First Look at Google's 'AI Mode'

Yesterday Google announced it was upgrading AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0 and unveiled its much-anticipated "AI Mode" as an "experimental" Search Labs product. We got access this evening and have been informally testing it out.

It's a much better experience than AI Overviews and hints at what the future of search might look like for Google. But more on that below. Under the hood it offers some of Gemini 2.0's more advanced capabilities, including advanced reasoning. It's better than what Google has presented to consumers to date.

Privacy Be Gone

The first thing to know is that to access AI Mode you need to have Search History/Web & App Activity enabled. So if you've turned this off for privacy reasons, you've got to reactivate. Google doesn't actually need this change to give you answers to your questions, but it's taking this opportunity to track and capture more data about you, allegedly for personalization of search/AI results.

Getting to AI Mode

You get to AI Mode by searching for something on Google.com and then clicking the "AI Mode" tab at the top of the page, or going directly to AI Mode itself: https://www.google.com/aimode. There's also a "dive deeper in AI Mode" button at the bottom of the AI Overview once it's expanded. Google likely intends for people go through Google.com rather than navigate directly to AI Mode.

If Google is serving AI Overviews in your query category, you'll see one. If you then click the AI Mode tab or button it generates a new result using your query; it doesn't simply transfer over the existing AI Overview from the search result. Here's an example: "What are lectins?"

In both cases, there are links to sources in-line and in the right column (above). The in-line links take you to specific content sources on the right, which take you to the sites themselves. The AI Overview in this example had 19 publisher sources; the AI Mode result had 13, eight of which were common to both. I suspect this will be a pattern: a few different sources but material overlap between the two sets of AI results.

AI Mode Isn't 1:1 Gemini

It's also important to point out that Google isn't simply taking the Gemini result and plugging it in verbatim to AI Mode. While there's informational overlap, the AI Mode result and presentation are different that what you get on Gemini for the same query.

Here's what Google said about AI Mode's content sources and methodology:

What makes this experience unique is that it brings together advanced model capabilities with Google’s best-in-class information systems, and it’s built right into Search. You can not only access high-quality web content, but also tap into fresh, real-time sources like the Knowledge Graph, info about the real world, and shopping data for billions of products. It uses a “query fan-out” technique, issuing multiple related searches concurrently across subtopics and multiple data sources and then brings those results together to provide an easy-to-understand response. This approach helps you access more breadth and depth of information than a traditional search on Google.

Product Search

When I asked Google.com, "Where can I buy an affordable mountain bike?" it gave me one of its familiar product/shopping pages with filters. It was primarily an e-commerce-focused result. The AI Mode result was radically different and showed me local bike shops instead; there was no e-commerce.

Local Search

I ran a service business query, "HVAC Repair San Francisco." The Google.com result showed the familiar four ads, followed by a local pack (below). I clicked over to AI Mode and got similar results: it presented four out of the top five local listings from Google.com. This is very much like what happened with local queries in Google's AI Overview precursor SGE, which often largely duplicated the top local pack/finder results.

When I clicked back to Google.com and then again to AI Mode it generated the same local listings but with somewhat different information: ratings were present in #2 (below) and so was "known for," which were not present in #1. It's still very early so there's not a lot to say about this discrepancy.

I could do dozens of these comparisons and note the differences between the Google.com/AI Overviews and AI Mode results. This is all going to change and evolve so no conclusions can really be drawn except that the AI Mode UX is quite different. The UI is much cleaner and less cluttered than Google.com, which some people will find very appealing.

Competition and the Future

Google's hand was obviously forced by the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022. If Google had a plan to evolve its search-user experience it probably wasn't this. AI Overviews and now AI Mode are pretty clearly a response to and partial emulation of ChatGPT. AI Mode is a more "pure" AI conversational experience than what AI Overviews can offer. It's also intended to win back ChatGPT users or preempt others from fleeing Google for AI.

Gemini has not seen significant stand-alone adoption from consumers to date, despite Google's aggressive push. AI Mode likely represents a stronger consumer entry point, leveraging Google's search dominance. It will be very interesting to see what happens; many people will prefer AI Mode's UI to Google's traditional results.

There are currently no ads in AI Mode. If it succeeds that will obviously change. Regardless, Google will not have the same opportunity to monetize AI Mode. If the company tries to cram too many ads in AI Mode quickly, users will potentially defect. Despite Google's mantra that ads are useful content, that's only true in very limited contexts.

Notwithstanding multiple AI features and experiments, AI Mode feels like a first major step into the next chapter of search for Google. And Google has several natural advantages over its AI rivals. Among them are brand visibility, distribution and data. Google's effort to combine its various "graphs" (e.g., local data) with web search and conversational AI may ultimately create a "goog enough" experience to prevent the feared AIpocalypse.

To be continued ...