Google Search: so AI-powered it barely needs users

I/O started life as Google's annual developers conference. Excited nerds frolicked between tents for panels and workshops, only pausing to snag a waffle on a stick. It had a nice run for fifteen glorious years until an EDM DJ and a duck with lips announced its demise in a beat drop.

I/O was now a new, more profitable thing: an unstoppable AI hype storm. Quack.

We're now three years post the duckening and Capital G is leaning beyond passé genAI into a new hype. Google is ready for bigger and more agentic things! The company is aiming to bake agentic AI into the very core of its empire—Search, Gmail, YouTube, Docs, and Chrome are all getting the zombie-Clippy treatment.

Sure, you could watch the videos on YouTube, but where's the hollow-eyed they just blew up my roadmap. Again. joy in that? Let's dive into what Google's "hyper-progress" has in store for websites and the humans who love them.

Google Search: so AI-powered it barely needs users

Back in 2023, the announcement of Search Generative Experiences caused a tizzy. In 2024, the tizzy went kerfuffle with AI Overviews rolling into prod. Then it was AI Mode, which was more of a communal "I guess 🤷" response.

Friends, we bullied AI Mode and now it's here for revenge. The tizzy and kerfuffle barely prepared us for Google's inevitable realization: they no longer need to suffer the necessary evil of sending traffic to publishers.

If AI can provide everything the user wants, there's no need to send them away. The user keeps interacting and Google keeps loading those beautiful revenue-birthing ads. Google is already testing new ad formats in Search and expanding their Direct Offers pilot with Conversational Discovery ads and highlighted answers.

Everyone's happy.Everyone. Whether they like it or not.

It's not like you're actually going to use the (legally required) toggle to opt out of AI search features. They're giving you a performance report! A single filterable line chart with a single metric counts as a report, thank you very much. Think of the dozens of impressions you'll miss out on! Google knows you're concerned so they've already increased the number of inline links directly within responses. Beg your users to add you as a preferred source for search citations and you'll be right as rain!

(Moments like this let Bing's candor regarding the impact of LLMs and multi-metric marvel of an OG AI Performance report shine.)

Think of the users! AI Mode hit 1B monthly users in 12 months! Queries doubled every quarter! It's because they love it and not because sneaky UX changes flung it at them so everyone can be happy. And the search box. This new search box will open its maw wide to accommodate conversational queries and multimodal nom noms. Autocomplete is ready to go from annoying to invasive as it reaches deep into its expanded Personal Intelligence to anticipate user intent. This is all rolling out now everywhere AI Mode is live. Later this summer, this benevolent AI will build its own interactive layouts directly in the SERPs in real time Generative UI. Don't be sad, sweet SEO. A summer of gaffes, laughs and screenshots await us.

Julia Weissbach surmises Google's trajectory so succinctly: Google is transforming search into an agent.

"How serious Google is about this is reflected in the numbers behind the scenes. Sundar Pichai cited a capex of 180 to 190 billion dollars for this year, compared to 31 billion in 2022. The eighth generation of in-house TPUs delivers three times the computing power for training and handles nearly 1,500 tokens per second during inference. Token volume as another indicator: from 480 trillion tokens per month a year ago to 3.2 quadrillion today. That’s not iterative improvement that’s a different order of magnitude."

All of these changes are powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is now the default model for AI Mode and the Gemini app globally. It's faster, smarter on nearly every benchmark, and—in the Antigravity agent environment—a whopping twelve times faster for agentic workloads. Gemini 3.5 Pro slated for release next month.

Google also released Gemini Omni. Which appears to be their version of Sora. Yeah, the same AI video generator that OpenAI shut down after failed porn and Disney ventures. The feature was demoed onstage with a video of someone recording themselves walking through a metal sculpture. They then asked Omni to change the structure to look like it was made of bubbles. This feels like an oddly apt metaphor, even if I can't explain why.

A new shiny Gemini variant is Spark. This personal agent runs on dedicated VMs in Google Cloud and handles long-running tasks in the background and will connect to third-party tools via MCP in the coming weeks. The only ones not ecstatic about these Gemini upgrades seem to be Gemini users.

One of the most interesting features teased was information agents. They act as background processes in "AI Mode," actively monitoring dynamic changes on topics ranging from stock prices and sports to niche shopping drops. Forget slogging through a graveyard of blue links; these agents act as your personal researchers, dissecting data and pitting perspectives against each other to serve up snappy, synthesized updates the moment the world shifts. They're like Google alerts but behind a velvet AI Pro or Google Ultra subscription.

Remember kids, anxiety and excitement are nearly identical physiologically. It's okay if you run out of Gemini tokens. Don't let your human tokens get low. Stress if you want, but there's still going to be another I/O next year.