How Google Is Quietly Turning Millions of People Into AI Users

If you’ve used Google to search for something over the last few months, you may have noticed that the experience has changed. If you ask certain questions, an AI overview will pop up, followed by another search bar that encourages you to “Ask Anything.” Click on that, and you suddenly find yourself conversing with a chatbot in Google’s AI Mode interface.This pathway has resulted in millions of people—who never intended to use AI in the first place—unwittingly becoming acclimated to a new chatbot reality. Google Search usage hit an all-time high this year, and much of that activity involves AI. Google’s AI Mode has racked up more than 1 billion monthly users, the company says, a figure rivaling the estimated 1 billion monthly active users of ChatGPT in May, according to Sensor Tower.At the beginning of the AI arms race, Google lagged far behind its upstart competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic. But by aggressively implementing AI tools into its dominant search engine, Google is arguably doing more to bring AI into people’s everyday lives. In the process, the company is already transforming how users and content creators behave online. Introducing AIAI Mode is just the latest step in...