Back in August, Google announced that personalization would enter the fray for those who opted into the AI Mode experiment in Labs. Google said, “ AI Mode can use your previous conversations, along with places you’ve searched for or tapped on in Search and Maps to deliver more relevant options, personalized to you. So if AI Mode infers that you have a preference for Italian food, plant-based meals, and places that have outdoor seating, you may get results suggesting options like these.”
I caught this happening for a topic I was researching about a month ago. I had engaged in a cluster of searches, clicks, etc., for a specific brand. When I ran a query related to that brand’s vertical, Google’s AI Mode indicated “personalized” results. This basically put the brand I was interacting with at the top of the output. Which is significant.
Note, I did not opt in to have any of my properties, such as Gmail or Google Photos, connected. This level of personalization is based on my user behavior.
For privacy issues, I could not document that case.
That said, I did stumble on a new example of Google looking for personalized info in AI Mode. This time, I was able to document it. I have not seen many examples of this shared across the web, which is why I am sharing this with you now.
When I searched for “best quarterback ever,” I noticed Google indicated “Checking for personalized info” while processing its output.
It happened to give me this result, asking for better feedback, which makes sense given the personalization factor. (This feature is not new.)
I ran a follow-up with the query “best baseball team,” and again I saw the parsing for personalization show up.
This time, I got a typical-looking output that at the bottom indicated “Try without personalization”.
So I tried without personalization. It was basically the same thing.
The top paragraph was all but the same. I then got a list of “rankings” of each team, just one in paragraph form and the other in a table. There was some additional context in the personalized result around historical information, but that was about it.
[By the way, between Glenn Gabe writing and me, you’re going to get a lot of baseball examples.]
Note, in the example I could not show, AI Mode did place the brand it knew I was interested in at the top of the results, noting my personal history.
Again, this is not “new” per se - I just haven’t seen it documented extensively and thought it was interesting.
Are you seeing this show up in your AI Mode results?
Forum discussion somewhere.
