How to Use Google’s AI Mode Well, and How to Get Plain Search Results Back

By David Mensah · October 8, 2026 · 8 min read

Google’s own help page answers the most common question about its AI search features in two short sentences. “AI Overviews are a core Google Search feature, like knowledge panels. Features cannot be turned off.” There is no toggle in Settings, no Labs switch for the ordinary version, and no account preference that makes the summary at the top of your results go away for good.

The summaries are also getting harder to scroll past. In late August, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google had removed the “Show more” button on AI Overviews for some queries, so the full answer loads expanded with an “Ask anything” box underneath; a Google spokesperson said Overviews “may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people.” A month later, the same site documented a test, first spotted by SEO consultant Gagan Ghotra, in which underlined text inside an Overview opened AI Mode rather than a web page.

So the realistic goal is control rather than an off switch. You can get good results out of AI Mode when it suits the question, and a page of plain links when it doesn’t. Both take about two minutes to set up.

Two products, one search box

AI Overviews are the generated summaries that appear above ordinary results for some searches. You don’t ask for them. AI Mode is the separate, chat-style search you opt into, at google.com/ai, through the AI Mode button on google.com, or from the Google app. Google says AI Mode uses a “query fan-out” technique, splitting your question into subtopics and running many searches at once, and that it is available in more than 190 countries and territories.

The line between the two is thinning. Since Google I/O on May 19, 2026, you can ask a follow-up straight from an AI Overview and carry on the conversation, which is how many people end up in AI Mode without meaning to.

When AI Mode is the right tool

Our rule of thumb at the desk: AI Mode earns its keep on questions that would otherwise take five tabs. Comparisons with several constraints (“a carry-on under 2.3 kg that fits a 15-inch laptop and has a lifetime warranty”), getting oriented in an unfamiliar subject, or making sense of a document. Google’s help page says you can search with text, voice, images, PDFs and other files, or paste a URL and ask about that page, and that last one is underrated for long policy pages and terms of service.

It is a weaker tool when you already know where you’re going (a login page, a specific article), when the facts are hours old, or when you are about to act on the answer with money or your health. Google itself says on the same page that AI Mode “doesn’t always get it right.” For those searches, skip ahead to the plain-links section.

How to check its sources

Almost nobody does this. When Pew Research Center tracked the browsing of 900 U.S. adults in March 2025, people clicked a link inside an AI summary on just 1% of visits to results pages that had one. The sources are there for a reason. A practical routine:

Open at least one cited page for any claim you’ll repeat or act on. Use your browser’s find command (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) to locate the specific number or sentence. If you can’t find it, the summary may have blended sources or got it wrong.
Check the date on the source page. A correct statement from 2023 can be the wrong answer in 2026, and summaries rarely flag that.
Notice where a link goes before you trust it. Given the test Search Engine Roundtable documented, an underlined phrase in an Overview may lead to another AI answer rather than to the web. Hover on desktop, or long-press on a phone, to see the destination.
Ask directly. “Which source says that, and what exactly does it say?” is a legitimate follow-up, and a vague reply is useful information.

One setting is worth a minute. Since May 2026, Google has let you mark “Preferred Sources” that it highlights in AI Overviews and AI Mode, set up through your Search personalization settings. Google product manager Duncan Osborn wrote that “people are twice as likely to click through to a Preferred Source.” If you trust particular outlets on particular subjects, tell Google.

Follow-ups that make answers better

The follow-up box is where AI Mode differs most from a results page, and most people use it to ask the same question again with different words. Better moves:

Add the constraint you left out. Budget, country, date range, skill level. “In Canada” changes a surprising number of answers about prices, laws and availability.
Ask for the disagreement. “Where do experts or reviewers disagree on this?” tends to surface the caveats that a confident first answer skipped.
Ask for dates. “When was each of these sources published?” is a quick staleness test.
Narrow, then restart. Long threads drift. When a conversation has wandered, a fresh search with everything you’ve learned in one precise question usually beats the fifteenth follow-up.

AI Mode keeps a history, which matters if you share a computer or search for sensitive things. Google says you can delete individual AI Mode searches or all of them from the history icon or My Activity, though deletion can take up to 24 hours to process.

How to get plain search results back

A translucent upper panel holding a soft glowing blob lifts away from a lower panel, revealing neat rows of plain lines and dots beneath it. — Illustration: prompt/power

None of these methods disables AI features across Google, but each gets you a page of links.

1. Use the Web filter

Run your search, then click Web in the row of filters under the search box (on narrow screens it may be tucked under More). Google’s help page describes this as the official route: it “displays only text-based links without features like AI Overviews.” The filter launched in May 2024, when Google’s Search Liaison Danny Sullivan said Google had added it “after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages.”

2. Make the Web view your default with udm=14

Clicking Web on every search gets old. Its results page has a URL parameter, udm=14, and if your browser sends that parameter every time, you land on plain links by default. The trick was popularized in May 2024 by Ernie Smith of the newsletter Tedium, who built udm14.com as a simple front door to it (Daring Fireball was among the sites that spread it).

In Chrome on a computer, per Google’s Chrome help page: open the three-dot menu, choose Settings, then Search engine, then Manage search engines and site search. Next to “Site search,” click Add. Give it a name (say, “Google Web”), a shortcut, and this URL: https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14. Save it, then use the three-dot menu next to the new entry to make it your default.

In Firefox, Mozilla’s instructions are similar: Settings, then Search, scroll to “Additional search engines,” click Add search engine, and paste the same URL with %s where the query goes. Then pick it as your default at the top of the Search panel.

A caveat: udm=14 is not a documented setting. It is simply how Google’s own Web filter is addressed today, and Google could rename it without notice. If plain results stop appearing, run a search, click Web, and copy the new address.

3. On your phone

Mobile browsers make custom search engines harder to add. The low-effort fix is tapping Web after a search, or bookmarking udm14.com to your home screen and searching from there.

4. The “-ai” trick, with a catch

Adding -ai to a query has been widely reported to suppress AI Overviews. It works because the minus sign is Google’s exclusion operator, which means it also tells Google to drop pages containing the word “AI.” Fine for a recipe search. A bad idea if you are researching anything involving AI, which, in 2026, is a lot of things.

Why the links matter beyond you

The sites that AI answers summarize are paid, mostly, by the visits those answers no longer send. Pew found that people who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional result on 8% of visits, against 15% for people who didn’t, and ended their browsing session on 26% of those pages, compared with 16% for pages without a summary.

Google has started testing direct payments. Its AI contribution pilot, reported by Search Engine Journal on Sept. 14, pays invited publishers through Search Console when their content shapes a response in Gemini, AI Overviews or AI Mode; one participating executive called the tracking “quite black box.” We’ve written separately about what that pilot says Google thinks the web is worth.

That is the publishers’ fight. For you, the practical version is smaller. When an answer matters, click through to the page it came from. And if you want the old Google back, the most reliable switch is the filter Sullivan once described lobbying for: “Since I joined Google, I’ve just been a boy standing in front of the search group asking it to love a Web filter.” It is still there, in the row under the search box, waiting to be clicked.

Sources

// Columnist, Software

David Mensah

David Mensah covers software and platforms for prompt/power: apps, browsers, developer tools and the open web. He firmly believes every "simple" settings menu is hiding a second, worse settings menu.

How to Use Google’s AI Mode Well, and How to Get Plain Search Results Back

Two products, one search box

When AI Mode is the right tool

How to check its sources

Follow-ups that make answers better