Google's Going All In on 'AI Mode' With New Features and a Global Launch

After months of testing and opt-ins, Google Search thinks its AI Mode is ready for primetime. Starting today, it’s going to be available for 180 countries across the globe (although only in English), expanding from the U.S., UK, and India.

AI Mode is Google Search’s LLM-based search results feature, where instead of the usual links, you’ll get an answer from Google's Gemini AI model. Before, you could think of it as a faster, lighter version of Gemini built right into Google Search, but now Google is also adding agentic capabilities to AI Mode, as well as personalized responses.

AI Mode gets personal, and global

If your country didn't already have AI Mode, it will now be available as a new tab on the Google Search toolbar. Thankfully, it’s not the default for all searches, at least not yet. Instead, if you ask Google a question that it thinks Gemini could help with, you’ll see the usual AI Overview at the top of your search results, and at the end, you’ll see a button for “Dive Deeper in AI Mode,” which will take you to AI Mode if you click it.

Just like with AI Overviews, there is no way to disable the AI Mode tab, but there are some tricks you can use to more easily ignore it. If you want to always jump directly to the standard Web results, you can use a special URL to bypass AI Overviews, or one of these AI-busting extensions.

In the U.S., for people who have opted into the "AI Mode experiment" in Labs, AI Mode results will start personalizing themselves based on your preferences and interests. Google is starting out personalization for dining-related questions, including restaurants and cafes. If you ask it for recommendations for lunch spots, it can refer to previous conversations, Search results, and Maps data to bring up relevant results. Speaking of results, Google is also making it easy to share AI Mode results and collaborate on conversations using a new Share link feature.

Credit: Google

Of course, just like in Gemini, there is a way to disable the personalization here as well. Go to the Search Personalization section in Google Account settings to disable the feature altogether.

Credit: Khamosh Pathak

Agents are coming to AI Mode in Search

Google is also starting to add agents to AI Mode, which will be able to take action for you. However, agents are limited to the U.S. for now, and you have to be subscribed to the $200 Google AI Ultra plan to access them. If you want to try out the feature, you can enable it from the Agentic capabilities in AI Mode experiment in Google Labs.

The feature is starting out by helping you find restaurant reservations, and will eventually expand to local service appointments and event tickets. Google made a big show about this feature back at Google I/O, so I'm curious to see how it plays out now that it's starting to ship.

To use it, ask Google AI Mode for help getting a dinner reservation, and include multiple preferences like your party size, desired dates and times, your location, and which type of cuisine you want to eat. AI Mode will figure out availability and present you with options. Then, AI Mode will also do the legwork of directing you to the booking page. For now, it can’t take the last step, which is to finalize the reservation, likely due to privacy. To accomplish this, Google uses live web browsing, partner integrations, Google Maps, and its own knowledge graph. Google's AI agents currently integrate with OpenTable, Resy, Tock, Ticketmaster, StubHub, SeatGeek, Booksy, and there are plans to add more partners later on.