Is AI Mode about to become the default Google experience?
Google is turning AI Mode into a “shopping mall,” and it's a sign that a new search experience may be coming to the masses.
Mark late May on your calendar. That’s when the most seismic shift to SEO and content marketing of 2026 is likely to hit.
Why May? It’s when Google usually drops its annual bomb on the marketing, tech, and media world at its I/O developer conference. The past two years haven’t disappointed:
In 2024, Google announced the launch of AI Overviews, a move that’s since upended search and sent organic traffic cratering across the web.
In 2025, they announced the rollout of AI Mode to all users, delivering a search experience that felt similar to using Google’s flagship LLM, Gemini, but infused with more links. The company also explained that AI Mode would eventually deliver personalized results to each user based on everything Google knows about you—your search history, the contents of your Gmail and Google Drive, etc.
There’s a good chance that 2026 will bring about even bigger changes.
So far, AI Mode hasn’t upended search. It’s a tab in the main Google bar, not the default experience. In Q4, AI Mode hit 75 million daily active users (DAU), making it about as big as Bing. But that’s still relatively small by Google’s standards.
However, most people expect that Google will make AI Mode the default experience eventually. And that eventuality may come sooner than we think.
The biggest risk to making AI Mode the default is the prospect that it will hurt Google’s $175 billion search advertising business. But as Pepper advisor and SEO expert Eli Schwartz recently noted, Google just unveiled a trio of monetization updates for AI Mode. Schwartz writes:
The AI Mode tsunami is coming.
Google just announced monetization for AI Mode.
They’re rolling out three revenue streams:
1. Ads integrated directly into AI responses
2. Direct product offers from retailers
3. Universal Commerce Protocol for seamless transactions
Translation: AI Mode is becoming a shopping mall.
This might make AI Mode even more valuable to Google than traditional search, so the chances of AI Mode becoming the default just got more likely.
Schwartz captured the inflection point well. In this low-key blog post, Google announced a new Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) that they co-developed with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart. Essentially, this UCP makes it much easier to sell things directly within AI Mode, enabling three big things:
First, a checkout feature that lets people buy products as they’re shopping in AI Mode in Search or in the Gemini app.
Second, “Direct Offers,” which allow retailers to present exclusive promotions or discounts to users.
Third, a “Business Agent” that acts like a virtual sales associate, allowing shoppers to chat with brands right in AI Mode.
Taken together, it’s easy to envision how these features could drive serious revenue from AI Mode and reduce the risk of making it the default search experience. On the flip side, it could very well increase revenue. As Schwartz wrote, AI Mode is becoming a shopping mall.
If the past two years are any indication, Google I/O is when they’ll announce that AI Mode is becoming the default experience for users, likely starting with a subset of folks in the U.S. (Of course, they could also wait until 2027.)
This could be the beginning of the end for Google’s blue links—and an entire era of the internet.
If AI Search has you spinning, we’re offering free GEO audits to kick off 2026. Request yours here.
AI news is as inescapable as the phrase "ROI" on a Davos panel. Here are the stories to know this week.
New BrightEdge research reveals that Google's AI Overviews dominate educational queries ("What is an IRA?") while steering clear of real-time data, calculators, and local searches—proof that Google's still learning where AI answers help versus hurt.
OpenAI announced it will begin testing ads in ChatGPT's free and Go tiers, but promised that paid opportunities won't influence responses. Altman had previously called the idea "uniquely unsettling," but apparently, $11.5 billion quarterly losses are even more uncomfortable.
OpenAI and ServiceNow inked a three-year deal to embed AI agents directly into enterprise software. Translation: Your IT ticket might soon get resolved by a bot.
AI dominated at Davos 2026. But at this year’s event, the hype gave way to an old obsession: ROI.
Google Trends will now use Gemini to automatically surface and compare related search terms, turning manual research into AI-assisted trend discovery.
Microsoft is pledging to cover the full electricity costs of its data centers, so that your utility bill doesn't foot the exorbitant costs of AI. The news comes as communities near data centers have seen energy costs spike up to 267% over the past five years.
New Stanford/Yale research shows that LLMs can reproduce near-complete texts of copyrighted books when prompted strategically. Sounds like the major AI companies skipped the J-School lecture on sourcing.
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