By Reece Rogers
Publication Date: 2026-04-16 17:00:00
You’ll never have to worry about the dozens of tabs open on your desktop again. In fact, you’ll never even have to leave AI Mode, Google’s chatbot-style search tool, at all. That’s the idea behind Google Chrome’s latest update.
Starting today in the US, if you click a hyperlink in AI Mode on the desktop version of Chrome, the link opens right there—with Google’s search chatbot still present as a sidebar on the left side of the screen.
Previously, when you clicked on a hyperlink in one of Google Search’s AI Mode outputs, it opened a new browser tab in the same window. You clicking on that link effectively ended the search journey, and AI Mode stayed behind, right where it was, in the old tab. This update to AI Mode means that once you begin a search using that tool in Chrome, the search tool essentially becomes an always-on aspect of your user experience.
In an example interaction that Google shared, a user enters a long query into the AI Mode search bar. They are…
