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Understanding Google’s New AI Mode: a Bridge Between Search and Gemini

 In Paid Search
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Google announced a new SERP feature called AI Mode on March 5th. In the same announcement Google also describes updates to AI Overviews in SERPs. The AI Overviews announcements seem to be that AIOs now use Gemini 2.0 and are now available to more users. These are modest changes. 

The AI Mode is an entirely new Google product, currently a Labs beta, which appears to be basically an in-between product bridging Search and Gemini. AI Mode has a fully separate standalone interface, seen below. This is a whole new product, not Google Search, and not Gemini. 

Once enabled in labs, AI Mode also appears as a button on the main Google.com search interface, allowing users to jump directly to the AI Mode interface from Google.com. This makes it a pretty significant change, as buttons and features are rarely added to Google.com. If this were to become a permanent feature it would certainly be a big driver of LLM -style queries for Google. 

Summarizing Our Views on Google’s AI Mode for SEM

The View for Advertisers: Right now, there are no ad placements in AI Mode. This makes sense given that it’s a Labs product. SEL reports that Google is planning to eventually explore bringing ads to AI Mode, but we would guess this is a distant rollout. 

Furthermore, obviously the discussion around AI Mode invites comparison with AI Overviews, and it’s worth noting that while in theory Google launched ads in AI Overviews late 2024, in actual practice the appearance of ads in AI Overviews has hardly been seen. Broadly all of Google’s AI products right now – AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Gemini, are not monetized by ads. 

At the moment therefore, the view for advertisers is basically neutral – we know that in the long term, Google is not going to demonetize its own results, and eventually as commercially valuable traffic gets exposed to AI answers Google will integrate ads placements. 

The View for Google Products in General: The introduction of AI Mode brings us to a number of questions and views on Google’s core products. Google offers us several products and features with significant overlap: AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, and older SERP elements such as Featured Snippets. 

Featured Snippets specifically, and other pre-AI SERP features of this type, continue to feel outdated and redundant when presented alongside AI-enhanced results. Below in our example screenshots we present an example of a typical user experience for an informational query – the AI Overview and the Featured Snippet are basically totally redundant, and the user experience of seeing more or less the same summarized content twice is rather odd. So here we have one issue for Google to resolve: unifying pre-AI SERP summary content with AI Overviews. 

The next major question to answer is how AI Mode fits into the Google Gemini product vision. AI Mode is basically Gemini with more outlinks and less other AI features. On one hand, AI Mode offers Google a path to draw more users from search into AI, which presumably is a goal of Google’s, though at the moment this user path actually results in less Google revenue. 

On the other hand, a separate LLM-Style interface comparable to Gemini serves to create confusion and may diminish the Gemini brand, which today struggles for consumer attention against rivals like ChatGPT despite being a very strong product. Thus we suggest Google’s second big challenge is unifying Google Search, Google AI Mode, and Google Gemini in an elegant fashion. 

Key Conclusions for Brands and Advertisers

  • Google’s AI Mode is a beta product generally hybridizing LLM + Search
  • Today it is totally unmonetized and not an advertising opportunity
  • AI Mode is relatively generous organically and today does offer SEO opportunity
  • The product vision for Google Search + AI is still murky and disjointed 
  • We expect continued feature flux and eventual monetization within 12-24 months
  • We hope and expect Google will eventually build an elegant, integrated, monetized, Search + AI experience that substantially modernizes the GOogle.com experience – but AI Mode isn’t there yet. 

Examples of AI Mode Results and Findings

Google’s Regular SERP: Transactional Query

  • Complete ads domination of SERP
  • Zero organic content visibility on 15 inch MacBook screen
  • Google SERP behaves comparable to Amazon 
  • Google’s shopping results are pretty smart: products around the stated price range
  • Nice result for users, advertisers and $GOOG shareholders
  • Not so nice for anyone trying to get organic traffic 
  • Zero AI features in this SERP (beyond the AI driving the Shopping results, PMAX) 

Google Gemini 2.5 Pro: Transactional Query

  • Gemini 2.5 Pro gives a straightforward answer listing popular shoe brands
  • There are zero external links in this answer 
  • Zero monetization of any kind 
  • Source of data is simply the Google LLM black box

Google AI Mode: Transactional Query

  • AI Mode shows result that publishers and SEOs will be happy with
  • Zero ads nor monetization here – this is a hybrid organic + LLM result
  • AI Mode’s answer is similar to Gemini’s but not identical
  • Though nice for the publishers, unclear how much users will value this: Google’s AI Mode answers simply link to publishers offering more or less the same answers, which then link to places to buy the shoes, presumably including an affiliate commission for the publisher. 

Google AI Mode: Research Query

  • Below shows AI Mode’s response to “summarize yesterday’s world news” 
  • A completely different experience to Google.com 
  • This result is comparable to what Perplexity and ChatGPT o3 deliver
  • In AI Mode, Google is rather generous with organic outbound links to publishers
  • Gemini does not link out in the same way for this query 

Google SERP: Informational Query (AI Overview Expanded) 

  • Google’s AI Overview now prompts to “Dive Deeper in AI Mode”
  • This kicks the user into the AI Mode interface which basically repeats the answer
  • AI mode then behaves like Gemini with less features and more links 

Google SERP: Informational Query (AI Overview Not Expanded)

  • When we don’t expand the AI Overview, we see an odd redundancy in the SERP
  • The AI Overview and the Featured Snippet are largely redundant
  • The Britannica organic link is repeated top left and top organic
  • Is this a good user experience? Surely Google will change this soon
  • Featured snippets in general seem redundant in the AI SERP era
  • Of course, there is zero monetization here 
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