AI Mode

also known as: Google AI Mode

Google’s fully conversational search experience, a step past AI Overviews, with its own deeper retrieval, follow-up questions and multi-query synthesis, replacing the results page with a composed answer for the queries it handles. It runs its own retrieval, so what it cites and how it phrases an answer can differ from both classic Search and AI Overviews for the identical query.

In AI Search API

The google_ai_mode surface renders the real AI Mode experience in a browser (there is no official API for it) and returns the answer as the same Envelope every surface uses. AI Mode decomposes a single prompt into several sub-searches and often prints those sub-queries right in its answer, so answer.markdown here is an unusually rich record of the retrieval driving what AI Mode actually says. Absence-is-data applies the same way as everywhere else. A query that does not trigger AI Mode completes as surfacePresent:false rather than an error.

Envelope excerpt, AI Mode’s answer

"answer": {
  "markdown": "Here's a comparison…\n\nSearches run:\n- range of 2026 electric SUVs\n- fastest-charging electric SUVs",
  "blocks": [ { "type": "paragraph", "text": "…" } ]
}

Related terms

See it in the product

Every definition here is enforced in the Envelope contract. Run a capture and read the fields yourself.

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