Google is back with yet another AI-powered Search feature. But unlike AI Overviews, which attempts to summarize an answer to your search, or AI Mode, which uses generative AI to try to return results that are more detailed and useful, “Web Guide” is much simpler: It aims to make your search results easier to look at and surface links you wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Google announced Web Guide in a short blog post on Thursday, and there’s really not much to it. When you enable the feature in Google Labs, you’re able to try it out along any search query you want. Google suggests “open-ended” searches, like “how to solo travel in Japan” or “detailed queries,” like “My family is spread across multiple time zones. What are the best tools for staying connected and maintaining close relationships despite the distance?” But the feature technically works with anything you would normally search Google for.
The core of the feature is this: Instead of showing AI summaries, it simply groups relevant links together into different categories. Since Google isn’t trying to give away the content of each link with AI, you still have to click on any you find relevant, but the fact that they’re grouped in this way might actually make it easier to find what you’re looking for—or to find different types of links in one search.
My experience with Web Guide
After enabling the new feature on my personal account, I tried out a couple queries to get a sense of what Google was going for here.
My first attempt was the search, “news about generative AI.” After hitting the search button, Google instantly loads two links it thinks are relevant at the top of the page. One was from TechCrunch, while the other was from the site AI Business, both of which pointed to the sites’ generative AI news stories.
Beneath this, I could see Google’s AI was busy loading a full page of search results, which took about five seconds to return. Those results begin with a short summary of my query, including that, “the field of generative AI is rapidly evolving” (thank you for that insight), as well as two stories that had been in the news recently: the release of Grok 4, and the introduction of Qwen3-Coder.
Scroll past this, and you finally reach the results groupings. Each has a title (e.g. Aggregated Generative AI News) with a short summary of what you’ll find, and, of course, the links. The first two groupings in my results only had two links each, but subsequent groupings offered a “More” button, which added another two or three links to the mix.
Some of these groupings could be useful: One, AI Communities and Forums, linked me to four different subreddits, three of which dealt with AI discussions in one form or another (r/machinelearningnews, r/generativeai, and r/localllama). The fourth linked simply to an AI story on r/technews—possibly helpful if the Reddit thread has to do with AI, but not necessarily a helpful way to find new AI communities, if that’s what I was looking for.
Others, however, were a bit odd: AI News Aggregators, for example, offered one link to r/machinelearningnews, and three links to articles rounding up different AI news aggregators. Not aggregators of AI news, mind you—AI-powered news aggregators.
My second query was more successful. I searched for “best Mac for college students.” The first grouping attempted to find links for MacBook recommendations for college students: Three of the four did, while one was a CNET article about the best MacBooks they’ve tested in general, not necessarily for college. Still, helpful! The next grouping was also helpful, as Google listed four different Reddit threads about MacBooks for college—three of which were questions about which MacBook was best for college, while one asked if a MacBook was the best choice above other products.
A few groupings down, there was “MacBook Model Comparisons,” which featured two links: one to Apple’s official “Which Mac Is Best for Me?” page, but also one to a site called “Mac Business Solutions,” which is a computer repair store in Maryland. Its Mac comparison guide seems helpful for parents or students looking to buy a Mac for school, and it was the one the AI choose to sit next to Apple’s in this grouping. I tested “best MacBook for college” on a standard Google search, and this particular site didn’t show up until the fourth page of results for me, so it’s pretty cool to see such a niche site pop up in these Web Guide results.
What do you think so far?
Shit—do I actually like an AI-powered search feature?
More Web Guide, less AI Mode, please
I don’t want AI to summarize my content for me with varying levels of accuracy. However, I’m not opposed to AI making the information I am looking for more apparent and easy to find.
Web Guide is a brand new experimental feature, and it shows. I’m not sure this is something I’m really going to use in its current state, but I can see the vision. I’d like to see more links that are even more relevant in each grouping, and I’d like to see a wider variety of groupings than I’ve received so far. But I think the idea of grouping relevant links together, and scrolling through those groupings, rather than a sea of individual links, is very compelling. I like that I’m still clicking on each link I want to see, so I’m both engaging with the content myself and supporting that content by visiting its site.
But perhaps what I like most of all is the potential to surface links I wouldn’t have otherwise found. There’s no chance I thumb through four pages of Google for a search like “best MacBook for college,” but with Web Guide, I might actually see a link from a site that typically lives on that fourth page. That’s what excites me about something like Web Guide. Let’s focus on AI tools that still supports sites (especially small ones) while making search better, instead of assuming everyone wants their answers handed to them by a bot that might just be making up those results anyway.
How to try Web Guide
If you’re interested in trying this experience for yourself, head to Web Guide’s official Search Labs page. Click the toggle to enable the feature, then click “Search on Web Guide” to launch a search—or, click the new “Web” tab that appears when you start a new search.
Ironically, it seems to replace the Web filter that removes AI from Search entirely. If you want that back, you’ll have to disable Web Guide.