It can be hard sometimes to keep up with the deluge of generative AI in Google products. Even if you try to avoid it all, there are some features that still manage to get in your face. Case in point: AI Overviews. This AI-powered search experience has a reputation for getting things wrong, but you may notice some improvements soon. Google says AI Overviews is being upgraded to the latest Gemini 3 models with a more conversational bent.
In just the last year, Google has radically expanded the number of searches on which you get an AI Overview at the top. Today, the chatbot will almost always have an answer for your query, which has relied mostly on models in Google’s Gemini 2.5 family. There was nothing wrong with Gemini 2.5 as generative AI models go, but Gemini 3 is a little better by every metric.
There are, of course, multiple flavors of Gemini 3, and Google doesn’t like to be specific about which ones appear in your searches. What Google does say is that AI Overviews chooses the right model for the job. So if you’re searching for something simple for which there are a lot of valid sources, AI Overviews may manifest something like Gemini 3 Flash without running through a ton of reasoning tokens. For a complex “long tail” query, it could step up the thinking or move to Gemini 3 Pro (for paying subscribers).
Make no mistake—Gemini 3 can still make mistakes like any other gen AI system. That said, it does get things right more often than the previous model. The lightweight Gemini 3 Flash model more than doubled its score in knowledge-based benchmarks compared to the 2.5 branch. Since you really can’t get away from AI Overviews (without leaving Google), it’s at least nice Google is deploying models that get things right more often.
As part of this update, Google is also pushing AI Mode even harder by creating a bridge between it and AI Overviews. Google says that testers prefer an experience that can move naturally from a search paradigm to a conversational one. Thus, AI Overviews will gain the ability to hand off follow-up questions to AI Mode.
According to Google, this “fluid” experience is better at giving people what they want when they type something into the search bar—a quick factoid or a deep conversation. However, the expansion of AI Mode into the traditional search experience will also continue to pull people away from Google’s increasingly forsaken list of blue links. AI Mode may be scraping its content from those sites, but it keeps users bottled up in the Google bubble. That’s search in the AI era.
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