Google is preparing to publicly unleash its AI Mode search engine tool for the first time. The company announced today that “a small percentage” of people in the US will start seeing an AI Mode tab in Google Search “in the coming weeks,” allowing users to test the search-centric chatbot outside of Google’s experimental Labs environment.
In contrast to traditional search platforms that provide a wall of URL results based on the enquiry or descriptions a user has entered, Google’s AI Mode will answer questions with an AI-generated response based on information within Google’s search index. This also differs from the AI Overviews already available in Google Search, which sandwich an AI-generated summary of information between the search box and web results.
AI Mode will be located under its own dedicated tab that will appear first in the Search tab lineup, to the left of the “All,” “Images,” “Videos,” and “Shopping” tabs. It’s Google’s answer to large language model-based search engines like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT search features. These search-specific AI models are better at accessing the web and real-time data than regular chatbots like Gemini, which should help them to provide more relevant and up-to-date responses.
Google is also scrapping the waitlist for Labs users in the US to test AI Mode, allowing more people to opt in to try the Search feature before it becomes widely available. AI Mode is still only available to users who are over 18 and paying for a Google One AI Premium subscription, however.
AI Mode itself has also been updated with some new capabilities, including a feature that will save past searches to a new left-side panel, allowing users to quickly revisit topics or ask follow-up queries without starting a new conversation. Visual, clickable cards for products and places are also now starting to appear in AI Mode, providing information like opening hours, reviews, and ratings for businesses, and images, inventory, shipping details, and real-time prices for shoppable products.
