Google is fundamentally reshaping its iconic search engine for the AI era, rolling out a new intelligent search box and a suite of at least seven agent-driven features powered by its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model, a direct challenge to AI-native competitors like OpenAI.
"The goal of Search has always been simple: to help you ask anything on your mind," said Liz Reid, vice president and head of Search at Google. She added that Search is now "designed not just to answer, but to research, shop, book, monitor, and create on your behalf."
The overhaul, described as the biggest upgrade in 25 years, replaces the keyword-based box with a conversational interface that accepts text, images, and video. The new AI Mode, now the default for over one billion monthly users, runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash. New "information agents" will monitor topics in the background, a feature first available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.
This agent-led strategy aims to solidify Google's dominance as users shift to conversational AI, creating new revenue streams through premium subscriptions to offset potential disruption to its core ad business. The move puts pressure on publishers already seeing traffic decline from AI summaries and directly competes with the agent-focused roadmaps of rivals like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The End of "Ten Blue Links"
The centerpiece of the new experience is an "intelligent AI-powered Search box" built for conversational, multimodal questions. Instead of users compressing complex thoughts into keywords, the new box is designed to understand longer, more natural queries. This change, rolling out globally, marks a definitive shift away from the ranked list of links that has defined Google for a quarter-century.
Powering this is Gemini 3.5 Flash, which Google describes as its "strongest agentic and coding model yet." The model is designed for complex, multistep workflows, enabling Search to function less like a directory and more like a personal assistant.
A Suite of AI Agents
Google is introducing several agentic capabilities that will perform tasks on behalf of the user:
- Information Agents: Users can delegate research tasks to these agents, which will continuously scan the web for updates on topics like apartment listings or market movements and provide synthesized updates. This feature will debut for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.
- Agentic Booking and Shopping: Search will help book local services and appointments, in some cases by having the AI call businesses directly. A "Universal Cart" will track products across Google's services, watch for price drops, and even flag incompatibilities when building a custom PC. These features are set to roll out in the US this summer.
- Agentic Coding: Leveraging its Antigravity platform, Google will allow users to create small, custom applications and generative user interfaces directly within Search, from astrophysics visualizations to wedding-planning dashboards. These capabilities will become available to all users this summer, with advanced features for subscribers.
The integration of "Personal Intelligence" will allow users to opt-in to let Search draw on their private data from Gmail, Calendar, and Photos for more personalized results. This feature is expanding to nearly 200 countries.
The aggressive push into agent-based search signals Google's multi-billion dollar effort to redefine its core product and defend its turf in the age of generative AI. While it offers users a more powerful and personalized tool, it also intensifies the data privacy trade-off and further threatens the referral traffic that online publishers have long relied on.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
