“Users are still visiting the website, and it still counts as a pageview. If you click a link in AI Mode today, it opens in a new tab in Chrome. With this feature, the webpage opens in the same tab. We built this to make it easier for people to dive deeper into the web, so they can view the page while keeping the context.”

— Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search

That said, the broader dynamic remains unchanged: Google is embedding the webpage into the chat experience instead of sending users fully to the publisher’s site, where they would explore it on the publisher’s own terms.

Google is integrating AI Mode more deeply into Chrome. Webpages will now open directly beside the AI response, and follow-up questions can continue in the same window. As a result, the traditional website visit becomes less central, while Google Search moves closer to functioning like a chatbot.

According to Google’s blog post, clicking a link in AI Mode on Chrome desktop will open the target page directly next to the search interface. Users no longer leave the search conversation. Instead, the webpage appears as a side-by-side context panel.

Technically, Chrome still loads the page. In practice, however, user engagement with the content happens inside the chat environment. When a user asks a follow-up question, AI Mode combines information from the opened page with additional web sources and returns a synthesized answer. In this setup, the webpage increasingly serves as source material for the AI response rather than as the main destination.

Google illustrates this with two examples. In one, a shopper opens a retailer’s coffee machine product page beside AI Mode and asks, “How easy is this machine to clean?” The AI then answers by using both the page itself and the broader web context.

In the second example, a page about McLaren’s pit crew training is shown on the right, while AI Mode answers follow-up questions about its content on the left.

According to Stein and Torres, early testers appreciated “not having to constantly switch tabs” while working with long articles or videos. For publishers, however, the implication is different: the page becomes raw input for an answer that may bypass the original text. Scrolling, clicking deeper into the site, and seeing ads or other on-page elements all become less likely.
Multiple tabs become shared input for one AI answer

Google is also adding a new plus menu on Chrome’s New Tab page and in AI Mode, allowing users to include already open tabs in a search, on both desktop and mobile. Tabs, images, and files such as PDFs can be combined and passed together as context to AI Mode.

Google suggests use cases such as researching family-friendly hiking routes based on already open travel pages, or preparing for exams using lecture slides, notes, and academic papers. The AI uses all of this material to generate a tailored answer and may recommend additional pages. In effect, multiple web sources are bundled into supporting inputs for a single Google-generated output.

Several studies have already found that AI-generated answers can significantly reduce traffic to external websites. Google Search chief Liz Reid has disputed those findings and argued that the studies are flawed. However, Google has not provided a compelling counterexample, and the newly announced in-context webpage feature is another step toward absorbing the open web into Google’s AI ecosystem. Google frames these changes entirely as a convenience benefit for users.

According to Google, the new features are initially available only in the United States. An expansion to other countries has been announced, but no timeline has been provided.