Google Search no longer returns a list of links and waits. At I/O 2026, Google announced the most fundamental redesign of its search product in 25 years. Search now dispatches AI agents, builds custom apps from plain-language commands, and renders interactive visuals directly in results.
“We’re entering the era of search agents now,” Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, told the I/O audience on Tuesday. The new experience rolls out this week, free of charge.
The Search Box Now Takes Anything You Throw at It
The first visible change is the search box itself. The box now takes images, files, video, and live browser tabs, anything not just typed queries. Query suggestions now go beyond autocomplete: the system helps you shape questions you do not know how to phrase yet.
Longer, conversational queries fit directly in the box. No mode-switching, no deciding upfront how you want to search.
AI Overviews, already used by 2.5 billion monthly users, now allow follow-up questions that drop you directly into AI mode. AI Mode has crossed 1 billion monthly users since launching last year, with query volume more than doubling every quarter. For context: ChatGPT has 900 million weekly active users. Google has more unique monthly users touching AI features. ChatGPT has more frequent individual engagement.
READ: Gmail Live Finds Anything in Your Inbox by Voice
Information Agents Are Google Alerts for the AI Era
The bigger structural change is information agents’ background AI processes that monitor the web and report back when something you care about changes.
Google launched Google Alerts in 2003 to email users when new results matched their search terms. Agents are that idea rebuilt with actual intelligence. The difference: agents do not just flag changes; they analyse what those changes mean.
Reid gave the example of a sector-monitoring agent: it builds its own tracking plan, pulls from real-time finance data, and delivers a synthesised briefing when the conditions you set are triggered. Users can build and manage multiple agents within Search starting this summer.
That shift has a direct consequence. Web browsing, a human clicking links to find information, will increasingly become something AI does on your behalf. The human role moves downstream to acting on what agents surface rather than hunting for it manually.
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Mini Apps Built by Search, On Demand
Google is also introducing generative UI Search, building custom interactive experiences in response to specific questions. A query about black holes could produce an interactive visual. A fitness goal could produce a personalised tracker.
These mini apps are stateful; they persist, so you can return and ask follow-up questions over time. No code required. You describe what you want, and Search builds it.
Mini apps and information agents roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer. The new search box and generative UI are free and arriving now.
READ: ChatGPT Now Sees Your Bank Account. Should You Let It?
What This Costs Publishers
Google’s own data makes the consequence plain. AI Overviews already cut click-throughs to publisher websites, and that was the opening act. Every new feature announced at I/O further shrinks the surface where a user might click a link to an external site. AI-overviewed media operations that survived now face a harder round.
Sundar Pichai told reporters ahead of I/O that Google’s long-term goal is to make frontier AI broadly accessible and low-cost. Good for users. A compounding problem for anyone whose business depends on Google sending them traffic.
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