Google blends AI Overviews with AI Mode in Search

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Google has decided that hopping between search tabs is so last algorithm. 

This week, the company revealed it’s testing a new hybrid feature that fuses its AI Overviews, the bite-sized summaries that now greet many search queries, with its increasingly popular conversational AI Mode. 

AI Mode, powered by Google’s Gemini model, has been rolling out since May in the US and globally since August. 

It lets users chat directly with the AI in a casual, back-and-forth style, perfect for when your “quick question” mutates into a 40-minute deep dive. 

But until now, getting into this mode required clairvoyance: Will this question end up needing a whole conversation? Or can I get away with a normal search like it’s 2012? 

Choose wrong, and you’d end up clicking back and forth like an indecisive shopper.

Google’s test aims to end that awkward dance. Now, when users see an AI Overview at the top of their search page, they can immediately slip into a conversational exchange, no tab-hopping required. 

It’s Google saying, “Look, just start wherever. We know you’ll eventually ask follow-up questions anyway.” 

For now, the experiment is rolling out globally on mobile, presumably because that’s where most of us do our existential googling.

All this coincides with OpenAI triggering its own internal “Code Red,” delaying other projects to sharpen its chat experience as the AI competition heats up. 

Google, meanwhile, is basking in Gemini’s momentum: the model recently hit more than 650 million monthly users, boosted by upgrades like the Nano Banana image model. 

And if Google manages to blend Gemini’s 650M conversational users with Search’s whopping 2 billion monthly AI Overview users, it could score a massive adoption win.

As Google Search VP Robby Stein put it, “You shouldn’t have to think about where or how to ask your question.” Just ask away, and let Search decide how nerdy your journey becomes.