Google is expanding AI Mode, its AI-powered search experience, to five additional languages: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese. After months of English-only access, the move opens the door to millions of users who prefer searching and reasoning in their native language, and signals Google’s next phase in globalizing AI-led search.
Why these languages matter
These five languages map to some of the world’s largest and most active internet populations. Industry bodies and national statistics agencies estimate India has more than 700 million active internet users (IAMAI–Kantar), Indonesia surpasses 200 million (APJII), Brazil exceeds 160 million (CGI.br/NIC.br), and Japan and South Korea have among the highest penetration rates globally (MIC Japan and KISA). Collectively, this rollout brings AI Mode closer to serving well over a billion people in their primary or most comfortable language.
Language complexity is a real factor here. Japanese and Korean require sophisticated tokenization and handling of context without whitespace cues, while Hindi demands robust support for Devanagari and code-mixed queries common in India (for example, “train status Delhi se Jaipur” mixing Hindi and English). Brazilian Portuguese brings regional vocabulary and idioms that differ from European Portuguese. Getting these details right is crucial for high-quality retrieval and grounded answers.
How AI Mode works in multilingual search
AI Mode combines Google’s index with a large multimodal model—internally described as a customized Gemini 2.5 variant—to synthesize answers, cite sources, and reason across documents. In practice, that means the system parses a query, retrieves relevant information, and drafts a concise response that can handle follow-ups without starting over. Multilingual support adds layers: accurate query understanding, cross-language retrieval when local sources are scarce, and trustworthy answer generation in the user’s chosen language.
Consider examples users might try on day one: asking in Hindi for “best budget 5G phones under ₹15,000 with 3 years of updates,” searching in Japanese for “東京の深夜営業しているヴィーガン対応の居酒屋,” or querying in Korean for “마포구에서 주말 가족체험 가능한 실내 과학 전시.” These are the kinds of nuanced, constraint-heavy searches that AI Mode aims to simplify by doing the synthesis and ranking legwork up front.
What changes for users
Users can find AI Mode via a dedicated tab in results or a button within the search bar. Google previously expanded English access across 180+ markets; now, speakers of the five new languages can get AI-led summaries and follow-up prompts similar to English users. According to Google’s Search leadership, the goal is to let people ask complex, multi-step questions in their preferred language while still discovering the open web.
Google has also been piloting “agentic” actions inside AI Mode—finding restaurant reservations and, in time, booking local services or event tickets. These capabilities remain limited to an experiment available to subscribers on a top-end tier in the U.S. Google positions these features as an extension of search: from answering to accomplishing, with user consent and controls.
Competition and the traffic debate
The expansion lands amid intensifying competition from AI-forward search offerings like Perplexity and new search experiences tied to general-purpose chatbots. Industry watchers have noted that Google appears to be steering toward making AI Mode the default interface. A product lead at Google’s AI organization has publicly hinted at that ambition, suggesting the company is preparing for a broader shift in how search results are presented.
Publishers and SEO leaders are watching closely. AI-generated summaries can reduce the need to click, particularly for simple questions. Google has countered that its AI features are designed to surface a broader mix of sources and drive traffic to a wider set of sites, including emerging publishers, reiterating that the open web remains central. Independent measurement firms and news industry groups are continuing to study the impact by language and region, where behavior can differ widely.
Quality, safety, and localization hurdles
Expanding to these languages is not only a data or UI problem—it is a safety and evaluation challenge. Reliable answers require clean training data, robust fact-checking signals, and guardrails against hallucinations, all of which can vary by language. Organizations such as the Partnership on AI and academic groups studying multilingual benchmarks have emphasized that model performance can drift when moving beyond English; continued fine-tuning and region-specific evaluations are essential.
Localization also touches ranked sources. In markets where local publishers are strong—and where regulations emphasize platform accountability—Google must ensure that AI Mode reflects local authority, legal context, and cultural nuance. That’s especially relevant in Brazil and South Korea, where digital policy and platform accountability frameworks are evolving quickly.
What to watch next
With five high-impact languages added, the next milestones are clear: performance parity with English, broader rollout of agentic actions, and clearer guidance to publishers on attribution and traffic. If Google does shift AI Mode closer to the default, adoption in India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, and Brazil will be the stress test for whether AI-led search can scale globally without sacrificing discovery or trust.