Google has widened the reach of its AI Mode, the search feature driven by machine intelligence, bringing it into five new languages after half a year confined to English alone. The company said on Monday that users may now turn to Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. This change follows a recent move to spread the English version across 180 additional regions, after first appearing in America and later finding its way to Britain and India.

“With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the web more deeply,” explained Hema Budaraju, a vice-president for product at Google Search, in a public note. AI Mode was first offered in March as a trial for those paying for Google One’s AI Premium plan. It stands as Google’s counter to newer rivals such as Perplexity and OpenAI’s search tool linked to ChatGPT. At its base is a modified release of Gemini 2.5, designed with powers of reasoning and the ability to handle words and images alike.

Google AI Mode Steps beyond English

In August, Google added what it calls agentic tools to AI Mode, giving it the power to secure restaurant bookings, with plans to widen the service to local appointments and ticket sales in time. For now, these additions are kept to users of the AI Ultra plan in the United States, and may be tried through a Labs program under the name “Agentic capabilities in AI Mode.” The Ultra plan is priced at $249.99 each month.

AI Search Tools Becoming a Core Feature of Google

At present, AI Mode can be reached through its own tab on the search results page, or by pressing a button within the search bar. The company seems intent on making this machine-led form of search the standard choice “soon,” as Logan Kilpatrick, a product head at Google DeepMind, hinted in reply to a user’s post on X last week. Yet the firm’s recent shifts, from AI Mode to AI Overviews, have drawn censure for cutting into the number of clicks on ordinary search results. Last month, however, Google rejected the charge that its new tools were draining traffic away from the wider web.

Final words

The linguistic growth of the AI Mode at Google is a little like a tech giant learning to say hello in five new languages – at a premium price. With the Ultra plan priced at $249.99 a month, users can now pose their burning questions in Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian and Brazilian Portuguese, but one wonders whether the answers will be worth more than a decent car payment. The bold goal of the company to transform AI-powered search into the default in the nearest future implies that we are seeing the gradual demotion of the lowly blue link. 

Google denies that it cannibalizes traditional web traffic, but critics are not convinced. With the spread of AI Mode to languages and continents, there is one thing that is certain: Google is still on a search dominance mission, but with a multilingual touch and restaurant reservation features.