Google AI Mode goes live in the UK

New search experience described as "lose-lose" for sources of trusted news.

Example of Google AI Mode answer about Trump tariffs in May 2025

Google has started rolling out its new search experience AI Mode in the UK.

The new arrival will escalate fears for publishers that are already seeing reduced clickthroughs from the main search results pages following the addition of Google’s AI Overviews – summaries generated from publishers and other websites that give several sentences in response rather than just a headline and a snippet.

AI Mode, which was made available to all US users from 20 May, builds on this by giving much longer, detailed answers that vastly reduce the need to click out from Google to find more information. It uses Google’s Gemini 2.5 AI model.

It lives in a separate tab in Google search alongside other options like the main search results, images, videos, news and shopping – meaning it is more of a replacement for legacy search than AI Overviews which appear at the top of the traditional results page. AI Mode also appears in the Google app on Android and iOS.

Press Gazette previously reported that AI Mode reduces the number of sources surfaced in search results and does not always successfully link to the original source of information once a story has been followed up elsewhere.

Traffic from AI Overviews or AI Mode is impossible to distinguish from other Google traffic so it is hard for publishers to gauge the impact on referrals other than their overall trend.

Publishers are also unable to opt out of their content being used for these AI experiences unless they “no snippet” their websites for the main Google search product – meaning any of their links that do still show in Google would appear less detailed and attractive to the user.

Owen Meredith, chief executive of the News Media Association which represents the UK’s biggest newsbrands, said: “This is yet another example of Google using its dominant position in search to force news publishers to allow their content to be ingested for AI.

“If publishers want to block Google’s search crawlers to stop their content from being exploited with no transparency, consent – or appropriate reward for original source material – they’ll be demoted from general search listings, causing catastrophic drops in audiences.

“It’s a lose-lose for sources of trusted verified news and information as the dominant tech firms continue to draw yet more web traffic into their walled gardens.”

Google says AI Mode still contains ‘prominent links’

Google’s vice president of product management, search, Hema Budaraju, described AI Mode as its “most powerful AI search experience, with more advanced reasoning and multimodality, and the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web”.

Budaraju added: “AI Mode is particularly helpful for exploratory questions and for more complicated tasks like comparing products, planning a trip or understanding complex how-tos.

“In fact, we’ve found that early users of AI Mode are asking questions that are two or three times the length of traditional search queries.”

AI Mode works by breaking down questions into subtopics and issuing multiple queries at once to find information on the web, meaning it draws on more sources from publishers and other sites each time.

Budaraju said AI Mode shows “prominent links for people to click on”.

But speaking in May, when AI Mode was in beta testing in the US, the Daily Mail’s global head of SEO and editorial e-commerce Carly Steven said: “I don’t think anyone is going to be clicking on those links. It just answers it.” She was displaying a screenshot of a query about British teenager Jay Slater who went missing in Tenerife last year.

Google now ‘taking content by force’

Danielle Coffey, the chief executive and president of US publisher trade association News/Media Alliance, said in a statement: “Links were the last redeeming quality of search that gave publishers traffic and revenue.

“Now Google just takes content by force and uses it with no return, the definition of theft. The Department of Justice remedies must address this to prevent continued domination of the internet by one company.”

Steven warned that if AI Mode “does become the default experience then I think referral traffic from Google is definitely in trouble”.

She also noted AI Mode does appear to be used to answer hard news queries, something that Google has said is not the case for AI Overviews (although studies suggest some news searches do still generate an AI summary).

Steven added that AI Mode could even threaten clickthroughs to queries in which people have deliberately included a newsbrand like the Daily Mail as part of their search.

“I think even branded search which we can sort of take for granted – this ‘oh, well, if people are Googling Daily Mail they definitely want to come to the Daily Mail’, I’m not sure that’s true,” she said.

Media consultant and former Financial Times director of platform strategy and public affairs David Buttle previously wrote for Press Gazette that AI Mode shows Google appearing to “abandon its previous position as a friend to publishers”.

He urged the tech company to provide separate data in data tool Search Console on the performance of links in AI Overviews and AI Mode, and to let publishers decide whether their content is used for AI features without having to opt out of appearing properly in traditional search results.