Google today updated AI Mode, making it a better fit for planning your summer vacation, shopping trip, or learning more about any topic. Plus, if you’re interested in trying the tool, access to it just got a lot easier.
Google’s new AI Mode takes Search’s real-time information access and combines it with the best generative AI capabilities — such as longer natural queries and personalized answers — to create an AI search engine experience. It is especially helpful for nuanced questions with many criteria, like shopping and trip planning.
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“We are really enabling, helping you shop and seek local businesses, and plan your travel much better,” said Soufi Esmaeilzadeh, the director of Search product management, to ZDNET. “We’re taking AI Mode and elevating it by connecting it to the rich content that we have in our shopping graph, as well as the millions of businesses that we have in our local database.”
Shopping and trip planning cards
You can already use AI Mode to learn about any topic, including products or trip destinations. However, with the latest update, AI Mode will display visual place and product cards that you can click for more information.
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While the emergence of AI agents has now made AI assistants that can book trips for you a reality, AI Mode serves as a research partner, helping you get the information you need to book your trip with ease. The same goes for shopping.
When searching for a location, such as a restaurant, you will get information such as ratings, reviews, and hours, while products will show shippable options with real-time price, images, local inventory, and more. All the information is pulled freshly off the web, so it has the most up-to-date details.
“If you ask a question like, ‘I’m looking for a midcentury modern furniture store where I want to get a dresser, and I’m looking for these particularities,’ the model can take that into consideration, respond, find the best businesses for you, and then allow you to access right there all the richness of the information the businesses that we have really worked for years to build out,” Esmaeilzadeh said.
Access your past searches
AI Mode will now have a new left-side panel that contains your past searches. This panel allows you to reference these searches later or return to the conversation with follow-up questions.
“In AI Mode, people really are engaging in follow-ups, and they are coming to it from more of these long-running journeys or research journeys, so we want to really make it easy in the product for people to be able to reference back the work that they did to pick up where they’ve left off,” Esmaeilzadeh said.
Although it may seem like a basic feature, can you imagine a world where you never access your Google Search history? Similarly, accessing past conversations will be a valuable productivity tool.
How to try AI Mode
To access AI Mode, users typically go to Google Labs and sign up for the waitlist — until now. If you want to try AI Mode for yourself, US users can now get immediate access. Visit Google Labs to get started.
The feedback on AI Mode has been positive, with users reporting it to be helpful, according to Google. As a result, the company is expanding access through a limited test outside of Labs. A small percentage of US Google Search users will see the AI Mode tab on the Search page. Google says it will continue to use user feedback to enhance the model.
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Google took a similar rollout approach when it launched AI Overviews, the feature that populates an AI-generated summary at the top of your search results page. This experience eventually moved out of Labs and became a regular part of users’ search results.
How AI Mode differs from AI Overviews and Gemini
If AI Mode reminds you of AI Overviews, that similarity is by design. AI Mode is meant to be more of an extension of the AI Overviews experience than a brand-new one, allowing users to ask follow-ups to the AI-powered responses and lean into searches that don’t depend on keywords.
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Another major difference is that, unlike AI Overviews, which only populates AI responses when it deems relevant, AI Mode helps users predictably get AI-generated responses on demand.
“Power users came to us and said, ‘Hey, we enjoy this [AI Overviews], we want to have this more predictably,'” Esmaeilzadeh said.
Although you could technically take the same approach with Gemini, Google does make a distinction. Gemini is meant to function more as an assistant that can co-work with you, whereas AI Mode should function first and foremost as an information-seeking platform.
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“Gemini 2.0 I really view as a personal assistant that is focused on a lot of your productivity, creativity tasks, whether it’s writing or image generation or coding, in AI Mode, we live and breathe the search goal of making access to information effortless,” Esmaeilzadeh added.
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