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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—The Google that once showed 10 blue links is looking ever more distant with the announcement at Google I/O here of an array of AI search-assistant tools that build on the AI Overview mode introduced at least year’s I/O .
Calling that AI interface “one of the most successful launches in search in the past decade” in a press briefing Monday, CEO Sundar Pichai and other Google executives outlined a series of AI augmentations of its core search product.
AI Mode for All
To begin, the AI Mode —a conversational, chatbot interface that it only opened for testing in March —is now rolling out to everybody in the US. Google executives in the briefing pronounced themselves encouraged by how people have taken to that option.
“They're asking longer questions, harder questions, more complex questions,” said Liz Reid, a vice president and head of Google Search. “It really creates an experience where people can come to us and ask any question that they have.”
A custom version of the 2.5 version of Google’s Gemini AI platform , debuted in March , is coming to both AI Overview and AI Mode to allow both to process more complex queries–in AI Mode’s case, by employing a “fan-out” technique of running searches in parallel.
Google research shows that AI Overview, which the company says more than 1.5 billion people now use, has driven a 10% increase in search use in the US and India.
But the workings of this non-conversational interface, in which Google’s AI generates answers based on the content of pages it finds, also has publishers worried that fewer people will click through the links Overview shows to support its answers.
For example, last week the British media trade pub Press Gazette quoted Daily Mail SEO director Carly Steven as saying that AI Overview results had roughly half the clickthroughs to the British tabloid’s site of traditional results–a 56% in desktop browsers, 48% on mobile browsers.
Reid did not share clickthrough data in the briefing but said those that did happen are more valuable to publishers. “Pages with AI Overview get higher-quality clickthroughs to web sites,” she said. “What that means is, people spend more time on those web sites."
We asked for metrics documenting that but did not get a response.
A Few Options for Early Adopters
Google will offer some advanced search options via its Labs opt-in experience .
Search Live leverages the image-recognition technology demoed as Project Astra at last year’s I/O to allow interactive search sessions that start by pointing your phone’s camera at something nearby. In an example video shown in the briefing, this began with a bike mechanic asking Google to find a manual for the bike he needed to fix–then went on to include increasingly specific queries about the kind of screw needed.
A separate set of features address at-home apparel acquisition . A virtual try-on option lets you upload a picture of yourself–full-length, dressed in fitting clothes, the background doesn’t seem to matter–and have AI routines generate a model of you that then shows what the clothing in question will look like.
AI Mode can then perform fan-out queries to see which shops have the best price.
Particularly adventurous (or lazy) shoppers can also put Google’s agentic AI to work by having it not only find the cheapest price for that shirt, purse, or pair of sports tickets and then take you through the checkout process, assuming the merchant supports Google Pay.
But not all the way, clarified Vidhya Srinivasan, vice president and general manager for Google ads and commerce, in the briefing: “You still have to click on 'buy for me' for this to happen.”
Personalized Search Results From Gmail, If You Want Them
Yet another search option will not only require an opt-in but will come with some level of are-you-sure reminders: Google search results not only tailored to your past search and web activity but to the contents of your Gmail.
Reid described this as something you might only want to toggle on for particular queries that could benefit from a scan of your inbox, saying “you can connect it and disconnect it at any time.”
The company plans to offer options to connect other Google apps to your search, but Pichai was unusually specific during the Q&A part of the briefing in saying that this will remain an opt-in experience.
“We are going to make these explicit user actions, so none of this will ever work automatically,” he said. “There will be friction in the flow, so people can decide what to connect.”
