Simon Willison’s Weblog

When I wrote about how good ChatGPT with GPT-5 is at search yesterday I nearly added a note about how comparatively disappointing Google's efforts around this are.

I'm glad I left that out, because it turns out Google's new "AI mode" is genuinely really good! It feels very similar to GPT-5 search but returns results much faster.

www.google.com/ai (not available in the EU, as I found out this morning since I'm staying in France for a few days.)

Here's what I got for the following question:

Anthropic but lots of physical books and cut them up and scan them for training data. Do any other AI labs do the same thing?

I'll be honest: I hadn't spent much time with AI mode for a couple of reasons:

• My expectations of "AI mode" were extremely low based on my terrible experience of "AI overviews"
• The name "AI mode" is so generic!

Based on some initial experiments I'm impressed - Google finally seem to be taking full advantage of their search infrastructure for building out truly great AI-assisted search.

I do have one disappointment: AI mode will tell you that it's "running 5 searches" but it won't tell you what those searches are! Seeing the searches that were run is really important for me in evaluating the likely quality of the end results. I've had the same problem with Google's Gemini app in the past - the lack of transparency as to what it's doing really damages my trust.