Google is launching AI Mode for its search platform, an interactive tool that functions much like a chatbot, allowing users to fine-tune queries with follow-up prompts. In the next few weeks, an AI Mode tab will appear in Google Search and in the Google app search bar. Following the introduction of AI Overviews last year, the company began experimenting with AI Mode early this year. “As we’ve rolled out AI Overviews, we’ve heard from power users who want an end-to-end AI Search experience,” explains Google in detailing the evolution of AI Mode. The new tool will also test various ad placements.

In a blog post, Google says “AI Overviews is one of the most successful launches in Search in the past decade,” driving a 10 percent increase in Google’s largest markets, the U.S. and India, for queries that return Overview results.

“As people use AI Overviews, we see they’re happier with their results, and they search more often,” the post notes, emphasizing AI Mode will further improve the process.

AI Mode “lets users ask complex, multi-part questions via an AI interface,” writes TechCrunch, enumerating capabilities including Deep Search.

“It’s a total reimagining of search,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said at a press briefing prior to the company’s annual I/O conference for developers, adding that in tests “people dramatically ‘changed the nature of how they are interacting with search,’” The New York Times reports.

At Wednesday’s Google Marketing Live, the company announced AI Mode will have ads. The new feature may place ads “‘where relevant’ below and ‘integrated into’ AI Mode responses as part of a test,” TechCrunch reports.

Google is motivated to establish itself in AI search before competitors like Perplexity and ChatGPT gain an edge, but the company is under tremendous pressure to do it right because it has so much to lose, NYT points out, writing that “the company’s search business generated nearly $200 billion last year, more than half of its total sales. And the bedrock of that business has been how it has reliably provided people with the best answers to questions.”

AI Mode will also have a virtual shopping component, including a try-it-on option that lets users upload a picture of themselves that can be shown wearing clothes. “The feature will have an understanding of 3D shapes and fabric types, and stretch, Google notes, and will begin rolling out in Search Labs,” per TechCrunch, which writes that coming soon is a shopping agent that will purchase an item when it goes on sale.

Both AI Overviews and AI Mode are now using a search-optimized version of Gemini 2.5.

Related:
News/Media Alliance Calls Google’s AI Mode ‘Theft’, Engadget, 5/21/25
Google’s Future is Google Googling, The Verge, 5/21/25