AI mode in Google Search uses a 'fan out' strategy where a single question dispatches multiple concurrent web crawls (e.g., 72 searches for 'Costco membership cost'), prioritizing comprehensiveness over efficiency, creating both advantages (thorough answers to complex multi-step questions) and disadvantages (computational waste for simple queries).

factualpending

Speaker

Casey Newton

Evidence Quote

it does this thing called the fan out which u is is very funny to me. Like you ask it a question and it kind of dispatches like a bunch of different Google searches to like crawl a bunch of different web pages and like bring you back the answer and it actually tells you like how many searches it is doing and how many different websites it's doing.

Source

Google DeepMind C.E.O. Demis Hassabis on Living in an A.I. Future | EP 137Hard Fork
Created: 8/11/2026, 7:14:45 AM

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