Google's AI-powered search experience — essentially Gemini with search, calculator, time, location and Python tools — answering queries conversationally.
AI Mode is Google's AI-powered search experience, and under the hood it is essentially Gemini equipped with a set of tools: Google Search, a calculator, time, location, and a Python sandbox. It answers queries conversationally, using search results as grounding rather than just returning a list of links.
Our testing exposed how it works: date, time and location are injected as real-time context to sharpen time- and place-sensitive answers, and an internal tool_code block shows the search queries it constructs — rewriting a question into several google_search.search(...) calls before synthesising a reply. When we disabled Google Search, it still ran the searches but Gemini declined to synthesise them into an answer.
Its retrieval follows a Prepare → Retrieve → Signal → Serve pattern, and it reads pages through distinct browsing and content-fetcher paths. Notably, at launch AI Mode could not read live pages via the URL Context tool the way the Gemini app could. It's a prime surface for AI visibility work.
