Google AI Mode Just Hit 75M Daily Users. Here's What Changes for Indian Brand Discovery

Google AI Mode is no longer a labs experiment. It's a shopping channel.

75 million people use it every day — a milestone confirmed in late 2025, and the number has only grown since. It expanded to 200+ countries and over 50 languages. And — the part that should make every ecommerce brand sit up — users in the US can now complete purchases directly inside the AI conversation. No redirect to a product page. No external checkout. Ask, get a recommendation, buy. One conversation.

Meanwhile, AI Overviews — the AI summaries that sit above organic results — now appear in 14% of all shopping queries. That's up 5.6x from 2.1% in November 2024. Google went from showing AI answers on 1 in 50 shopping searches to 1 in 7.

If you're an Indian D2C brand still thinking of Google as "organic rankings + Shopping ads" — you're optimising for yesterday's Google.

The numbers that matter

Let me lay out the current state of Google's AI search surfaces, because these aren't incremental updates. They're structural shifts.

And on March 26, Google Search Live went global. That's voice and camera AI search, powered by Gemini 3.1 Flash Live. Users can now point their phone camera at a product in a store and ask Google AI about it. The physical shelf just became a trigger for AI-powered discovery.

AI Mode now has a buy button

This is the change with the biggest long-term implications for ecommerce.

In the US, users can complete purchases for eligible retailers directly inside Google AI Mode. The traditional funnel — search, click through to site, browse, add to cart, checkout — collapses into: ask a question, receive an AI recommendation, buy. One conversation. No product page visit.

For the user, this is frictionless. For the brand that gets recommended, it's a direct conversion. For the brand that doesn't get recommended — the one AI Mode never mentions — that purchase happened without them ever appearing in the buyer's journey. Not even as an option.

India doesn't have AI Mode commerce yet. But the trajectory is unmistakable. Google launched AI Mode in India in early 2026. The language expansion includes Hindi. Commerce integration in India is a matter of when, not if.

The brands that are visible in Google AI Mode when commerce arrives will capture purchases. The brands that aren't will watch their category competitors grow through a channel they never even saw coming.

The citation redesign nobody noticed

Google quietly redesigned how citations appear in AI Mode — and this matters more than it sounds.

Sources now get more prominent visual treatment: favicons, clearer attribution, hover pop-up link cards on desktop, and more visible link icons on mobile. Early signals suggest pages cited in AI Mode are seeing increased branded search activity — even when users don't click through directly.

This is the "zero-click but not zero-impact" dynamic. A user sees your brand recommended by Google's AI. They don't click the citation link. Instead, they Google your brand name directly — or search for "[Your Brand] reviews" — driven by the trust signal of appearing in an AI answer.

Most Indian brands aren't connecting the dots between AI Mode presence and branded search volume. They see branded search going up and attribute it to brand campaigns or organic growth. They don't realise the AI recommendation drove the search.

If you're measuring AI visibility in isolation from branded search trends, you're missing half the picture.

What this means for Indian D2C specifically

India is, by most estimates, Google's largest search market outside the US. When Google expands AI features, the India impact is second only to the US. The Cited Index already shows how unevenly Indian brands perform across AI platforms — and Google AI Mode adds another surface where that gap compounds. Here's why March 2026 matters specifically for Indian brands:

50+ languages changes the game for regional D2C. AI Mode's language expansion means Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and Bengali queries now get the full AI Mode treatment. A user in Chennai asking "best face wash for oily skin" in Tamil gets an AI-powered answer with brand recommendations.

Regional language D2C brands have a rare first-mover window. Most competitors haven't optimised for AI visibility in any language — let alone regional ones. The brand that builds AI-citable content in Hindi and regional languages now will have a structural advantage when AI Mode commerce reaches India.

14% of shopping queries is just the beginning. Google expanded AI Overviews from 2.1% to 14% of shopping queries in five months. At this rate, a majority of product discovery queries on Google will include an AI answer by late 2026. Every month you delay building AI visibility, the percentage of your potential customers discovering brands through AI — not organic links — grows.

Your Google organic ranking and your AI visibility are increasingly different metrics. We covered this dynamic when AI Overviews went conversational — and the March data makes it starker. Only 38% of AI Overview citations come from top-10 organic results. You can rank #1 for your category keyword and still be absent from the AI Overview above it.

Five things to do before AI Mode commerce hits India

1. Search your category in AI Mode today.

You can access AI Mode through Google Search in India. Run your top 10 category queries. See what brands AI Mode recommends. If you're not there, your competitors might be — and when commerce integration arrives, those competitors will capture purchases inside the conversation.

2. Optimise product pages for AI readability.

AI Mode pulls from the same content signals as AI Overviews — structured data, clear benefit statements, specific claims. The product page optimisation principles we outlined for ChatGPT apply to Google's AI surfaces too. Product schema, FAQ schema, price-value tables, ingredient breakdowns — these aren't SEO housekeeping. They're direct inputs to whether AI Mode recommends your brand.

3. Build content for the follow-up conversation.

AI Mode is conversational. A user who sees your brand in an AI Overview will ask follow-up questions: "How does it compare to [competitor]?" "Is it worth the price?" "What do reviews say?" If your content doesn't answer these follow-ups in a way Gemini can cite, you appear in the opening answer and vanish in the conversation that drives the purchase.

Comparison content, detailed reviews, specific use-case pages — these are the pages that sustain AI Mode visibility across a multi-turn conversation.

4. Build off-site signals that AI Mode trusts.

AI Mode doesn't just cite brand websites. It cites LinkedIn articles, review sites, expert content, and forum discussions. The brands with the strongest AI Mode presence are the ones with a web of credible third-party content supporting their claims.

5. Start tracking AI visibility as a separate channel.

Your SEO dashboard doesn't show AI Mode presence. Google Analytics doesn't neatly separate AI-referred traffic from organic traffic. Start with a GEO Score scan to check your website's AI-readiness in 30 seconds. For deeper tracking, you need GEO-specific measurement — what AI says about your brand, which queries trigger your brand in AI answers, and how that presence correlates with branded search and conversion.

This isn't coming. It's here.

Google AI Mode has 75 million daily users and a buy button. AI Overviews appear in one out of seven shopping queries. Voice and camera AI search just went global.

The brands that treat this as a future trend will discover — too late — that their competitors were building AI visibility while they were optimising for a version of Google that no longer exists.

The discovery-to-purchase funnel just compressed into a single AI conversation. The only question is whether your brand is part of that conversation — or invisible inside it.

Google AI Mode is a shopping channel now. Is your brand visible when 75M daily users search your category? Get a free GEO Report Card — 20 queries, 3 AI platforms, delivered within 24 hours.