Google launches AI Mode in Search

Google introduced AI Mode, a new tab within Search offering a fully conversational experience built around answering complex, multi-part questions and supporting follow-up exploration — a more direct departure from the traditional list-of-links results page than the AI Overviews summaries Google had already rolled out. It launched as an opt-in experiment through Google Labs, with subscribers to Google’s paid One AI Premium tier getting first access in the United States.

The feature used a technique Google called “query fan-out”: rather than answering from a single search, AI Mode issued multiple related queries across different subtopics and sources simultaneously and synthesised the results into one response, drawing on Google’s Knowledge Graph, real-time web data and product information alongside a custom version of Gemini 2.0. Google positioned it as an extension of the Gemini 2.0 upgrade it had already given AI Overviews for handling coding, advanced mathematics and multimodal queries — AI Overviews itself had by this point been expanded to reach over a billion users, including, with the sign-in requirement removed, teenagers.

The launch came as competitors including Perplexity and OpenAI’s own search-integrated ChatGPT products pushed into territory Google Search had long dominated, and as critics argued AI-generated summaries reduced the traffic search had historically sent to publishers and other websites — a concern AI Mode, by design, extended rather than resolved, since it produced synthesised answers rather than links by default. Google broadened AI Mode’s rollout through the year, including at its May I/O developer conference, treating it as a running experiment rather than a finished product from launch.