India is Google's top testbed for AI search: Elizabeth Reid

Mumbai: India has emerged as Google's foremost testbed for its biggest reinvention of search in a decade, with the country getting access to AI-powered features almost simultaneously with its home market of the US, said a senior executive.

India "is one of our top markets overall," Elizabeth Reid, global head of search at Google told ET in an interview last week, noting that the country is also the technology giant's biggest market for Google Lens, and Voice.

Google Lens handles 1.5 billion visual searches a month globally. Reid did not disclose India's share in the total.

Google introduced AI Mode, its AI-powered deep search experience to India in June, a month after the US and before any other country. According to Reid, about 100 million Google users in total are tapping into AI Mode every month in the US and India.

"A few years ago, if we launched something in the US, it would come to India, maybe a year or 18 months later. Now we're really trying to shrink it down to months, if not weeks," said Reid. "Search Live is coming to India soon. India is going to be the first ground for testing Google's innovations going forward."

The latest innovations-AI Overviews and AI Mode-are at the centre of Google's transformation of the world's most popular search engine, even as it faces escalating competition from standalone LLMs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic's Claude AI.

Google's AI Overviews, which produces AI-generated summaries with direct source links, has boosted search usage by more than 10% in internal tests, said Reid in a recent note. Google plans for Overviews to reach over a billion users worldwide by 2025-end.

AI Mode, powered by the Gemini 2.5 model, breaks down complex queries into smaller searches, stitching them back into detailed, chat-like responses.

Reid said India's current role has vastly moved beyond just being a consumer and testing ground for Google.

"We have a great team in Search here and it actually cuts across our whole system. That makes it possible to serve at low latency and high capacity," Reid said. "It isn't just India-specific work. It's foundational work, and it's also about figuring out how to excel in this market," she emphasised.

Google is also investing deeply in vernacular AI in India, having already brought Hindi into AI Overviews and AI Mode, and enabling users to toggle between Hindi and English. Other Indian languages are on the roadmap, she said, without giving a timeframe.

Notably, there have been major changes in the way users are utilising Google, approaching it with questions 2-3 times longer than before. Follow-up queries in AI Mode retain context, encouraging users to ask more complex questions without repetition. Experts and users have said Google lags LLMs in gauging intent and setting context. "There's definitely room to grow," said Reid.

Experts have also raised questions about how websites, publishers, and businesses will adapt to Google's new SEO landscape in an AI-first world.

In response, Reid said shallow content will lose out. "But if you produce really high quality content, you bring your perspective and experience into it, users will want to click in further. Because we give a lot of context now, we see fewer bounce clicks (click followed by instant click back) and more deep clicks," she said.

For advertisers, AI Overviews push ads further down the page but longer queries mean sharper targeting opportunities. In a recent interview, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said ad revenue from AI-driven search was holding steady.