Google's AI Mode can now connect to your shopping and design apps
Instacart, Canva, and YouTube Music are the first apps you can link directly to Google's conversational search tool, letting it do tasks, not just answer questions.
Key points
- Google added third-party app support to AI Mode, its conversational search experience, announcing the feature on Thursday.
- At launch, three apps are supported: Instacart (grocery shopping), Canva (design templates), and YouTube Music (playlists).
- The rollout is limited to users in the United States, with more apps planned.
- Google's main rivals, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, both already offer similar app-linking features.
Google's AI Mode, the chat-style search tool built into Google Search, can now connect directly to a small set of everyday apps and take action inside them. It's a sharper shift than it sounds.
Before, you could ask AI Mode to suggest ingredients for a barbecue. Now, with your Instacart account linked, it adds those ingredients to your shopping cart. You open Instacart to check out; the AI handles the list.
Design app Canva works the same way. Ask AI Mode for flyer templates and it pulls a selection directly from Canva. For music, ask it to build a party playlist and it saves that playlist straight to YouTube Music.
This pushes AI Mode away from being a smarter search box and toward a tool that finishes tasks. ChatGPT and Claude have offered similar app connections for some time, and Google is narrowing that gap.
What does this mean for people who use Google Search every day?
Nothing changes unless you choose to connect an app. If you do, the main benefit is fewer steps between planning something and doing it: you stay inside Google Search rather than switching between tabs. The feature is opt-in, and Google says it doesn't share your app data beyond what's needed to carry out the specific task you've requested.
This isn't Google's first move in this direction. Earlier in 2025, at Google I/O, the company added similar connections to its separate Gemini app, covering Canva, Instacart, the restaurant-booking service OpenTable, and others. AI Mode is catching up to Gemini's own feature set.
We covered the privacy wrinkle that sits beneath this kind of integration on 15 July 2026, when a report on the MemGhost attack showed how a single email can plant false information inside an AI agent's memory without the user knowing. Linking real accounts to AI Mode raises the stakes of that vulnerability in a way Google hasn't addressed publicly yet.
AI Mode has added other capabilities recently. It can check local store inventory for a product you need, let you browse the web alongside a conversation without losing chat context, and, if you opt in, read your Gmail and Google Photos to personalise answers through a feature called Personal Intelligence.
More app partnerships are coming, Google says, without naming them or giving a timeline. As first reported by TechCrunch AI, the initial three partners are available now for US users.
