Closing the gap between search engines & generative AI queries is at the heart of all the new products Google unveiled at its I/O meet last week. The shift to AI-helped answers could change the way users interact with the web & impact websites dependent on search traffic, explains Banasree Purkayastha
Embedding AI in every product
Google’s annual I/O developer conference last week laid down the blueprint for the search engine giant. As expected, the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI), with CEO Sundar Pichai mentioning AI 92 times in his keynote speech. Google products including Search, Chrome, and its Gemini app, will soon come embedded with agentic AI capabilities, that will help users find more personalised results and give it an edge as it attempts to outpace competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In a long stream of announcements, the search giant unveiled the new AI products it has been working on over the past few months, including an AI tool for filmmaking, an asynchronous AI coding agent, an AI-first 3D video communication platform, and more.
It introduced upgraded versions of existing AI models and tools such as Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro, Imagen 4, Veo 3, and Lyria 2, as well as new updates to AI Mode in Search, Deep Research, Canvas, Gmail, Google Meet, etc. “AI Mode is where we will bring our first frontier capabilities into Search,” Pichai said. Search gets more than 8.5 billion enquiries daily.
A smarter way to search
There are significant changes in Google Search, with end-to-end AI Mode in Search (released first in the US) allowing users to ingest long and complicated prompts directly. This appears in a new tab directly within Search. “Under the hood, AI Mode uses our query fan-out technique, breaking down your question into subtopics and issuing a multitude of queries simultaneously on your behalf. This enables Search to dive deeper into the web than a traditional search on Google, helping you discover even more of what the web has to offer and find incredible, hyper-relevant content that matches your question,” explained Liz Reid, VP, head of Google Search, calling AI Mode a glimpse of what is to come. “You can bring your hardest questions right to the search box.”
The aim: Make AI search results so good that people use Google more than ever.
End of internet search as we know it?
Well, instead of some text summarising search results and a page full of blue links, there could be AI-generated videos or podcasts, or even automatically generated charts and graphs. With AI making Google Search more helpful to users, there could be fewer reasons for people to go to the open web and search the old way. So what we get is a version of Search that is much more flexible and personalised, both to the user and to the query. And with Search Live, one can interact with the search engine by having a conversation with it, and by pointing our camera at whatever we are looking for. AI Mode can also now access our old search queries, and if we allow it to access our email (and eventually other Google apps such as Meet, Chat, Maps and Photos) to give the system more context about who we are, it could virtually read our mind to know and deliver what we are actually looking for.
What this could mean for website owners
For website owners that depend on Google to send them traffic, it could herald difficult times. Since the AI Mode would give the answers using content from those websites without sending the user to those sites, traditional SEO rules will no longer apply. So instead of asking what will please the algorithm, they will need to take a holistic approach to tackling content, communications and communities to earn AI’s endorsement. However, Nick Fox, who leads Google’s knowledge and information units, says the rise of AI is not the end of the open web. In an interview to The Verge just a few days ahead of the I/O meet, Fox said, “The death of the web has been 25 years coming, and it’s not happening. The web is growing.” He says Google’s data shows that people do click the links in the AI Overviews, and can actually be more engaged in the sites they go to as they’re deliberately looking to go deeper on something.
Will Google’s search advertising revenue take a hit?
Google was the pioneer in developing the research behind the generative AI boom but in the last couple of years, startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic have started to challenge its monopoly over online queries. So, overhauling its search engine to add features that make it function like an AI chatbot will help it compete better, though the new products could impact its revenues — the brief, AI-generated answers are popular with users, but have reduced click rates on ads that Google relies on for much of its revenue, says the Financial Times. “As it pivots to AI, Google is moving further from its ad-supported free model,” it pointed out. Google’s standard “AI pro” subscription plan costs $25 a month.
Google made $50 billion in search advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2025, more than half the total $90 billion for Alphabet overall. How it plans to integrate advertising into the new AI search, browser and app-based agentic offerings remains to be seen.