Google AI Mode promises to bring more information to our fingertips faster and in a more useful way. It leverages Google’s Gemini AI models to answer more complex questions and integrates generative AI more deeply into search. Google AI Mode has officially launched in Australia following an experimental launch in the USA earlier in 2025.
Back in the late 1990s, Google revolutionised internet search. Tools such as Yahoo! and AltaVista captured websites by registering them in their indexes. Google changed that by using ‘spiders’ that crept across the web and created indexes.
Eventually Google discovered that it could predict what people would search for, ushering in the era of predictive analytics and its dominance of online advertising. As a fun aside, the first step in that journey came from a a bizarre intersection between the old TV show The Brady Bunch and the quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
The generative AI revolution that kicked off with the public release of ChatGPT in 2022. In just a few days it crossed the million-user mark. Google was arguably the best placed of all the companies playing catchup. Since its public launch, as a beta in 1998, Google has amassed a massive cache of data that it can use to train its models. One AI expert I spoke to recently told me that given the choice between more data scientists and more data, they’d take the data every time.
That’s why Google AI Mode has the potential to become everyone’s most used AI tool.
What does Google AI Mode do?
Google AI Mode can answer complex questions that might have required several different searches previously and the manual assembly of the answers. Google provides this example:
…you might ask: “Create a walkable itinerary for my friends and I in Melbourne this Saturday. We want to cafe hop at some lesser known specialty coffee shops, visit art galleries, and see local street art.”
What we are actually seeing is the transition from traditional search where we might have asked a search tool to find instances of a specific set of words, to deeper integration of generative AI capability where we get Google to do more of our thinking.
And those queries don’t only have to be typed. You can talk to Google AI Mode or upload an image as part of your query.
Of course, a challenge still remains. Can you really trust the result Google delivers? AI slop is a real problem that promises to get worse before it gets better. That makes fact checking and discernment increasingly valuable skills. I think it’s important to view any AI-generated output with some scepticism until it’s properly verified.
Anthony is the founder of Australian Apple News. He is a long-time Apple user and former editor of Australian Macworld. He has contributed to many technology magazines and newspapers as well as appearing regularly on radio and occasionally on TV.