Samsung’s Circle to Search feature, which was part of a larger batch of AI-related products introduced for the Galaxy S24 family, is fast not exclusive to the Korean company. A day after the S24 announcement, Google suddenly unveiled the same feature for its Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.
Google’s Circle to Search was then said to launch on January 31, and indeed it did. According to multiple reports on Reddit, it is now available on both Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. It’s not coming through a firmware update, however, it seems to be a server-side switch so it just ‘magically’ appears.
If you have one of Google’s latest smartphones, note that you won’t get any indication that Circle to Search is live. Just try using it and it should work – that is, assuming it’s not one of Google’s trademark staged rollouts.
Circle to Search works anywhere on your phone. You need to long press the navigation bar to activate it and then you can start circling and highlighting items on the screen. It’s much faster and easier to use than Google Lens – but it uses the same backend as Lens, which supports multimodal search queries so you can use both text and images.
