Google Search AI Mode Gets Visual

AI Mode is an AI-powered experience in Google Search that provides conversational answers to complex questions so you can keep exploring and learn more. Today, Google announced a major enhancement to this feature that adds visual results with the same ongoing conversational-style interactions.

“Starting today, you can ask a question conversationally and get a range of visual results in AI Mode, with the ability to continuously refine your search in the way that’s most natural for you,” Google explains in the announcement post. “AI Mode will help you turn your vague idea into a clear vision. You’ll see rich visuals that match the vibe you’re looking for, and can follow up in whatever way is most natural for you, like asking for more options with dark tones and bold prints. Each image has a link, so you can click out and learn more when something catches your eye. And because the experience is multimodal, you can also start your search by uploading an image or snapping a photo.”

The big use case here, at least for now is shopping: You can give it a query about what you want, view the visual results (which will appear along with textual results), and then ask follow-up queries to fine-tune the response until you’ve found exactly what you want.

As with a lot of AI functionality, some examples will help make sense of this. The Google post describes a person prompting AI Mode for design inspiration for a particular room in their home. AI mode provides a list of visual results and you can then click on one to go in that direction or ask follow-up queries. You can also start this search by taking a photo (if you’re on a phone) or uploading an image.

“Perhaps you’re looking for the best weekend jeans for fall,” Google continues. “Rather than sifting through filters to find the right style, rise, color, size or brand, just say ‘barrel jeans that aren’t too baggy,’ and AI Mode will intelligently provide a relevant set of shoppable options. If you want to refine your options further, just search what you’re thinking [about]: like, ‘I want more ankle length.’ Love a particular option? You can easily visit the retailer’s site and purchase: With our Shopping Graph of more than 50 billion product listings, you’ll get results you can trust.”

The visual results in AI Mode were created using the multimodal and language capabilities in Gemini 2.5, and they’re rooted in the visual understanding Google has developed over many years with Google Search with Lens and Image search. It uses a new “visual search fan-out” technique based on Google’s established “query fan-out” approach to enable deeper understanding of images and what’s in them as it runs multiple queries in the background.

This new experience is rolling out in AI Mode in Google Search this week in English in the United States this week.

You can learn more about AI Mode on the Google website.