Google is dramatically expanding the global reach of its AI search tool, now rolling out its AI Mode to users in over 180 new countries and territories. This aggressive expansion marks a significant shift, as the feature was previously limited to just the United States, India, and the United Kingdom. For now, English remains the only supported language, but the company has indicated that support for additional languages is coming soon.
Beyond its geographical expansion, Google is also enhancing the tool’s capabilities, moving it toward a more agentic model that can perform tasks. A key new feature is the ability to find restaurant reservations using natural language queries. Users can ask for a dinner reservation by specifying details like group size, desired date, location, and preferred type of cuisine. The AI then scours the web to present a list of suggestions with available reservation slots and provides direct links to the relevant booking pages. Google has confirmed that future updates will add the ability to book local service appointments and event tickets, with partnerships already in place with companies like Ticketmaster and StubHub.
This new functionality is powered by Google’s web-browsing AI agent, known internally as Project Mariner. It integrates with the company’s existing Search infrastructure, including the Knowledge Graph and Google Maps, to provide comprehensive results. To ensure broad restaurant coverage, Google has partnered with major booking platforms including OpenTable, Resy, and Tock.
However, access to this advanced restaurant booking feature is currently gated. It is exclusively available to subscribers of the premium Google AI Ultra plan in the US, which carries a significant monthly cost. The feature is accessed through Google’s Labs platform. For users who opt into the AI Mode experiment, the tool can also remember past conversations and searches to deliver increasingly personalized and relevant results over time.
In a move toward collaborative AI, Google is also introducing a new sharing feature. If a user has a particularly interesting or useful exchange with the AI, they can now tap a Share button on any response. This generates a link that can be sent to another person, allowing them to join the conversation at that exact point and ask their own follow-up questions. Google suggests this would be ideal for collaborative tasks like planning a group trip or organizing a party. The original user maintains control and can delete any shared conversation links at any time.
This global rollout and feature expansion represent Google’s latest effort to deeply integrate advanced AI into the core search experience, transforming it from a simple information retrieval tool into an interactive, task-completing agent.
This article originally appeared on Engadget.
