Google hosted their annual developer conference, Google I/O, last week. As expected, the event featured a wide range of product launches and announcements. Interestingly, CEO Sundar Pichai noted that while Google typically saves major product releases for I/O, this year they felt compelled to unveil some products ahead of the event—they simply couldn’t wait to share them.
This was a marked change for Google. They clearly are feeling the pressure from competitors like OpenAI and shareholders who are demanding they move faster with AI.
What this means for us is that most of the announcements weren’t new. They were mostly updates to, or full-scale release of previously known products. For example, we had been testing their flagship release, AI Mode, in beta for months. However, there were some new upcoming releases they plan for the summer, like agentic search.
Although many of the announcements were expected, the releases mark a pivotal moment in how people will use search and how brands should approach their strategy.
“Beyond Search to Intelligence”
Google positioned its future as “beyond search to intelligence” signifying that they want to minimize the steps required by a user to reach a conclusion. They want users to get intelligence without having to do the work of searching. This is key to understanding where Google is heading. Even though they are not there yet, this is a marked change from “organizing the worlds information and making it universally accessible and useful” which has been their long-standing mission.
If you read between the lines, their longstanding mission requires people to actively search for and use the information (search results or generative AI results). The statement at I/O, and their agentic previews, indicate a world in the future where Google does the searching for you via agents, and connects you to the end result in as few steps as possible.
How do you optimize for a world in which agents are doing more of the searches on behalf of people? That’s a key question for the future of search.
Ultimately, though Google has firmly established its plan to fully integrate AI into search, that is not the current state. Right now, we’re only seeing 15% – 25% of our client’s target search results (depending on their industry) including an AI Overview. Additionally, AI Overviews are mostly showing for research and informational style queries and much less for navigational and transactional queries. However, this is highly likely to continue moving towards 100% over time, especially if and when, AI Mode becomes the primary interface.
A New Interface: AI Mode (Available Now)
Google released AI Mode, their chat style interface, live to all users in the United States. This is something that our team has been testing in a beta environment for months, so while it’s not new to us, it’s new to most users and will have a profound impact on search behavior.
Google has given AI Mode prominent positioning as a static main navigation link in the top left position of search results.
AI Mode
AI Mode is different from an AI Overview which is the generative AI module that is integrated directly into the traditional “All” search results tab:
AI Overview
For now, AI Overviews are the most impactful given their direct integration into core search results. However, we expect this to change over time with AI Mode increasing in prominence and replacing core search results.
The good news is that while generative AI formats are taking over search, traditional search functionality is also migrating to generative AI results. For example, ChatGPT just released shopping carousels and a shopping feed, and most platforms are integrating more links and citations into generative AI responses.
Search will Become Truly Multi-modal
Google continues to push towards search functionality that includes all types of inputs beyond just text, including searching with images and video. You can imagine a world where you “facetime” with Google and show it a problem you’re trying to solve (think about a math homework problem for your child, or a gardening challenge you’re facing) and it provides you with a voice solution, no text involved!
Personal Context: Personalization at Scale (Coming Soon, Maybe This Summer)
Google announced a lot of upcoming integrations across their ecosystem, including Gmail, where they will use the data from emails in your inbox to personalize AI responses for you. For example, if it knows you always make reservations at Italian restaurants, it may prioritize Italian restaurants when you ask for a recommendation on your next vacation.
This personal context, especially when added to the more complex questions that people are asking in generative AI platforms, will dramatically increase the personalization of search. Searches are moving from short keywords to personal conversations and this will have big implications for optimization and measurement strategies.
An Agentic Future: Do the Research for Me (Coming Soon, Maybe This Summer)
Google unveiled plans to add agentic capabilities to search starting with event tickets, local service appointments, and restaurant reservations. Rather than searching for the cheapest tickets to your favorite sports team, Google will search for you, find the best option available, add it to a cart, and provide you with a link to purchase.
An agentic future brings about the need for your website to be accessible and navigable to agents, in addition to ensuring the LLM (large language model) knows enough about you for the topics that matter to choose your website as the conversion point.
Other Announcements
- Query Fan-out: Google announced that one part of how their systems work is using a technique called query fan-out. This is when a user enters a long prompt that may include multiple sentences, and instead of Google “searching” for information about the entire paragraph, it breaks the paragraph into many (tens to hundreds) of new queries and then conducts searches for each of them, before stitching all of the information it found together, and producing the final response to the user.
For example, if you ask “what is the best crm software for ecommerce?” it may conduct searches for the queries below, and then stictch all the information it found across these multiple searches together into one response. Where a user might have done 10 searches before, they may only need to do 1.- crm software
- best crm software
- ecommerce crm software
- best ecommerce crm software
- and many more…
- Deep Search (Coming Soon, Maybe This Summer): This will be their equivalent to ChatGPT Deep Research, where you can have Google produce an in-depth research report based on your prompt. This is likely to be most impactful to higher cost purchases and B2B companies.
- AI Powered Shopping (Coming Soon, Maybe This Summer): There were several announcements of product releases for shopping. Google also tried to differentiate itself from OpenAI (who is now accepting applications for product feed integration) by promoting its shopping graph of 50 billion products and growing. The announcements from I/O included:
- Visual try-on powered by AI (upload your photo, see the product on you).
- Price tracking and alerts when the price of a product you like hits a certain level. Though this has been available in Chrome for some time, we’ll have to see how AI can further improve it.
- Visual shopping where you can search for products with a photo you took and identify products in photos other people have taken.These features have also been available for some time, but is likely to continue dramatically improving with the improvements in AI models.
Conclusion
Those announcements really are just the tip of the iceberg. There is significantly more coming, and as Google said this year, they probably aren’t going to wait until next year’s I/O to release other big changes. With all these dramatic shifts, it can be overwhelming to stay up-to-date on all the changes and then decide how you should act. If you need any help navigating these changes, we’re here to help! Just reach out to us at info@morevisibility.com.
