Google has begun rolling out what it says is the biggest change to search in more than 25 years, rebuilding its core search box around its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model and putting AI-generated answers more central to the product than ever before.
The announcement came at Google I/O 2026, where CEO Sundar Pichai and the search team unveiled a redesigned search box that can take text, images, files, videos, and open Chrome tabs as input and search all of them at once, rather than returning a simple list of links. The full keynote is available on YouTube.
Gemini 3.5 takes over the search bar
AI Mode, Google’s conversational search experience, is now supported by default worldwide in Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google says the model can rival the performance of much larger flagship systems in coding and agent tasks, while running about four times faster in output speed than other top models – a combination that Google hopes will make AI-generated summaries feel faster than a traditional page load.
The change comes as AI Mode has reached 1 billion monthly active users about a year after launch, with query volume more than doubling every quarter. This scale has made the format Google’s fastest-growing search product in years, even as publishers and SEO experts continue to raise concerns about declining click-through rates to external sites as AI summaries answer more queries directly on the results page.
“Information agents” begin to work in the background
Beyond the redesigned search box, Google has introduced “information agents” – always-on AI processes that continuously monitor topics a user follows in blogs, news sites, social posts and real-time feeds such as finance, shopping and sports, then proactively display synthesized updates and can take limited actions on the user’s behalf.
The feature will initially roll out to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the US this summer, with a broader rollout expected to follow.
Google has paired the search updates with Gemini Omni, a new multimodal model that can generate videos from a range of inputs. This signals that the company sees search, generation and agent action increasingly merging into a single interface rather than separate products.
Taken together, the changes represent Google’s most aggressive attempt yet to keep users in an AI-native experience rather than funneling them to the open web — a strategy that has generated both excitement among users testing early agent features and unease among an online publishing industry that still relies heavily on search referral traffic.
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