Google's AI Mode is coming to Germany

If you want an answer to a particularly complex question, you should select AI Mode in Google Search in future. The Gemini 2.5 AI model behind it is specially adapted to search queries – This means that both the real-time search and the gigantic database, the Knowledge Graph, are linked to it. Both questions and answers do not have to be in text form. For example, questions about an image are also possible.

AI Mode does not provide link lists. The AI overviews or AI overviews also provide an AI-generated answer to a question above the links if Google believes that such an answer is useful. For an answer in AI mode, Gemini collects and analyzes more information and summarizes it appropriately. The previous search history and your location are also considered, if you allow this. From the first answer, you can ask further questions and have a kind of conversation. This is very similar to an AI chatbot. Unlike the Gemini chatbot, however, AI Mode is optimized for searches – is how Google explains the difference. Above all, however, AI Mode is integrated into the regular search.

AI Mode as an extended AI chatbot

The function is also reminiscent of Perplexity and ChatGPT. Here too, there are AI-generated and compiled answers to questions in real time. In contrast, however, Google has the Knowledge Graph with millions of pieces of information on opening times, admission prices, functions and facts, such as the height of the Eiffel Tower.

AI Mode is already available in the USA and other countries, and is now coming to Germany and other countries, including in German. According to Google, AI Mode is particularly suitable for delving deeper into a topic. Many of the questions that people ask didn't exist before because Google didn't have an answer. They are also two to three times longer. This is one of the reasons why Google cannot measure whether website operators lose clicks due to the AI answers. The accusation is that Google is helping itself to other content, using it itself to display it in AI Mode or in the AI overviews. The content creators have mainly earned money by displaying adverts on their sites –, but this requires a human to visit the site in order for adverts to be displayed. However, Google says that there has been an overall ten per cent growth in search queries since the AI overviews.

Google already dominates the online advertising business. In the USA, it has already been decided in proceedings that Google has a monopoly and favours itself. The resulting conditions are currently being discussed in proceedings; in the worst-case scenario, the advertising business could be spun off.

Google is already experimenting with adverts in AI mode in the USA. Experience is still being gathered before adverts are also displayed in other countries.

(emw)