Google launches AI Mode for search in Australia

Google has rolled out its AI Mode for search in Australia just months after it was introduced in the US.

Google refers to it as its “most powerful AI search experience yet”, which allows users to get the answers to more complex and nuanced queries.

As Hema Budaraju, ice president of product management and search at Google, explains, early testers of AI Mode were already asking queries nearly three times the length of traditional searches.

In a blogpost, he outlines an 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.’ And then, ‘What are some local food spots that we can get along the way for lunch and dinner?’”

AI Mode uses a custom version of Gemini 2.0. It is designed to be multimodal with prompts capable of being a mix of text, voice or even uploading an image.

Google is positioning AI Mode as a tool that helps with exploratory tasks like planning a trip or understanding complex how-tos.

Budaraju cites another example of this. “You can now ask questions like: ‘I want to understand the different coffee brewing methods. Make a table comparing the differences in taste, ease of use and the equipment needed.’ And even follow up with: ‘What’s the best grind size for each method?’ ”

AI Mode uses a “query fan-out technique” that breaks the multi-layered questions into subtopics and issues numerous queries on your behalf.

It allows its search to then dive deeper into the web to find a relevant answer, which can then be queried with further follow-up questions. It can tap real-time sources like the Knowledge Graph and shopping data for billions of products.

The company is keen to emphasise that its AI Mode is not set to cannibalise traffic away from websites. It builds on the AI Overviews capability that the company introduced in Australia a year ago.

AI Mode features web content in a range of formats, with prominent links for people to click on.

The company says it aims to show an AI-powered response as much as possible, but in cases where it doesn’t have high confidence, users will see a set of web search results.

With AI Overviews, the company says it was seeing people visiting a greater diversity of websites for help with more complex questions.

Clicks from search result pages with AI Overviews were also reported to be of higher quality for websites, which implies that users could be spending more time on the sites they visit. “And in the months since we first started testing AI Mode, we’ve continued to evolve how we show links in responses to make it easier for people to continue their journeys on the web,” Budaraju says.