Google adds Gemini 3.8 Flash to AI Mode, its third Flash model in six weeks

Google has added a new artificial-intelligence model, Gemini 3.8 Flash, to AI Mode in its search engine. Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal reported the change on 2 September 2026. AI Mode is the part of Google Search that answers a question with a written summary instead of a plain list of links.

Robby Stein, who leads product for Google Search, said the model reached people the same day. Anyone who pays for Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra can now pick 3.8 Flash from a menu behind the “+” button in the AI Mode search box, and the option reaches these subscribers around the world. People on the free version of Search cannot choose a model, so they get whatever Google sets as the default.

Gemini 3.8 Flash is the third Flash model in six weeks

Flash is the smaller, faster version of Gemini, built to answer quickly and at low cost. The previous one, Gemini 3.7 Flash, arrived on 14 August, only three weeks earlier, and it has already dropped out of the model menu. That pace shows how often Google now changes the engine behind its search answers. The company is under pressure to keep up in AI, and the EU recently began to treat ChatGPT as a very large search engine.

Search Engine Roundtable says 3.8 Flash links out less

Early testers see a possible downside for websites. Search Engine Roundtable wrote that the new model seems to cite and link to source pages less often than earlier versions. If that holds, a reader who gets an AI Mode answer may click through to the original site less often. That matters for publishers and shops that depend on visits from Google, and it is one reason the company built AI Overviews reporting in Search Console. Nothing is settled yet, and this behaviour can change again with the next model.

Log the model name before you trust an AI search test

The quick swaps also make testing harder. Search Engine Journal warns that any check run on 3.7 Flash in the past three weeks used a model that is no longer the default. So a change in how often a brand shows up in AI answers may come from the new model, not from the pages a brand publishes. Marketers who track their visibility in AI search should write down which model they tested and repeat the check after each release. The stakes rise as AI answers carry more advertising, with ChatGPT ads now at a $1 billion yearly run rate.