According to Google's official announcement, this tech giant has officially announced the expansion of its AI-powered search experience mode to five new languages, ending the six-month limitation that only supported English. The update released on Monday has opened the door to intelligent search for more users around the world.
According to Google's announcement, the AI mode now supports Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. This expansion follows last month's opening of the English version of the AI mode to 180 new markets, as the feature was initially launched only in the United States, then expanded to the UK and India.
Hema Budaraju, Vice President of Google Search Product Management, stated in a blog post that through this expansion, more users can now ask complex questions in their preferred language and explore web content more deeply. This statement highlights Google's emphasis on multilingual AI search experiences.
The development of the AI mode has been quite challenging. The feature was first introduced as an experimental project in March to Google One AI Premium subscribers, seen as a direct response from Google to AI search platforms like Perplexity and OpenAI's ChatGPT Search. Technically, the AI mode uses a customized version of the Gemini 2.5 model, which has multimodal and reasoning capabilities.
More notably, in August this year, Google introduced an agent feature for the AI mode, enabling it to help users find restaurant reservations. According to reports, this feature is planned to support local service appointments and event ticket bookings in the future. However, these advanced features are currently available only to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the United States, provided through the "AI mode agent feature" experiment in the lab, with the Ultra plan costing $249.99 per month.
From a user experience perspective, the current Google AI mode is accessed through a dedicated tab on the search results page and a button in the search bar. There are signs that Google is working to make this AI-driven search experience the default mode. Last week, Logan Kilpatrick, a product manager at Google DeepMind, hinted on the X platform that this shift would happen "soon."
However, Google's AI search feature expansion has not been without challenges. The latest AI updates, including the AI mode and AI overview, have faced criticism for affecting search click-through rates. The industry is concerned that AI providing answers directly on the search results page may reduce user visits to original websites, thereby affecting website traffic and advertising revenue.
In response, Google clearly denied the accusation that its AI search function is harming website traffic last month. The company insists that AI functions actually help users discover and explore relevant content more effectively, rather than simply replacing traditional search results.
Analyzing from a global market perspective, this multilingual expansion reflects Google's strategic positioning in the AI search field. By supporting more languages, Google not only serves a broader user base but also gains a competitive advantage against other AI search platforms. Especially in the Asia-Pacific region, the addition of support for Japanese, Korean, and Hindi will significantly enhance the user experience.
Industry experts believe that Google's multilingual expansion of the AI mode marks an important shift of AI search technology from the experimental stage to mainstream application. As more users begin to experience AI-driven search features, traditional search models may face fundamental changes.
On the technical implementation level, supporting multiple languages for AI search requires strong natural language processing capabilities and deep localization understanding. Google's ability to launch support for five languages simultaneously demonstrates its deep accumulation in AI technology and engineering capabilities.
Looking ahead, as the AI mode's features continue to improve and the user base expands, Google is expected to maintain a leading advantage in the next round of search technology competition. At the same time, how to balance the promotion of AI features with the healthy development of the traditional website ecosystem will become an important issue that Google needs to continuously focus on and solve.
This multilingual expansion is not only a demonstration of technological progress, but also an important step in Google's global AI strategy, signaling the acceleration of the intelligent search era.
