# Google AI Mode 74 Hacker News commenters recommended Google AI Mode and 92 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Fast, sourced answers to quick questions and hard-to-search lookups that people often prefer to regular results. Caveat: it often makes things up. ## Why people recommend it - Fast answers to quick questions (4 comments): "My main reason is if I just have a quick question it seems a lot quicker than logging into ChatGPT/Claude" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297399)) "got a full description of the story with links to online hostings of the full text in under 1 second" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47576621)) "almost absurdly fast, although the hallucination rate is somewhat proportionally higher" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49537019)) - Cites sources and links (4 comments): "The reason i prefer it is because it is a search-driven reasoning engine and thus gives references" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48744411)) "You are better off talking to Google's AI mode about that sort of thing because it runs searches." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46542954)) "I've found it pretty useful for research as long as I use my brain and check its citations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48994460)) - Saves time on research (4 comments): "If Google can do that for me and summarize the main points, that's another 10 minutes of my life saved." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48306718)) "AI mode made Google search far more useful for me and gives me what I'm looking for 99.9% of the time." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306899)) "their AI Mode has saved so much time in the month or two I've been using it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48217175)) - Good for lookups and comparisons (4 comments): "Occasionally it is useful, especially when I can't think of the correct term to search for." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48299840)) "It has access to Google's index so it can be quite a good search engine interface" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197044)) "both Perplexity and Google AI Mode are good at quick lookup of SvelteKit idioms" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46259462)) ## What people warn about - Makes things up, hallucinates (5 comments): "This morning AIMode fabricated for me a diverse science education publishing and research effort around using generative AI to teach rough-quantitative reasoning." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47238002)) "their AI mode is pretty pathetic for troubleshooting something. 50% of the times the first response is riddled with inaccuracies and mistakes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48475029)) "it hallucinated an off-trail, alpine scrambling route that, based on my knowledge of the area, would potentially get someone killed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197716)) - Invents articles instead of searching (2 comments): "I asked it to find an article that compares a certain thing to another, which doesn't exist. So Google automatically wrote a 5 page article" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49853816)) "AI mode doesn't even search. I'll ask it to find a blog post or article that I remember reading recently." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567046)) - Forced on users, degrades search (3 comments): "Users aren't adopting their AI at the rate shareholders expect, so they now force the adoption at the cost of search." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48297452)) "everyone who uses Google the search engine is forced to use Google AI, we can't get meaningful statistics for those" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445611)) "the ai overviews and ai mode are why I stopped using google, they have always been very bad i.m.e." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48847110)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Perplexity](https://hackerapproved.com/p/perplexity.md): 121 recommend - [Kagi Assistant](https://hackerapproved.com/p/kagi-assistant.md): 79 recommend - [Phind](https://hackerapproved.com/p/phind.md): 36 recommend - [Google AI summaries](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-ai-summaries.md): 13 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Google AI Mode", https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-ai-mode/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).