Google just gave Search something it’s never really had: memory. The new Canvas feature in AI Mode opens a live, sticky workspace alongside your results, letting you pin ideas, reorganize them, and keep refining across sessions—no extra docs, no endless self-emails.
Key Points
- Canvas lives in a collapsible side panel that saves your work across searches
- Built for planning: think semester study schedules, itineraries, or DIY checklists
- Rolls out “in the coming weeks” to U.S. desktop users enrolled in Search Labs
- Part of a broader AI Mode push that pits Google against Microsoft’s new Copilot browser mode
Ask for a two-week biology cram plan, hit “Create Canvas,” and AI Mode now lays out a draft timeline in a docked panel beside your results. From there you can drag in follow-up answers—say, flash-card prompts or YouTube explainers—and nudge the plan around in real time. Close the tab, come back tomorrow, and Canvas is waiting with every tweak intact. Google says the panel will also ingest PDFs, images, and eventually files from Drive, so that syllabus or hotel reservation can shape the next AI pass automatically.
If the feature feels familiar, that’s because it is: Google introduced a nearly identical Canvas sandbox inside its Gemini chatbot back in March, pitching it as a playground for long documents and code prototypes. Bringing the concept to Search ups the stakes—Search is still Google’s front door, and AI Mode already reaches nearly every query you type or paste.
Canvas also arrives as AI Mode itself leaves the “tiny toggle in Labs” phase. Google started rolling the mode out to all U.S. users in May, touting its Gemini-powered Deep Search tricks and a more citation-heavy approach than last year’s AI Overviews. The new side panel makes that promise more concrete: instead of a one-off paragraph, you get an evolving document that can survive dozens of follow-ups.
Of course, Google isn’t the only one gluing a planning board to your browser. Just yesterday, Microsoft flipped the switch on Copilot Mode in Edge, an AI agent that can see every tab and even book dinner if you hand over your credentials. The race now is less about who can spit out a clever paragraph and more about who can organize your day without forcing you to switch apps.
For Google, that means folding AI deeper into familiar surfaces. Canvas isn’t a new app—it’s a gesture that says the search box can be the starting point and the workspace at once. If it works, the next time you’re staring down a group project, you might skip that blank Google Doc entirely and just start talking to Search.