Google announced Monday the expansion of its AI Mode, an AI-powered search experience, to five new languages, making it accessible to a wider global user base. The new languages supported are Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese, following over six months of being limited to English.
This update follows a global rollout last month that extended the AI-powered experience to 180 new markets in English. Initially launched in the U.S., AI Mode had previously expanded to the U.K. and India. Hema Budaraju, VP of Product Management at Google Search, stated in a blog post, "With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the web more deeply."
AI Mode, first introduced as an experiment for Google One AI Premium subscribers in March, represents Google's entry into the generative AI search platform landscape, competing with offerings like Perplexity and OpenAI's ChatGPT Search. The feature integrates a customized version of Gemini 2.5, equipped with multimodal and reasoning capabilities.
In August, Google introduced agentic functionalities within AI Mode, enabling tasks such as finding restaurant reservations. Future plans include support for local service appointments and event ticket bookings. These advanced features are presently restricted to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. and are available through the "Agentic capabilities in AI Mode" experiment in Labs. The Ultra subscription tier is priced at $249.99 per month.
Currently, users access AI Mode via a dedicated tab on the search results page or a button within the search bar. Logan Kilpatrick, Google DeepMind's group product manager, indicated last week that the company is working towards making this AI-led search experience the default "soon."
Google's recent AI innovations, including AI Mode and AI Overviews, have faced criticism regarding their potential impact on search clicks and website traffic. However, Google publicly denied last month that its AI search features were reducing website traffic.
