What is AI Mode? Google's AI Search Experience Explained

What is AI Mode?

AI Mode refers to an enhanced experience, provided by Google, where AI generates comprehensive answers and surfaces information to answer a user's question, going beyond a traditional list of links. Instead of just providing snippets or summaries, this mode aims to deliver more holistic, AI-generated responses that synthesize information from multiple sources directly within the search interface.

The core idea behind AI Mode is to provide users with a richer, more interactive search journey. This can involve AI directly answering complex, multi-faceted questions, offering follow-up prompts for deeper exploration, and presenting information in dynamic formats that are tailored to the user's query.

A direct competitor to ChatGPT, AI Mode is designed to feel more like a dialogue with a knowledgeable assistant rather than a simple query-and-response interaction with a database of web pages.

While features like AI Overviews offer AI-generated summaries for certain queries, AI Mode is a more deeply integrated or customizable experience where the AI's role is more prominent throughout the search session, reducing a user’s need to sift through sources to find an answer.

In layperson's terms, AI Mode is Google's version of ChatGPT. It runs on Google Gemini, so it's like having a conversation with Gemini.

What's interesting is that Google's CEO said that AI Mode is going to be at the bleeding edge of AI innovation, where they'll do a lot of their experiments, but they still want to be led by the ‘human-created’ web.

Search experiences like Google’s AI Mode likely represent the future of search as we know it.

How AI Mode works

When you engage with Google Search in AI Mode , you're interacting with an advanced system designed to understand and respond to your queries more comprehensively.

Instead of relying on traditional ranking algorithms and keywords to surface a list of relevant web pages, Google's AI models analyze the intent and nuances of your question to actively synthesize information from a wide array of trusted sources across the web.

The system then generates a response directly within the search interface. This response is not just a single snippet but can be a more elaborate explanation, a step-by-step guide, or a comparison, depending on the query.

These AI-generated results often surface links to supporting web pages, allowing users to seamlessly dive deeper into research. They also suggest follow-up questions or related topics to encourage a more exploratory and conversational search journey.

This mode emphasizes understanding context, providing direct answers, and offering opportunities to learn more.

AI mode is a very clear signal that Google recognizes that the future of how people discover information is going to be an AI-native kind of interface, rather than the current limited search and links experience.

AI Mode vs. AI Overviews: What's the difference?

While both AI Mode and AI Overviews leverage Google's AI, answer user questions, and surface information, they go about it differently. AI Overviews are generally the AI-generated snapshots or summaries that appear at the top of the search results for certain queries. They provide a quick, digestible answer or summary synthesized from web sources, often followed by links to those sources and the traditional list of search results below. Think of AI Overviews as a specific feature within the broader search results page.

AI Mode, on the other hand, often implies a more comprehensive and immersive AI-centric search experience. In AI Mode, the AI might not provide more than an initial overview of a topic, inviting more complex interactions, handling follow-up questions more conversationally, and potentially organizing results in a unique and customizable way. It suggests a deeper dive where the AI is more of a continuous partner in the information discovery process.

Google obviously introduced AI Overviews as a kind of hybrid approach between AI and traditional search. They still maintain the bottom links and results, but leverage a snippet of the answer at the top of the page. I think that experience isn’t ideal. Generally, people prefer getting a clean page of answers where they can have conversational dialogues, and don't care about those 10 blue links on the bottom.

The key distinction lies in the extent and prominence of the AI interaction. AI Overviews are concise, AI-powered answers integrated into the familiar search results page. AI Mode suggests an AI-driven environment for search, where the entire user experienceUser Experience
User experience (or UX for short) is a term used to describe the experience a user has with a product.
Learn more is more heavily shaped by generative AI.

FAQs

• What is an answer engine?
• What is generative engine optimization (GEO)?
• What is answer engine optimization (AEO)?
• What is AI optimization (AIO)?