Gmail Now Uses Artificial Intelligence to Sort “more Relevant” Results, but You Can Turn It Off
You may not have thought about it, but you’re probably already used to how Gmail’s search feature works. You enter your query, wait a moment, then browse the results to find the email you’re looking for. These results are always arranged in chronological order, with the most recent results appearing at the top. After years of searching this way, you probably subconsciously expect this order, scrolling back in time to find the result you have in mind.
I imagine the next time you search for something in Gmail it will be a little confusing and the results aren’t sorted by recency. This comes as Google is changing the way it delivers Gmail results to users: Google announced in a blog post on Thursday that the company is rolling out a new AI-powered search feature for Gmail on both mobile devices and the web. (It’s 2025: the new feature is powered by artificial intelligence, of course .) The idea is to use artificial intelligence to return more relevant search results, rather than showing results in chronological order.
The AI still takes relevance into account when returning results, but also takes into account the emails you clicked most often, as well as the contacts you communicate with frequently. In theory, the changes should be useful: In an ideal world, the email you want to see would appear at the very top of the list every time you search, so the closer Gmail can find the specific emails you want, the better.
Of course, with every new change comes friction. Searching requires muscle memory: You’re used to seeing your emails arrive in chronological order, so it can be a little frustrating to miss one result only to find a more recent one pops up after it. There’s also “AI” in all this: will artificial intelligence help in finding relevant emails or will it hallucinate and turn this into another AI Reviews fiasco ?
Gmail’s new AI search could actually be useful
While I’m a skeptic about generative AI, I have to be honest: this change could actually be beneficial. In particular, I found that the new search worked well for requests for posts that were clearly not recent. For example, when searching for “graduation,” sorting by “Most Recent” returned a number of results from the last few days, and given that my last graduation was many years ago, it was completely unhelpful. In fact, I had to sift through an incredible amount of newsletters and promotions before I saw any personal emails—whether they were relevant to my search or not.
On the other hand, switching to the new “Most Relevant” option showed me mostly personal emails. They may not have always been about graduations, but instead included results containing variations of the word “graduation” (graduate, graduation, etc.), but aside from the odd promotional message or two, virtually all of the immediate results were direct messages from friends and family.
The same thing happened with the search for “booking”. The traditional sorting method produced a bunch of nonsense from hotel accounts, food blogs, restaurant newsletters, and even a few Samsung emails. (Apparently, I can reserve a $100 credit for a total savings of up to $1,100 when I pre-order a custom AI product. No thanks.)
While I’m glad I didn’t miss out on Samsung’s offer, the new AI-powered search returned personalized results that actually made sense to my query: The top result was a recent dinner reservation made through Google, respectively, and subsequent results included airline reservations and other restaurant reservations. Even the first hotel search result was related to my previous stay and not a newsletter.
How to disable the new AI search in Gmail
This doesn’t mean it will be for everyone. If you have a specific email you’re looking for, especially if it’s recent, I might see old ways of doing things that are better for you here.
Thankfully, Google hasn’t removed the ability to search by recency – it’s just made New Search the default search, which I can only imagine will cause some confusion.
It’s an easy change to miss, but once you know what to look for, you’ll be all set. Next time you search in Gmail, look just above the top search result, on the left. You’ll see “Most Relevant” with a small drop-down arrow next to it. Tap this menu, then in the Sort by pop-up window, select Latest.