Google AI Mode Merges With AI Overviews in Search Amid Publishing and Privacy Concerns
Google announced at Google I/O 2025, Search will incorporate AI Mode for all U.S. users as of May 20, with personalized suggestions coming this summer.
Written by Jackie Leavitt (Co-Chief Editor)
Reviewed by Aleksander Hougen (Co-Chief Editor)
Last Updated:
This Google I/O ‘25 Keynote announcement comes roughly one year after Google announced the launch of its AI Overviews in 2024.
Google began testing AI Mode with a small group of real-world users at the beginning of May 2025, replacing the “I’m feeling lucky” button and bringing AI Mode into AI overviews.
The Future of Google Search
In the Keynote presentation, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that AI Mode is the next step in the Search evolution, with AI Overviews having 1.5 billion users and expanding to over 200 countries.
Pichai said that since AI Overview’s implementation, there has been an increase in searches and more complex queries two or three times the length of traditional searches.
“In just one year there’s been a profound shift in how people use search, “ said Liz Reid, Vice President, Head of Search, in her Google I/O presentation. “AI Mode is Search transformed, with Gemini 2.5 at its core.”
The transformation that Reid describes includes a “query fanout technique,” where Gemini can break complex questions that need “advanced reasoning” into different subtopics, then searches the entire web for all those subqueries to create a detailed summary. Before Google presents its summary, “it checks its work to make sure it meets our high bar for information quality,” Reid says. “And if it detects any gaps, it issues even more searches to fill them in.”
In the future, Google will start incorporating personalized suggestions into the answers based on users’ past searches. Users will also be able to opt in to connect other Google apps, like Gmail, for “personal context.” Google will also launch “Deep Search” to create a report from the multitude of simultaneous searches. These features will go live this summer.
Concerns With AI Mode Search: Publishing and Privacy
Not surprisingly, there has been a chorus of concern from the publishing industry, who largely see this announcement as a death knell for their site traffic and readership.
The following day after the Keynote presentation, the News/Media Alliance released a statement, calling the changes theft.
“Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue. Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The DOJ remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”
— Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance
If publishers don’t want their work included in Google’s AI features, they need to opt out of search results completely. According to an internal Google document disclosed this week as part of Google’s antitrust trial over search dominance, Google decided against asking publishers for permission to have their work included in its AI search features, according to Bloomberg reporting.
Additionally, incorporating personalized content in search could be convenient in many search instances, but it also brings existing data privacy concerns to a higher level.
Our Testing of AI Mode
To access AI Mode, users need to go to google.com/aimode and opt in to Search Labs.
The following page displays Search Lab’s AI Mode page, where users can “turn this experiment on or off.”
Clicking the “try AI Mode” button brings you to the updated Google Search page. In our testing, we chose the phrase “monday.com vs clickup,” which we used in both the AI Mode and in the normal AI Overviews without AI Mode. Even without AI Mode, the Overviews expanded to include more information for users.
However AI Mode had more direct comparisons of key features, a much simpler version to what you’d find in a comparison article, like Cloudwards’ monday.com vs ClickUp article. It highlights two sources, with more sources hidden behind an easy-to-miss “show all” button.
With such thorough summaries and the sources easy to miss, it’s clear AI Mode will further reduce readership of online news sources and publishers. We will continue to monitor and report on this topic as AI Mode becomes incorporated into Google Search.