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genai/news//Marketing Tech News
Users will be encouraged to ask follow-up questions that will help them refine the terms of what they are looking for.
Google's search box will be replaced with an LLM-driven 'intelligent search box' starting this week.
KEY POINTS
LLM-generated results will take priority over traditional blue links in Google's new search interface.
AI agents will proactively monitor web changes for users, evolving beyond standard Google Alerts.
Agentic search and notifications will be available only to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers later this year.
Gemini Spark personal assistant is now in beta for select US Google AI Ultra subscribers, soon to go live.
Google is re-engineering its iconic search page to place LLM-powered search front and centre for users. Announced at the company’s I/O conference last week, the familiar space where users typed their enquiries is to be replaced with an “intelligent search box” that can place users on occasion into a conversation with Gemini.
Instead of the familiar list of links that Search has yielded since the search engine’s inception in 1997, users might be encouraged to ask follow-up questions that will help them refine the terms of what they are looking for, the company says. The familiar ‘blue links’ will not entirely disappear, but will be given less priority than LLM-generated responses in the future.
The new interface brings ‘vanilla’ search closer to what users have been experiencing to an increasing degree over the last couple of years in the form of AI Overviews (in which web sources’ contents are summarised by Gemini) and AI Mode, where users can converse with a chatbot to find the information they need.
Google will also offer the use of LLM agents that can track changes on the web and report back to users if information is updated. This is an evolution of Google Alerts, a service that notified users of defined changes in search results such as a price change on a range of desired items or breaking news in a particular area. Users will be able to use “information agents” that work in the background, combing relevant web pages according to criteria defined by the user, without manually checking back with the Alerts service.
Liz Reid, Google’s head of search, said in a press conference, “You could […] track market movements in a particular sector with very specific parameters, and the agent will map out a monitoring plan for you, including the tools and the data it needs to access. It will then keep track of those changes and let you know when the conditions are met, and provide a synthesised update with links and information you can dive into further.”
The company says AI Overviews are used by more than 2.5 billion times a month, with one billion monthly users of AI Mode. To place those figures in perspective, daily Google search volume is estimated to be 13.7 billion searches per day – thus, 0.85% of Google Search users actively engage in the engine’s LLM-powered services each month.
The new-look Gemini-powered search interface is due to begin appearing this week, and the Antigravity-powered agentic facilities will arrive later this year.
“Part of the reason we focus on delivering frontier models […] is because we want to bring [them] to as many people as possible,” Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, said in a press briefing ahead of the Google I/O conference.
The new-look search box and generative UI will both be free to use for all users, with background agentic search and notifications rolling out to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers later this year.
Google has also said that its Gemini Spark ‘personal assistant’ (currently in beta) is now available to select Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, and will enter production status soon.
Marketing functions that rely heavily on traditional SEO may wish to extrapolate from Google Search’s recent progress, in which the search giant’s impetus appears to have three goals:
to keep users on the Search page or within the Google portfolio,
to present information without necessarily directly referencing sources in the form of external links,
to present large language models’ interpretations of sources as answers to a growing ratio of total queries.
If we interpret OpenAI and Anthropic’s top-down, gradual moves to token-based billing as a pragmatic response to the cost of training and running AI models, it seems inevitable that providing frontier models for free (or at low subscription rates) will become a thing of the past. However, unlike OpenAI and Anthropic, Google has additional lines of profitable business that can support Gemini as a loss-leader. These most recent changes from the search giant are likely, therefore, to both progress in depth and stick around.
(Image source: Pixabay, under licence.)