Google Search gets AI Mode in India: What this means for users

Google is introducing the AI Mode for Search in India, its most advanced AI-powered search experience, in India as an experimental feature available through Google Labs in English. The multimodal search tool, which uses a custom version of Gemini 2.5 , allows users to ask complex, multi-layered questions and receive comprehensive AI-generated responses with web links and follow-up capabilities.

The feature arrives in India following successful testing in the United States earlier this year, where Google says users began asking queries 2-3 times longer than traditional searches.

AI Mode is particularly designed for exploratory questions and complex tasks like product comparisons, trip planning, and detailed how-to inquiries that would previously require multiple separate searches.

Voice and Visual Search integration targets Indian marketRecognizing India's strong preference for voice and visual search—with more people using Google Lens monthly than any other country—AI Mode incorporates multimodal capabilities. Users can ask questions through text, voice commands, or by uploading images, making the search experience more accessible for India's diverse user base.

The feature uses Google's "query fan-out technique," breaking complex questions into subtopics and issuing multiple simultaneous queries to dive deeper into web content. This approach helps discover hyper-relevant content that matches specific user questions while maintaining access to real-time sources including the Knowledge Graph and shopping data for billions of products.

Google Search’s AI mode builds on AI Overviews successThe feature builds on Google's AI Overviews feature , which now serves over 1.5 billion users monthly and has driven more than 10% usage increases in major markets including the US and India. AI Mode expands these capabilities with enhanced reasoning, advanced thinking processes, and multimodal functionality.

Google emphasizes that helping users discover web content remains central to its mission, with AI Mode designed to create new opportunities for content discovery while maintaining quality through core ranking systems and novel factuality approaches.