Google AI Mode can act inside your apps now
Google's AI Mode in Search can now link to Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music and take actions in them, not just answer questions about them.
Google started rolling out “connected apps” inside AI Mode in Search on July 16, letting US users in English securely link Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music and have AI Mode take actions in them directly from a search conversation. Once connected, AI Mode can add ingredients to an Instacart cart, pull up Canva design templates for a request like party flyers, or build and save a YouTube Music playlist, all without the user leaving the search results page.
The feature is limited to AI Mode in the US for now, and Google says it is working with more partners to add further connected apps. The announcement, from Search product manager Chips Mistry and engineering lead Biharck Araújo, frames it as evolving Search from answering questions to completing tasks.
What it means for operators
This is Google shipping, at consumer scale, the same “connect a tool, let the model call it” pattern operators have been building with MCP servers over the past year, just wrapped in Search’s UI instead of an agent client. If your product depends on discovery traffic from Google, connected apps is a new integration surface worth tracking: being one of the apps AI Mode can act inside is a different kind of distribution than ranking in results. It sits alongside other agentic-commerce moves like Amazon Quick’s agentic sales teammate and Smartsheet’s remote MCP server on AWS, part of a broader shift toward AI systems that act inside third-party tools rather than just describing them.