Google's AI Mode

Google released its newest AI search feature this month, but not everyone has access to it (yet).

It’s called AI Mode.

To use it, you have to be in the US, over the age of 18, and opt-in via Labs—for now.

Just like AI Overviews went mainstream after a year in Beta, AI Mode could be the future of Google Search or at least play a major role in it... and you need to be ready.

Here’s what it looks like:

Screenshots showing a comparison of Google's traditional SERP vs. AI Mode for the query "award winning end to end global digital marketing agency."

Once enabled, you can pull up AI Mode results just like you would toggle between other results such as images, shopping, videos, news, etc.

Unlike Google’s AI Overviews, AI Mode is available for all search queries.

Users can ask follow-up questions and fine-tune information via a chat interface, similar to ChatGPT and other AI chatbots. AI Mode is based on a custom version of Gemini 2.0, Google’s latest AI model.

Here’s what this means for your business:

Google currently has a 93.57% search market share, but people—especially younger generations—are increasingly adopting AI search. (ChatGPT is now getting an estimated 37.5 million search-like prompts per day, according to recent data published in Search Engine Land.)

This feature gives Google a way to go head-to-head with conversational AI tools like ChatGPT.

As you can see in the screenshots above, Google’s AI Mode can be a referral source of traffic for your business. A recent NP Digital study showed that between September 2024 and February 2025, referral traffic from generative AI rose by 123%—this is not an area you can ignore.