By now, you’re familiar with Google’s AI Overviews that populate search engine results pages (SERPs) for a still-growing list of queries. But on May 20, 2025, Google announced brand-new AI capabilities in Search that promise to take the user experience to a whole new level.
AI Mode vows to “go beyond information to intelligence,” with more ways to ask questions, get advice and complete tasks right in Google Search, including Lens.
Here’s a taste of what’s coming and why it matters for marketers — whether good, bad or uncertain.
What’s New With AI In Search?
There’s a lot to cover about what’s new with AI in Search. If you want a full rundown, check out Google’s official announcement. If you want a synopsis of exciting new features and commentary on how marketers can take advantage of them (or why they should take action now), keep reading.
Conversational Search Experience
AI Mode introduces a chatbot-style Search interface, enabling users to conduct searches as naturally as a flowing conversation. Unlike traditional Search, users can now have multi-turn interactions and ask follow-up questions that yield more context-rich results. Think about how you interact with Gemini or ChatGPT (sorry, Google) — AI Mode enables you to have those interactions directly in Search.
This shift means marketers may ultimately need to optimize content for more conversational queries and long-tail keywords, with robust content strategies that anticipate user follow-up questions, but more on this later.
Enhanced Reasoning with Gemini 2.0
With Gemini 2.0, Google’s AI can reason through complex queries — comparing products, planning activities or synthesizing nuanced information — offering more complete, tailored responses.
In Google’s announcement, they shared that users are growing more satisfied with AI Overview results overall. And while that’s beneficial for the users, it may reduce click-through rates to source websites, which may become even more of an issue with this new update.
In this regard, AI Mode has received near-immediate bad press from the News/Media Alliance. Just a day after Google announcement, the group released a statement saying, “Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft,” criticizing its new AI Mode for potentially diverting traffic away from original content creators, since AI-generated summaries may reduce the need for users to visit source websites.
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Multimodal Search Capabilities
AI Mode allows users to search how they want, including using text, images, video or even voice.
This opens up new opportunities for visual content and voice-optimized SEO, hinting that it may be a good time for marketers to start investing more in image SEO, alt-text and video metadata. In the very near future, it’ll be worth considering how your brand is represented in voice searches to make sure those robotic assistants aren’t (literally) talking smack about your brand.
Real-Time Information Integration
Google Search is about to get realer. With AI Mode, not only can you use video in Google Lens to ask AI for assistance in real–time based on what you’re pointing your camera at, but users will also get live updates in Shopping Graphs about prices and can even ask the AI to purchase something on their behalf when an all-time low price comes around.
Real-time integrations like this may help increase visibility for brands that keep their product feeds and structured data current. However, it also adds pressure on marketers to maintain up-to-date listings and capitalize on timely promotions to stay competitive in SERPs.
Expanded Access and User Engagement
The broader rollout of AI Overviews and now AI Mode has shown increased user interest in longer, more complex queries. This trend favors high-quality, authoritative content, which solid marketers already have in the bag. Still, now’s a good time to double down on thought leadership, in-depth guides and schema-enhanced pages to match the sophistication of user queries and AI expectations.
AI Mode Release Date
You likely won’t have to wait too long before exploring all these new AI capabilities in Search. Google has already begun rolling out the feature to everyone in the U.S. — no Labs sign-up required. For those outside of the U.S., you can flick a switch in Labs to turn on AI Mode in an experimental phase. There is no word on when a wider rollout will happen where users won’t need a Labs account, but it shouldn’t be long.
Will AI Mode Change SEO As We Know It?
Here’s a question that’s been asked a lot since AI crashed onto the scene: Will SEO as we know it change? At first, it was tough to tell. With Google’s introduction of AI Overviews, there was a lean toward “Yes,” but things were still a little unclear. Now, with AI Mode about to make waves, it’s safe to say that SEO could change in a big way.
If you’re currently relying heavily on organic clicks to drive traffic, now is a great time to start diversifying. Email marketing, social media and video content, among others, are effective ways to spread traffic across channels, and will become increasingly important as the AI Mode update rolls out.
With AI Mode able to help users navigate more complex search journeys (e.g., “Plan a 3-day vegan trip to Portland under $5,000”), it will also be important for brands and marketers to develop content clusters that address more complete user journeys. As a complimentary tactic, internal linking helps guide both users and crawlers through layered topics, and will likely become more important than it already is.
The Biggest Change to Search Yet
At the time, AI Overviews reshaped (and continues to reshape) Search. What AI Mode is promising, though, is much more significant and stands to completely change the foundation of Google Search as we know it. Google knows this, noting that, as they get feedback from users, they’ll “graduate many features and capabilities from AI Mode right into the core Search experience.”
Could this be the largest change to Search we’ve ever seen and will see for the foreseeable future? It’s likely — and it’s equal parts interesting and uncertain.
Note: This article was originally published on contentmarketing.ai.