For many people, Google’s search box is the lobby of the internet. Simple and intuitive, it has shaped how people navigate online for nearly three decades and was the driving force behind the company’s meteoric rise.
Now, it is set to undergo a radical transformation to fully incorporate artificial intelligence.
The company announced on Tuesday that the search bar will be “completely reimagined with AI,” calling it the biggest change in more than 25 years.
The change has the potential to reshape how people use the Internet and access information, and could disrupt many industries that rely on search traffic to drive customers their way.
TechCrunch, a technology news site, covered the change with a story headlined: “Google Search as you know it is over.”
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While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.
Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.
This new model will help users formulate questions with suggestions that “go beyond autocomplete” and let users search not just using text, but by uploading images, files, videos or Chrome tabs as search inputs, the company said in a blog post announcing the change.
The new search could disrupt industries
Tech experts have suggested that the new changes could dramatically change how people use search and the Internet.
“It’s not hard to imagine a future where, someday, Google just makes everything happen in one universal search box,” tech reporter Jay Peters writes for tech site The Verge after Google’s announcement.
“Google doing everything also means a lot of the web that Google relies on collapses under it,” he continues. “Google may not care — it increasingly seems to just want a search bar that can do it all, no matter the cost.”
When Google first started implementing AI-assisted results, news publishers warned of “catastrophic” impacts on the industry, much of which relies on Google search to drive users to their websites.
Last year, news websites saw significant traffic declines as chatbots increasingly replaced Google search as the primary way to find sites and ask questions.
Small businesses also noted drops in traffic to their sites from Google, which has traditionally delivered customers.
Lily Ray, vice president of SEO strategy & research at Amsive, a digital marketing agency, warned as early as last year that Google’s planned changes to search are “going to have a devastating impact on the Internet.”
“It will severely cut into the main source of revenue for most publishers and it will disincentivize content creators who rely on organic search traffic, which is millions of websites, maybe more,” she told Technology Magazine.
Agents will work in the background
Other upgrades will completely change the search experience for users, including a new way to infuse AI into Google Search by asking for “information agents” to keep them updated on things like new apartment listings.
“You could send an alert to track market movements in a particular sector with very specific parameters, and the agent will map out a monitoring plan for you, including the tools and the data it needs to access — like our real-time finance data,” Google’s head of Search, Liz Reid, announced at Google I/O 2026, an annual developer conference. “It will then keep track of those changes and let you know when the conditions are met, and provide a synthesized update with links and information you can dive into further.”
Google also announced an AI agent, Gemini Spark, that can work on tasks in the background, even when the user closes their laptop or phone.
Google’s increasing use of AI in search demonstrates a shift in how searching the Internet will work—an action likely to be performed less and less by real humans, and more and more by AI agents instructed to search for them.
The shift has been profitable for Google
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said at the conference that the company’s AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly active users, and the Gemini app has grown to 900 million monthly active users—a testament to how the company has worked to catch up with competitors like Anthropic and OpenAI in the tech AI race.
Gemini now accounts for more than a quarter of generative AI traffic, according to Similarweb, up from 7% a year ago.
Google and its parent company, Alphabet Inc., have poured billions of dollars into AI development; by the end of the year, the company expects to spend about $180 billion to $190 billion on capital expenditures in 2026, with a focus on AI infrastructure and chips, according to Pichai.
In its last quarter, Google reported that its advertising revenue rose almost 16% year over year to $77 billion.
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