I tried YouTube’s new Gemini search and it finds videos in a way I didn’t expect

This past May at the Google I/O conference, Google unveiled a new search function for YouTube: “Ask YouTube” will incorporate the Gemini AI assistant to, in the words of CEO Sundar Pichai, make “information much more digestible and easy to navigate.”

If you ask a question using Google’s ordinary search function, it will present you with a series of videos that purport to answer it. If you use “Ask YouTube,” you’ll get textual explanations alongside groupings of YouTube videos and shorts. And if you click into those videos, they’ll start at the point when the video is answering your question.

The “Ask YouTube” feature is currently only available to YouTube Premium subscribers, perhaps making it look like a more attractive deal. The feature will roll out to non-paying users late this year. In the meantime, I tested the “Ask YouTube” feature to see if it’s as useful as Pichai hopes it is.

Ask YouTube is pretty useful if you have a specific question

With some caveats

People go to YouTube for different things. First, let’s try using the “Ask YouTube” feature to look for something specific. I do some video editing, so I decided to ask something in that area: “How do you quickly remove background noise from a video you’re editing in Premiere Pro?” I queried.

When I asked that in a normal YouTube search, I got a list of videos that corresponded to my question, as you’d expect. For “Ask YouTube,” I got many of the same videos, except now they were grouped into categories like “Step-by-Step Noise Reduction Methods” and “Advanced Cleanup and Finishing Touches.” Each video comes with a little description under it, whereas with a normal search you’re just presented with the video title and the thumbnail image.

Finally, when you click into a video on the “Ask YouTube” results page, it will start playing from the moment it thinks will be most responsive to your question. Immediately, I ran into some issues with this. The “Ask YouTube” results prominently recommended me a video called “How to make VOICE sound STUDIO QUALITY and REMOVE BACKGROUND NOISE in Premiere Pro,” which you can watch above if you’re interested. When I clicked it, the video started about a minute in, telling me to click a button within Premiere Pro. The problem is that it 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 back. At least in this case, “Ask YouTube” skipped over some information I wanted to know.

“Ask YouTube” also lets you ask follow-up questions to further refine results. I tested that feature by asking, “Recommend fixes that don’t involve AI tools,” since the main video it recommended before made use of an AI feature within Premiere Pro; I wanted to see if YouTube could effectively filter that one out. It could. Ask YouTube came back with a lot of the same results from the first query, minus the one that recommended using the AI function.

Ask YouTube is less useful if you just want to be entertained

Where is my eternal scroll of cute cat videos?

So that’s what happens when you “Ask YouTube” for specific information. But what if you just want to kill a few minutes? To test this, I entered the words “cute cat videos” and waited to see what came up.

And I do mean “waited.” Whereas a traditional search immediately provided me with a long list of videos of cats being adorable, it took “Ask YouTube” several seconds to populate anything, probably because it was busy grouping them into categories like “Tiny Rainbow Kittens” and “Kitten Playtime.” In this case, when I just want to get a hit of dopamine that only adorable cats can provide, I think the traditional search is better, because it’s faster. I don’t really need these sorts of videos to be carefully sorted. I just want to click on the one that looks most appealing and get to watching.

Also, “Ask YouTube” only populates a single page of results, whereas in traditional search you can keep scrolling forever and never run out of new suggestions. You can see more results from “Ask YouTube” if you ask a follow-up question, which might be useful in some circumstances, but not when I’m looking for something this simple; I’d prefer to just keep scrolling until I see something that catches my eye.

Ask YouTube Pros and Cons

A little bit of everything

Credit: YouTube

The “Ask YouTube” function could get some makeovers between now and whenever Google decides to roll it out to the masses. At the moment, it works better for some things than for others, but you can also easily toggle back between the two search methods, so there’s no pressure to use it for everything.

Or at least, not yet. Google has been aggressive in overhauling its signature search function to make more use of AI, and it’s easy to imagine them doing the same with YouTube over time. Sooner or later, the people making content will have to rethink how they do things to be more responsive to how people search. In the 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 for everyone?

Google hasn’t given a firm date for when the “Ask YouTube” function will be available for everyone, except that it’s coming sometime in 2026. At first, it will only be accessible to users in the United States.