Circle to Search now lets you have deeper conversations about what's on your screen

Google’s AI Mode originated as a smarter and resourceful alternative to Search, but has since proliferated to other spots on your phone. A few months ago, Google added a direct AI Mode shortcut under the search bar in the Google app on Android, soon followed by AI Mode being added to Circle to Search for Samsung’s recently launched foldables — which was rolled out to other Android devices shortly after.

Despite this addition, Circle to Search defaulted to regular image search when asked any add-on questions. But this appears to be changing now, with additional queries along with images going to AI Mode, starting the Google app’s version 16.47.49.

This change introduces a new search bar at the bottom of Circle to Search results, which can be used for additional queries. Although it was teased by Google at the time of the July update, it wasn’t implemented. Instead, we continued to see a search bar at the top of the results, and typing anything would return standard, non-AI results.

With this change, however, any queries are now automatically taken up by AI Mode. This aligns with our findings from an earlier Authority Insights post from June, in which AI Mode addressed queries. Take a look in the vide below:

This improvement could strengthen the integration between Circle to Search and AI Mode, helping users benefit from the latter’s recently added capabilities for better travel planning. AI Mode recently also added features to help students with their homework and research, such as adding images to math or science problems or just asking it about key events in history, and these tasks might become much easier with the search bar’s new placement.