Google has begun rolling out what it calls its biggest change to Search in more than 25 years, rebuilding the core search box around its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model and pushing AI-generated answers further into the center of the product than ever before.
The announcement came at Google I/O 2026, where CEO Sundar Pichai and the Search team unveiled a reimagined search box capable of taking text, images, files, videos and open Chrome tabs as input, reasoning across all of them at once instead of 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 powered globally by Gemini 3.5 Flash by default. Google says the model matches the performance of much larger flagship systems on coding and agentic tasks while running roughly four times faster than other frontier models in output speed — a combination Google is betting will make AI-generated summaries feel closer to instant than a traditional page load.
The shift comes as AI Mode has crossed 1 billion monthly active users roughly a year after launch, with query volume more than doubling every quarter. That scale has made the format Google’s fastest-growing search product in years, even as publishers and SEO professionals continue to raise concerns about declining click-through to external websites as AI summaries answer more queries directly on the results page.
“Information Agents” Start Working in the Background
Beyond the redesigned search box, Google introduced “information agents” — always-on AI processes that continuously monitor topics a user follows across blogs, news sites, social posts and real-time feeds like finance, shopping and sports, then proactively surface synthesized updates and can take limited actions on the user’s behalf.
The feature is launching first for Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the US this summer, with a broader rollout expected to follow.
Google paired the Search updates with Gemini Omni, a new multimodal model capable of generating video from a range of inputs, signaling that the company sees search, generation and agentic action increasingly merging into a single interface rather than separate products.
Together, the changes represent Google’s most aggressive attempt yet to keep users inside an AI-native experience rather than routing them to the open web — a strategy that has drawn both enthusiasm from users testing early agent features and unease from an online publishing industry that still depends heavily on search referral traffic.
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