Google’s been rolling out AI Overviews to billions of users over the past year, but those summaries just got a serious upgrade. The company announced that Gemini 3 is now the default model powering AI Overviews globally. That means better answers, smarter reasoning, and a more natural way to dig deeper into topics.
For those unfamiliar, AI Overviews are those AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of your search results when you ask complex questions. They’ve been around for a while now, pulling information from across the web to give you quick answers without clicking through a dozen links. Google first deployed Gemini 3 in AI Overviews back in November through a router system that sent only the toughest questions to the new model. Now everyone gets access to it by default.
What actually changes with Gemini 3
The upgrade means AI Overviews can handle more nuanced queries with better context understanding. According to Google, Gemini 3 brings “state-of-the-art reasoning” that grasps depth and complexity in ways previous models couldn’t. So when you’re asking about something that requires actual analysis rather than just facts, you should get more thoughtful responses.
But there’s another change that might be even more useful. You can now jump straight into a follow-up conversation from an AI Overview. Google calls this AI Mode, and it’s basically their answer to chatbot-style search. Instead of getting one summary and moving on, you can ask follow-up questions while keeping all the context from your original search. The conversation flows naturally without starting over each time.
Google says their testing showed people prefer this kind of seamless transition into conversation. It makes sense when you’re researching something complicated and need to explore different angles without typing the same background information repeatedly. The update also brings Gemini 3’s advanced reasoning to AI Mode searches across dozens of countries, and Google’s been integrating AI Mode directly into Chrome to make access even easier.
The rollout is happening now, though availability varies by market. Google already brought Gemini 3 to the standalone Gemini app back in November with improved formatting and better code generation. This AI Overviews update puts that same intelligence directly into your everyday searches.
