Google launched AI Mode in March, designed to compete with popular services like Perplexity AI and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search. Today’s announced updates aim to make AI Mode a stronger contender against both.
With the expansion, Google is removing the AI Mode waitlist. Any US citizen aged 18 or older who joins Google’s experimental division Labs can now use the feature. Google is also testing an AI Mode tab within Google Search itself, visible to a subset of US users — the first step beyond the Labs sandbox.
New Features: Product Cards, Place Cards, Follow-Up Continuity
Beyond the access expansion, Google is refining AI Mode to handle more than just detailed questions about places and products. Users can now search for restaurants or travel items, and AI Mode will surface visual place and product cards that can be clicked for more detail.
Browsing local restaurants or salons, you can quickly see ratings, reviews, and opening hours. For products, you can view real-time pricing, promotions, images, delivery details, and local inventory. Example: searching for the best antique store with mid-century modern furniture, AI Mode highlights nearby shops, provides live details like how busy they are, and lets you call or get directions quickly. Or planning a camping trip, you can search “best folding camping chair under $100 that fits in a backpack” — AI Mode provides a breakdown of recommended products with details and retailer links.
Google also lets you pick up where you left off within AI Mode — useful for long-running projects and tasks. On desktop, a new left-side panel shows previous searches, the information you received, and lets you ask follow-up questions.
The competitive framing matters because AI Mode is Google’s direct answer to a threat it created. Perplexity proved that users would accept AI-generated answers to search queries; OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search proved they would accept them at ChatGPT scale; and both are now selling advertising against those answers, building the exact business that Google’s search monopoly was supposed to make impossible for anyone else to build. AI Mode is Google admitting that the future of search is conversational and AI-summarized rather than link-based, and that it would rather cannibalize itself than let Perplexity and OpenAI do the cannibalizing. The waitlist removal, the Search tab test, and the product cards are all pieces of a controlled detonation of Google’s own business model — timed to happen before the competition gets big enough to dictate the terms.
The product-card system is where the strategy becomes concrete. A user searching for a folding camping chair under $100 does not want ten links to review articles; they want the chair, the price, and the buy button. By generating those cards natively inside AI Mode — with live pricing pulled from merchant feeds and local inventory from Google’s existing shopping infrastructure — Google is building a transactional search experience that keeps the user inside Google’s surface area from query to purchase. The follow-up continuity feature compounds this: a user planning a camping trip can ask about chairs, then tents, then stoves, all in the same AI Mode session, with the left-side panel maintaining context across all of it. That session depth is something traditional search never had, and it creates advertising inventory that did not previously exist — the ability to show product cards at every turn of a multi-intent conversation rather than once per keyword query.
For publishers and local businesses, the update is a warning shot with a silver lining. The warning: AI Mode’s product cards pull pricing, ratings, and inventory data that publishers and review sites previously monetized through their own pages, and if users stop clicking through, the referral traffic that funds independent content collapses further. The silver lining: businesses whose data feeds are well-structured — accurate inventory, current pricing, rich location data — get surfaced directly inside AI Mode results without competing for SEO rankings. The local restaurant that keeps its Google Business Profile current gets found; the one that does not becomes invisible. The content and commerce web is being restructured around data quality rather than link equity, and the tools that win are the ones that feed Google’s cards the cleanest data.
What the Expansion Signals
The waitlist removal is the strategically important part of this update, because it marks Google’s transition from testing AI Mode as an experiment to deploying it as a product. The Labs gate served two purposes: limiting compute exposure while Google measured inference costs, and providing a controlled population for quality feedback. Opening to all US adults means Google believes the quality and cost curves have crossed the threshold for mass deployment — and the Search tab test for a subset of users signals that full Search integration is the next step, which would put AI Mode in front of billions of daily queries rather than millions.
The product and place cards are the commercial Trojan horse. By surfacing ratings, live pricing, local inventory, and business hours directly inside AI Mode responses, Google is building a shopping and local-discovery layer that bypasses the traditional ten blue links — and the advertising model those links support. If users stop clicking through to review sites and retailer pages and instead transact on information Google summarizes, the SEO-and-ads economy that funds the web’s content layer loses its traffic, and Google’s own product cards become the primary commercial surface. The antique-store example is instructive: the AI answers the question completely enough that clicking through to any individual store’s site becomes optional. Whether Google eventually charges merchants for placement inside those product cards — an evolution that would essentially be AdWords for the AI-search era — is the obvious next question, and the one Perplexity and OpenAI are watching most closely as they build their own shopping features.
