Google transforms YouTube into Search with new experimental AI mode

As a person who uses YouTube every day, I like where it's at right now. It offers a lot of great content with long and short-form videos, plus you can use Gemini to get the details you want from a video if you're really short on time or just want the cliff notes.

However, it looks like YouTube is now experimenting with something new, offering a big change when it comes to search. The brand's latest experiment tries to enhance the YouTube search bar experience by offering more data at a glance.

Do people really want this?

You can check out the details on YouTube's experimental features page for Premium members. The search bar feels more like something you'd see with Gemini, allowing users to have a conversation in order to get the results they are looking for.

When searching on YouTube, users will be hit with text, images, and even video results in this new experimental mode. You can even ask follow-up questions if needed, and YouTube will even present some additional prompts that might be worth looking at.

As you can imagine, blending these two worlds together can get a little messy. But for the most part, it seems to work quite well, as The Verge experimented with it. While it is pretty good, it did manage to make some mistakes.

But we've worked with AI long enough to know that this is to be expected. YouTube even highlights this before starting to engage with this feature, stating that AI can get things wrong, and has that as part of its introduction to the project on the feature page, sharing that "quality and accuracy may vary."

Subscribe for clear takes on YouTube's AI experiments

If you want to follow YouTube's AI-powered search experiments and similar product changes, subscribe to our newsletter for focused analysis, clear context, and concise summaries that make these developments easier to understand.

Get Updates

By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime.

For the time being, this will only be available to YouTube Premium members. And it can only be used on the desktop version of YouTube. However, the brand is looking to expand the feature to more users in the future. And we can already see this going to the mobile app as well at some point.

If you're a Premium member, you can head to the feature page to unlock it if you want to give it a try. Personally, I'm going to stick with the usual search that I've been using for over a decade. I just want to enjoy some videos; I don't need all that extra content on YouTube. The experience already feels like a mess. Why make it even more complicated and jumbled?