Google today announced that it is starting to roll out a dedicated AI Mode tab for Google Search. A "small percentage" of people in the United States will start seeing the AI Mode option "in the coming weeks."
AI Mode is a feature that Google has been testing with its Labs feature. It is a dedicated search option like News, Images, and Shopping, providing AI answers to queries directly in the search interface. AI Mode uses Gemini 2.0, Google's core AI model.
In addition to starting to roll out AI Mode as a standard search feature, Google is bringing the AI Mode option to all U.S. users who want to try it through Google Labs.
The new AI Mode experiment in Search uses advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities from Gemini to help with even your toughest questions. You can ask whatever's on your mind and get an AI-powered response with the ability to explore further with follow-up questions and helpful web links. AI Mode does the heavy lifting for you, intelligently organizing information and gives you easy-to-digest breakdowns.
AI Mode is similar to the AI summaries that Google provides for standard searches, but it cuts out typical search results entirely, providing only an AI-based answer that's pulled from different websites and data on the web.
Google is bolstering AI Mode with visual place and product cards that offer an option to tap to get more information. For restaurants, salons, and stores, these cards will provide information like ratings, reviews, hours, and store inventory.
There's also now a dedicated left-side panel that includes an AI history for returning to past searches for follow-up questions.
Separately, Google has also started testing ads for some third-party AI assistants. According to Bloomberg, Google's AdSense network is running ads in some chatbot conversations, and Google confirmed that AdSense for Search is available for websites that want to show ads in their conversational AI experiences.
