If you’ve used Google to search for something over the last few months, you may have noticed that the experience has changed. If you ask certain questions, an AI overview will pop up, followed by another search bar that encourages you to “Ask Anything.” Click on that, and you suddenly find yourself conversing with a chatbot in Google’s AI Mode interface. This pathway has resulted in millions of people—who never intended to use AI in the first place—unwittingly becoming acclimated to a new chatbot reality.
Google Search usage hit an all-time high this year, and much of that activity involves AI. Google’s AI Mode has racked up more than 1 billion monthly users, the company says, a figure rivaling the estimated 1 billion monthly active users of ChatGPT in May, according to Sensor Tower. At the beginning of the AI arms race, Google lagged far behind its upstart competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.
But by aggressively implementing AI tools into its dominant search engine, Google is arguably doing more to bring AI into people’s everyday lives. In the process, the company is already transforming how users and content creators behave online. AI Mode is just the latest step in a gradual series of AI integrations.
In 2024, Google began rolling out AI summaries in response to users’ searches called AI Overviews, above the classic blue links. These AI Overviews are now more prevalent—shown in forty percent of U.S. Google searches, according to Similarweb—and more utilized by the public.
This summer, a Pew poll found that more Americans read AI summaries at the top of search engine results than use chatbots (60% to 49%). Kevin Indig, a strategy advisor who writes the newsletter Growth Memo, says the introduction of AI Overviews didn’t drastically change how many people interacted with Google: they still scrolled below the Overviews to click on the links to verify information. But Indig says that when users are in AI Mode, they behave completely differently.
They write much longer queries—three times the length of traditional search queries. And they search for different kinds of things. They brainstorm essay ideas, build study guides, plan trips, and even seek financial advice.
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