Google AI Overviews has over 2 Billion monthly users

Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai, has revealed some interesting stats during the company's Q2 earnings call. He said that Google AI Overviews has grown so popular that it has over 2 Billion monthly users.

That number is from over 200 Countries, and across 40 languages. Google says that AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.5, and they drive over 10% more queries for the types of queries that show them. Lens, Circle to Search are also driving up numbers for AI Overviews, especially among younger users.

Google AI Overviews have been around since May 2024, and the Mountain View company started bundling ads into it right from the get-go. It may have a large audience, but it has drawn flak from blogs for stealing traffic. According to a study by Pew Research Center (via Ars Technica), Google users who read an AI summary are less likely to click on links to websites.

They are also likely to end their browsing session because they got the information from AI summaries. This could be harmful for blogs that depend on organic traffic from search engines.  The sad truth is, Google won't care about that if AI continues to fill its coffers. Unsurprisingly, some publishers have filed an antitrust lawsuit against the use of Google AI Overviews.

Back to the news at hand, Pichai also said that Google AI Mode, which is currently available for users in the U.S., and India, has over 100 million monthly active users. OpenAI recently confirmed that ChatGPT users are sending 2.5 Billion prompts per day.

On a side note, there is a new button that appears on Google.com. Apparently, this button has been around for a week or more, once again I must have missed this since I prefer to use DuckDuckGo.

Here's what Google's new button looks like, and it's animated too, the border shines with a rainbow hue when you mouse over it.

Note that this "AI Mode" should not to be confused with the AI Mode tab that you see on the search results page, you can remove that by following my guide. Anyway, uBlock Origin users who want to remove this new button can right-click on it and select Block Element, and create a new filter.

You will need to do that three times to block the button, its background, and animation effect.

It should add three new rules like these in uBlock Origin's > Dashboard > My Filters tab.

www.google.com##.u4Uk3c > span
www.google.com##.bvUkz
www.google.com##.plR5qb

Those will remove the AI Mode button from Google, I tested it in a few browsers, the elements appear to be the same. So you could probably paste those filters in your browser, and it should block the button, at least for now.

Do you like Google AI Overviews?

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