Google brings AI-powered search to all U.S. users

Times are getting tougher for your favorite websites.

- BY MARK HACHMAN

Whether you embrace it or not, Al is shaping the future of Google Search. Google is bringing Al Mode to Google Search for every U.S. user. Google in May 2024 launched Al Overviews (fave.co/3KKfHZ3), which aims to answer your question before showing the traditional list of links. Al Mode is the next step: From what Google has shown, the list of links will disappear entirely, replaced by tiny link icons that link back to the information Google is slurping up.

Google's Liz Reid, a Google vice president and head of Google Search, said that Al Overviews totals 1.5 billion users and will be expanded to over 200 countries. At the beginning of May, Google migrated Al Mode out of its Labs environment (fave.co/4n5TSFI) into a small subset of users in the real world and has apparently replaced the “I'm feeling lucky” button (fave.co/4jN3O3x) with an AI search button as well.

It's not clear whether AI Mode will be the default search for all U.S. users, or whether Google will allow users to express a preference or preserve the choices they've made before. Traditional search doesn’t look like it will go away, but it will be relegated to a different tab, in much the same way a search for Images requires you to shift to another search tab within Google. Reid said it's bringing AI Mode to AI overviews, too.

Google Search, at least for now, defaults to a traditional list of links, but AI Mode appears as well.