"AI Mode" usage is up month over month. Almost like because they forced it upon everyone. Once again, is there any real AI demand?

Only speaking for myself, but I use it a lot, and intentionally. Enough that I set up a search engine shortcut for it in my browser (g <space> type prompt here <enter>).

I much prefer it to having to click through links to find things. My last handful of searches were:

- Looking up open hours for a local store

- Defining words

- "postgres select where string has prefix"

- "cloudformation read parameter from ssm"

Things where I want to look up a fact, but want an answer right away without having to read through multiple pages.

I've used it for live service video games, it's pretty good at summarizing major changes to a game since you've played it last. With regular web search you'd have to go to every major patch and a lot of games don't even have good patch notes / it's all stuck in content creator videos.

Though I still prefer Claude for this since it's better at citing sources.

Not surprising. It’s placed exactly where the regular search results used to be (when navigating away from image results) and muscle memory is strong. Haven’t clicked it intentionally once though.

I've accidentally clicked ai mode probably 3+ times a week recently, so that's some real good metrics ;)

Yeah I actually use AI mode a fair bit. It has access to Google's index so it can be quite a good search engine interface when the normal one doesn't work (which is quite often).

Judging by global RAM, storage, and compute hardware demand, yes there is.

At the moment, I end up using AI mode only because the ads are not as prominent as the normal search.

For many queries, if I don't get an AI Mode response, I formulate it again until I do.