The verb "to Google" has changed quietly in twelve months. The search box now accepts whole questions, images, even open browser tabs. Photo: iStock
Twelve months ago, at Google's I/O 2025 developer conference in May last year, AI Mode was launched as a new tab where users could ask longer, conversational questions and get a synthesised answer instead of ten blue links. Last month, Google put AI Mode at the centre of its search engine.
A few days back, I sat down with my phone to plan a family weekend in Puducherry. The brief was the kind anyone planning a weekend will recognise: dietary preference (for us, pure vegetarian), family-friendly, near the beach, next weekend. The old way would have been ten browser tabs and forty minutes of cross-referencing on Zomato and MakeMyTrip. This time, I typed one sentence into Google's new AI Mode and got back a shortlist of hotels with prices, ratings, photo thumbnails and full addresses, already filtered for everything I had asked. Not links. The answer itself.
The verb "to Google" has changed quietly in twelve months. Here is what shifted.
Twelve months ago, at Google's I/O 2025 developer conference (I/O stands for input-output) in May last year, AI Mode was launched as a new tab where users could ask longer, conversational questions and get a synthesised answer instead of ten blue links. Twelve months later, on May 19, Google put AI Mode at the centre of its search engine.
On May 19, Google put AI Mode at the centre of its search engine. Photo: iStock
The search box now accepts whole questions, images, even open browser tabs. Background "agents" can monitor topics for users around the clock. For certain queries, Google search will now go so far as to build a comparison chart or a calculator app on the spot.
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The numbers say something. When ChatGPT crossed 100 million monthly users in two months in early 2023, it was the fastest consumer ramp tech had ever seen, a sensation! Three years on, AI Mode just crossed one billion users, now a standard operating mode for search.
What does this feel like in practice?
Here’s an example. Suppose you type "best home loan I can get on Rs 80,000 monthly salary in Chennai". It is the sort of question a middle-class Indian family might be mulling over on a Sunday evening. The familiar Google results page, which now begins with an AI Overview at the top, would inform Rs 40 to 48 lakhs. AI Mode, the new dedicated tab beside it, however, pegs it at Rs 46 to 52 lakhs. Same question, same salary, same city, two different headline answers, no warning that they disagreed.
AI Mode would also offer something else. It would work out that a hypothetical Rs 15,000 car EMI would drop loan eligibility to Rs 28-33 lakhs, and name three suburbs (Avadi, Ponneri, Tiruvallur, in this case) where a flat in that range was realistic. It reads like a savvy colleague who is a long-time Chennai resident.
But it would also inform users, with the same composure, that HDFC home loan rates "begin at 7.75% per annum". That number is real — it's on HDFC's own website. What the AI will not tell is that these are floor rates available to borrowers with the strongest credit profiles and that the walk-in rate for a Rs 80,000-salary borrower in Chennai today sits closer to 8.3 to 8.6 per cent. Helpful — yes. A home loan advisor — not yet.
AI Mode is Google's bid to keep the answer and the advertising business under one roof, before OpenAI, Perplexity, or Microsoft can 'chat' them away. Photo: iStock
Why AI Mode now? Because someone else got here first.
When ChatGPT showed in late 2022 that people would happily 'chat' for answers rather than rummage through the blue links, Google had a problem. A third of its global search business was suddenly at risk. Google's search share reportedly dipped below 90 per cent in late 2024 (the first time since 2015), small in percentage terms, seismic in revenue terms for a company that has reportedly earned over $60 billion from search advertisements in just the first quarter of this year.
AI Mode is Google's bid to keep the answer and the advertising business under one roof, before OpenAI, Perplexity, or Microsoft can 'chat' them away. The intelligent search box, the agents, the mini-apps are the new defence line of the most profitable franchise in internet history.
Now the catch. The Puducherry family weekend worked beautifully for my family. It, however, would not have worked so well for the publisher of the websites the AI was reading off.
Both 'AI Mode' and 'AI Overview' consulted Zomato and MakeMyTrip to find pure-veg hotels. The older one still sent me to those sites in the side panel. AI Mode showed me Google's own hotel cards, with photos and prices, placed inside the answer. I had no reason to leave Google.
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This is the trade. Every user who skips a click because the AI already answered is a reader that the news sites, the small blog, the homegrown explainer just lost.
One industry analysis estimates that global Google search referrals to publishers fell by roughly a third in the year to November 2025. An American publisher has filed an antitrust suit against Google over exactly this.
When someone now says, "can you Google this for me", they are no longer asking quite the same thing. Twelve months ago, the answer was: type keywords, scan links. Now it could mean "find this dress", "show me a comparison", or "monitor this overnight". "Google this" performed 25 years of honest work. It's now changing quietly. The question is, what all do we want from it?
