Google Search is no longer about searching

Users will receive AI-powered interactive experiences – whether they like it or not

Google has re-engineered its search engine to keep users inside its own ecosystem with AI-powered interactive experiences. If your task is to find and critically assess information on the open web, you're fresh out of luck.

Google has effectively driven a stake into the heart of Search.

Google’s familiar search box will now be replaced with what Google's Head of Search, Liz Reid, yesterday called an "Intelligent Search Box" powered by Google’s various Gemini AI models.

The changes were unveiled at the company's annual Google I/O developer conference in California yesterday and mark a decisive shift away from traditional search results toward a fully AI-driven experience.

Instead of returning a simple list of ranked links to websites, Google Search will present AI-powered interactive experiences, and give users more space to ask longer, more detailed queries and feature AI-powered suggestions.

Google’s ‘chatbotification’

The new search field runs on the company's Gemini 3.5 Flash model and has been designed to align with the expectations of users who have become used to typing more conversational queries into chatbots. Users can also search using images, documents, and files via an expanded input menu beneath the search box.

The new interface is already rolling out to users globally and will be free of charge.

There is also a paid option of AI "information agents" which is essentially an evolution of Google Alerts and will monitor topics on a user's behalf continuously without requiring repeated manual searches and provide updates accordingly.

Another paying feature will be custom "mini apps" - personalised dashboards for ongoing tasks like meal planning or fitness tracking

The changes follow Google's introduction of AI Overviews and AI Mode at last year's I/O, which Reid said has since surpassed one billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch.

RIP open web

As many angry social media posts suggest, this is effectively the end of the whole concept of searching the open web. Google has turned the whole Search model upside down by re-engineering its ecosystem to keep users inside it rather than sending them to other sites. Information agents and “mini apps” look custom built to remove the need for users to visit websites at all.

Google users will simply be interacting with chatbots instead and will be spoon-fed information in AI Summaries that may or may not be correct without ever having to visit the source of that information.

In addition to damaging the critical abilities of users, Google’s ongoing chatbotification piles on more bad news for web publishers. Even before Tuesday's announcements, Google's AI features had already taken a serious toll. Chartbeat data tracking more than 2,500 news sites globally showed that Google search referrals declined by 33% in 2025. Approximately 58% of Google searches end without any clicks to external sites – and that number is going to increase.

Publishers have spent decades building business models around Google sending them traffic. Yesterday's announcements broadcast the message loud and clear that Google is no longer interested in doing so.