Google AI Mode: The Next Generation of Search?

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

Over the past week, I’ve noticed that one of my more tenured Google accounts now has access to AI Mode, Google’s latest search functionality, which is the second rollout of the functionality after Testing Labs and power users’ access. Since then, I’ve been messing around with it, testing different queries, and analyzing how it affects search results. Now, I want to share some of my initial findings and insights. Let’s dive in.

What Is Google AI Mode?

Google AI Mode is a new experimental feature within Google Search that leverages advanced artificial intelligence to enhance the search experience. Introduced in March 2025, AI Mode utilizes a custom version of Google’s Gemini 2.0 model to provide users with AI-powered responses to more complex queries, facilitating more nuanced exploration and understanding, branching outside of the AI Overviews that they have been showing users for the past 2 years or so. Google mentioned “we’ve heard from power users that they want AI responses for even more of their searches” sparking the roll out of this feature.

Key Features of AI Mode

Here are some of the key features of the new AI Mode that Google mentioned in their press release in early March.

Advanced Reasoning and Multimodal Capabilities: AI Mode excels in handling complex, multi-part questions that require deeper reasoning and analysis. It supports various input forms, including text and images, allowing for a richer interaction with the search engine.

Conversational Interactions: Users can engage in a more interactive search process by asking follow-up questions. This conversational approach enables a deeper dive into topics without initiating separate searches.

Comprehensive AI-Powered Responses: AI Mode provides synthesized information from multiple sources, offering detailed answers that may include comparisons, summaries, and relevant web links for further exploration.

Why Did Google Introduce AI Mode?

Google’s AI Mode isn’t just an upgrade to search, it’s a response to how users are evolving in how they find information and adopting AI search more and more each day, especially as they’ve learned to trust it and gain confidence in it. As we know, traditional search has often required multiple queries, piecing together information from different sources, more so now than ever before. The AI Mode aims to eliminate that friction by offering more context-aware and comprehensive answers upfront. The key there being “aims to eliminate.” Only time will tell with this new search mode, but I am optimistic it helps the overall user experience without impacting business traffic (we’ll see, I guess).

Google describes AI Mode as particularly useful for:

• Complex questions that require deeper reasoning like comparing products or planning events.
• Multi-step searches that would typically require multiple queries.
• Providing richer insights with real-time web data to improve factual accuracy.

By introducing AI Mode as an opt-in experiment, Google is testing how users interact with a more AI-driven search experience before rolling it out more widely. It appears we are in the “second rollout phase” so only time will tell.

How Does AI Mode Work?

I’ve been doing a little research to try and see how AI mode works and if it means a shift in how we do SEO or not. AI Mode operates differently from standard Google Search by using:

• Gemini 2.0’s Advanced AI Capabilities: A more powerful model that can analyze and summarize complex queries.
• Query Fan-Out Processing: Instead of one search at a time, AI Mode issues multiple related searches in parallel and synthesizes the results into a single response, similarly to the Google AI Overviews (AIOs).
• Live Web Data Integration: Unlike static AI-generated responses, Google AI Mode taps into the latest updates from the web, Knowledge Graph, and even shopping data.
• Follow-Up Queries & Conversational Flow: Users can refine their searches without starting over, making it more intuitive, much like another tool we’re all used to using (cough cough, ChatGPT).

Right now, because AI mode is still in Testing Labs and has been rolled out to a second batch of users, Google is actively collecting user feedback to refine its accuracy and usefulness. Could this be a game-changer for the search engine giant?

See It In Action

Here’s a quick example of me searching my name and using AI Mode. You’ll notice a bit of a similarity between the ChatGPT interface, especially as it relates to the sources and how GPT also cites its sources.

AI Mode vs. Traditional Search: What’s the Difference?