YouTube’s new Gemini search finds videos in unexpected ways

At the Google I/O conference this May, Google announced new search features for YouTube. Ask YouTube includes the Gemini AI assistant, which, in the words of CEO Sundar Pichai, makes “information more understandable and easier to navigate.”

If you ask a question using Google’s regular search feature, you’ll be presented with a series of videos that purport to answer it. Ask YouTube shows you groups of YouTube videos and Shorts, plus text descriptions. When you click on one of these videos, the video starts at the point where your question is answered.

The “Ask YouTube” feature is currently only available to YouTube Premium subscribers, so it may seem like a more attractive deal. This feature will be rolled out to free users later this year. In the meantime, I tested the “Ask YouTube” feature to see if it’s as useful as Mr. Pichai hopes.

If you have a specific question, Ask YouTube is very useful

There are some things to keep in mind

People access YouTube for a variety of purposes. First, use the “Ask YouTube” feature to find something specific. I do video editing, so I decided to ask a question in that area. “How can I quickly remove background noise from a video I’m editing in Premiere Pro?” I asked.

I asked about it through a regular YouTube search, and as you might expect, a list of videos matching my question popped up. On “Ask YouTube,” I got many of the same videos, but they were grouped into categories like “Step-by-step noise reduction methods” and “Advanced cleanup and finishing touches.” There is a short description below each video, but a regular search will only show the video title and thumbnail image.

Finally, when you click on the video on the “Ask YouTube” results page, it will start playing from the moment it is most likely to respond to your question. I immediately ran into some issues with this. In the “Ask YouTube” results, the video “How to make VOICE sound STUDIO QUALITY and remove background noise in Premiere Pro” was prominently recommended. Please see above if you are interested. When I clicked on it, the video started after about a minute and prompted me to click a button within Premiere Pro. The problem is that they didn’t tell me where. To find that button; that information is in the first 60 seconds of the video, so I had to scan backwards. At least in this case, Ask YouTube skipped over some of the information I wanted.

Ask YouTube also allows you to ask follow-up questions to further narrow down your results. Since the main video that was previously recommended used AI features within Premiere Pro, we tested this feature by asking the question, “Recommend fixes that don’t use AI tools.” I wanted to see if YouTube could filter out such things effectively. It’s possible. Ask YouTube returned many of the same results as the first query, except for one that recommended using AI features.

If you just want to have fun, Ask YouTube isn’t that useful.

Where are my eternal scrolls of cute cat videos?

In other words, this is what happens when you “query YouTube” for certain information. But what if you just want to kill a few minutes? To test this, I typed in the words “cute cat video” and waited to see what came up.

And I mean “waited.” While traditional search quickly brought up a long list of adorable cat videos, Ask YouTube takes a few seconds to type anything. Probably because they were busy categorizing videos into categories like “Tiny Rainbow Kittens” and “Kitten Playtime.” In this case, if you just want to get that dopamine hit that only adorable cats can provide, I think traditional search is better because it’s faster. There is no need to carefully categorize this type of video. You just want to click and watch the one that looks the most appealing.

And while Ask YouTube only shows you one page of results, traditional search lets you keep scrolling forever, never running out of new suggestions. If you ask follow-up questions, you’ll see more results from Ask YouTube. This may be useful in some situations, but not if you’re looking for something this simple. I want to keep scrolling until I find something that catches my eye.

Ask about the pros and cons of YouTube

a little bit of everything

The Ask YouTube feature may undergo several changes between now and when Google decides to make it available to the public. Currently, some search methods work better than others, but you can easily switch between the two, so there’s no pressure to use it for every search method.

At least not yet. Google has been actively working on overhauling its signature search functionality to better utilize AI, and it’s easy to imagine YouTube doing the same before long. Sooner or later, people who create content will need to rethink the way they do things, to become more responsive to how people search. Meanwhile, Google is at least trying to make it harder for AI-generated content to fool people on YouTube.

When will Ask YouTube be available to everyone?

Google hasn’t given a firm date for when the Ask YouTube feature will be available to everyone, other than to say it will be available sometime in 2026. Initially, it will only be available to users in the United States.