Google will soon make AI Mode the default setting for search, according to staff.
AI Mode, which provides summarised responses to search queries, simplifies the Google search process and eliminates the need to sift through multiple sources that come up in search results. The feature was released fully in May.
Robby Stein, VP of product, Google Search, announced in a post on X that AI Mode can be opened directly, instead of the traditional Google search page, by inputting the link google.com/ai. A user commented that AI Mode should be the “default” for search– to which a Google AI employee responded that it likely will be. “Soon,” said Logan Kilpatrick, group product manager, Google DeepMind.
AI Mode acts as a chatbot, facilitating a conversation with the user to answer queries. A user may ask about the details of a news event, to which Google’s AI Mode generates a digestible summary of the event, relying on Google’s Gemini AI model. The responses include references to the sources it pulls information from.
Publishers Being Left Out
However, the use of AI in search has significantly impacted traffic to external websites. An analysis from the Pew Research Center found that only 8 percent of users clicked on webpages in search results when an AI summary was present.
The same report showed that 26 percent of users exited the web completely after being given an AI summary, indicating that the summary response was sufficient in providing the information the users sought.
Google began implementing an AI Overviews feature last year. This feature similarly takes from various sources to give users a condensed answer to their search query.
The implementation of this feature has been detrimental to publishers. A study from analytics platform Authoritas revealed that websites could lose almost 80 percent of traffic because of Google’s AI Overviews. The study included that these summaries also favour referencing user-operated sites, including YouTube, which is owned by Google.
AI Overviews appears at the top of the traditional search results page. AI Mode, on the other hand, is its own separate entity.
Google is not the only tech company contributing to developments in AI search. Apple is reportedly planning the release of its own AI search tool, according to reports from Bloomberg last week.
The tool, which would be integrated into Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, would follow a similar model to other AI search tools. Apple’s search tool, reportedly to be named “World Knowledge Answers,” would give users a summary of information, rather than listing links to websites like a traditional search engine.
