Meta Launches AI Mode Search in Facebook for Posts, Groups, and Reels

Meta announced the launch of a new AI Mode feature in Facebook — an artificial intelligence-powered search mode that generates answers by analyzing open user posts, including records from groups and short Reels videos.

How AI Mode works in Facebook

Instead of the familiar output of links and posts by keywords, AI Mode analyzes the content of open publications on the platform and compiles a coherent answer to a user's query from them. The sources are not just personal posts, but also community materials (groups) and Reels feed — formats that were previously indexed and found far less readily than regular feed.

• The function is called AI Mode and launches within Facebook search
• Answer sources are open posts, group publications and Reels videos
• The goal of the update is to change the principles of information search and content interaction on the platform
• The developer of the function is Meta

Why Meta is changing search in Facebook

Facebook is one of the few major social networks where full-featured search for content has long been a weakness: users more often searched through third-party search engines or couldn't find relevant posts and discussions in groups at all. The implementation of generative AI in search should solve this problem — instead of browsing links, the user immediately gets a formulated answer compiled from scattered publications.

This is part of Meta's broader strategy to integrate its own Meta AI assistant, built on Llama model family, into all its products — from Facebook and Instagram to WhatsApp and Ray-Ban Meta glasses. Similar AI content search features are already being tested by other major players: Google is embedding AI Mode and AI Overviews in search results, and OpenAI and Perplexity are developing their own search products based on large language models.

What problem Meta solves

Groups remain one of the most active yet least "searchable" parts of Facebook: millions of discussions, advice and recommendations within closed and open communities were practically not indexed by regular search and were lost in the flow of new posts. The same applies to Reels — short videos are poorly suited to text search by description. AI Mode should learn to "read" content in these formats and turn scattered mentions into a specific answer — for example, compile product recommendations or community opinions from dozens of posts in different groups into a single coherent text.

Facebook has previously tried to improve search: the platform offered basic full-text search by posts of friends and public pages for many years, but in quality and usability it noticeably lagged specialized search engines and couldn't handle tasks like "what do people think about X" or "what recommendations were given in this group". The transition to generative AI Mode is an attempt to close this gap, using the same principle already applied by Google and Perplexity: don't output a list of links, but immediately formulate a substantive answer.

What this means

Generative search is gradually becoming a standard element of major platforms — not only in separate search engines, but within social networks themselves, where users previously had to make do with chronological feed or simple keyword matching. For Facebook, this is an attempt to return user interest to search in groups and communities, which have long remained the least visible part of the platform.