Google brings Search's AI Mode to five new languages

For the past six months, if you wanted to test Google’s most advanced reasoning search, you had to ask your questions in English. That restriction is finally starting to crack.

On Monday, Google announced that AI Mode is expanding to five new languages worldwide: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. Users can access it right now via a dedicated tab on search results, a button inside the search bar, or directly at google.com/ai.

Gemini 2.5 goes local

AI Mode first surfaced back in March as an experimental perk for Google One AI Premium subscribers, built specifically to take on rivals like Perplexity and OpenAI’s ChatGPT Search.

Just last month, Google pushed the English version of the tool out to 180 new markets after early testing in the U.S., the U.K., and India. Now, it is tackling non-English territory.

Hema Budaraju, VP of Product Management at Google Search, noted that building a global search experience goes far beyond basic translation. It demands a nuanced grasp of local context, powered here by a custom version of Gemini 2.5 running multimodal and reasoning workloads behind the scenes.

Meanwhile, Google is quietly turning AI Mode into an action engine. In August, it rolled out agentic features that can scout restaurant reservations, with plans to support service bookings and event tickets down the road.

The catch? That agentic workflow is currently confined to Labs testing for Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S., which comes with a steep price tag of $249.99 a month.

Yet the endgame is clear. Logan Kilpatrick, a group product manager at Google DeepMind, hinted on X last week that Google is working toward making this AI-first search experience the default "soon."

Why it matters

For everyday users in places like Japan, Korea, and Brazil, querying nuanced local topics in native tongues without jumping through English prompts is a massive quality-of-life jump. The core search upgrade is free to try and well worth putting through its paces for research-heavy workflows, even if the $250-a-month agentic booking tier remains an absurd luxury for almost everyone.

Competitively, this is Google flexing its classic distribution muscle against Perplexity and OpenAI. While AI search startups moved fast in English, conquering nuanced local markets requires massive local web indexes and regional context that Google spent decades hoarding. Expanding native language coverage is how Google suffocates early startup momentum outside Silicon Valley.

Still, the elephant in the room is publisher traffic. Publishers have loudly complained that features like AI Overviews and AI Mode hoard user attention by keeping clicks within Google's walled garden. While Google denied last month that AI features are gutting site traffic, turning an answer-first, booking-capable AI interface into the default search will inevitably strain its fragile relationship with the open web even further.