Google AI Mode passes 1 billion monthly users as it absorbs AI Overviews
Google's AI Mode has passed 1 billion monthly active users, Sundar Pichai said at Google I/O in May 2026, calling it "our biggest upgrade to Search ever". The conversational search product began as a Labs experiment in March 2025, reached the US two months later, and was available in more than 200 countries and territories by October 2025.
AI Mode now runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash by default worldwide, with Gemini 4 Argon available to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers for harder multi-step questions. It has picked up its own Search Console report, an opt-out setting, a shopping cart and background agents that can book tables, call local businesses and monitor topics. At I/O 2026 Google merged AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single experience, so a user can move from a standard results page into a follow-up question without leaving it.
The two surfaces are not interchangeable for citation. In a comparison of 730,000 AI Mode and AI Overview responses to the same queries, only 13.7% of cited URLs overlapped, even though the answers were 86% semantically similar. Ranking in AI Overviews therefore gives no assurance of appearing in AI Mode.
AI Mode splits each prompt into subtopics and searches them at once, a process known as query fan-out. Seer Interactive and Nectiv research found an average of 9 to 11 fan-out queries per prompt, with some reaching 28, and more than 95% of those queries carry no measurable search volume. Google says retrieval still draws on its core Search ranking systems, so pages it cannot find and rank are not candidates.
Reported by Ahrefs Blog ↗
Topics: AI Mode, AI Overviews, Citations