Google is quietly testing whether Chrome should skip the classic results page and drop users into AI Mode whenever they search.
The experiment, spotted in Chrome Canary — the browser's bleeding-edge test channel — suggests Google is exploring making AI Mode the default search experience rather than an opt-in layer. Right now, AI Mode is a feature users can choose; this test would flip that relationship, making the ten-blue-links page the detour instead of the destination. Google has not announced the change publicly or confirmed it is headed to stable Chrome.
This matters because Chrome commands roughly two-thirds of the global browser market. Defaulting search to AI Mode would not just change how answers are delivered — it would reshape how often users ever see traditional search results, and by extension, how much traffic flows to third-party websites. Publishers and SEO-dependent businesses have already been squeezed by AI Overviews; a default AI Mode would tighten that vise considerably.
Google faces a structural problem: its most profitable product, search advertising, sits awkwardly inside an AI answer experience that discourages clicking through. Making AI Mode the default accelerates that tension rather than resolving it.