Simon Willison’s Weblog - AI Mode in Google Search Simon Willison shares his impressions of Google's new "AI mode" for search, highlighting significant improvements over past efforts. --- Key Points Initial Skepticism: Simon initially had low expectations for Google's AI mode due to poor experiences with "AI overviews" and the generic name "AI mode." Surprise at Performance: The new Google AI mode feels very similar to GPT-5 search and returns results much faster. Access Limitation: AI mode is not available in the EU, as Simon discovered when trying it in France. Example Query & Results: Simon tested the query: "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?" The AI mode returned detailed and organized results explaining Anthropic's approach to acquiring book data, including: Anthropic's bulk purchase, physical destruction, and scanning of books, leading to a copyright lawsuit settlement. Other AI labs’ book sourcing methods: OpenAI & Microsoft: Partnership with Harvard University libraries using non-destructive digitization of public-domain books. Meta: Accused of relying heavily on piracy, copying millions of books from LibGen. Google: Longtime pioneer of non-destructive scanning (e.g., Google Books), which set legal precedents for digitizing copyrighted works. Impression: Google is now leveraging its search infrastructure effectively for AI-assisted search. --- Disappointments Lack of Transparency: AI mode reports "running 5 searches" but does not reveal what these searches are. Simon values transparency to assess result quality and trusts systems more when their process is clear. A similar issue was noted previously with Google’s Gemini app. --- Additional Information Link to Google AI site: www.google.com/ai (restricted in EU). Simon had earlier written about GPT-5's strong search capabilities in ChatGPT, linked in his recent posts. The post was dated 7th September 2025. --- Related Recent Articles GPT-5 Thinking in ChatGPT is shockingly good at search (6th Sept 2025) V&A East Storehouse and Operation Mincemeat in London (27th Aug 2025) The Summer of Johann: prompt injections widespread (15th Aug 2025) --- Tags Google, AI, Generative AI, AI-assisted search, LLMs, Gemini, Search --- Simon invites sponsorship for a monthly curated email briefing on LLM developments: Sponsor & subscribe --- Summary Google’s new AI mode in search marks a significant step forward, delivering GPT-5-level quality answers quickly and using its search infrastructure effectively. Although limited by EU accessibility and transparency shortcomings, it shows Google making serious progress in AI-assisted search, competing well against leading AI models.