Google CEO Sundar Pichai, during Tuesday’s earnings call, described Google Search as being on a transformative “journey” driven by artificial intelligence. This shift began with AI overviews a significant and often debated change in how Google delivers information to billions of users.
However, that was merely the first step.
“As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet,” Pichai stated during the call’s opening remarks.
Pichai used the call to outline Google’s next steps in integrating DeepMind’s artificial intelligence capabilities into Search. Over time, the Search product is starting to resemble an artificial intelligence assistant that searches the web, reads web pages, and provides answers on your behalf.
It’s far from being a basic search engine that returns ten blue links.
Google has been following this strategy for some time now, ever since OpenAI’s ChatGPT caught them off guard in 2022. Websites that depend on Google’s traffic and businesses that purchase ads on Google Search will be greatly affected by the change.
Google is continuing regardless of how unhappy some people are.
“You can imagine the future with Project Astra,” Pichai stated when asked about the future of AI and Search. Project Astra is DeepMind’s multimodal AI system that can process live footage from a camera or computer screen and answer user inquiries about what the AI sees in real-time.
Project Astra is also very important to Google’s other divisions. The business has stated its intention to use Google’s operating system to power augmented reality smart glasses powered by multimodal AI technology.
One tool that Pichai emphasized as having the potential to drastically change people’s use of Google Search is Gemini Deep Research, an artificial intelligence agent that takes a few minutes to generate lengthy research reports. Deep Search streamlines the process that users have come to expect from Google Search. But now it appears that Google is interested in doing user research instead.
With this move, you are “really dramatically expanding the types of use cases for which Search can work – things which don’t always get answered instantaneously, but can take some time to answer,” Pichai remarked. “Those are all areas of exploration, and you will see us putting new experiences in front of users through the course of 2025.”
Additionally, Pichai stated that Google’s Project Mariner, another artificial intelligence agent, has a “clear sense” of the Search experiences that Google may develop. It will be unnecessary for people to utilize websites individually because that system can use the front end on behalf of users.
The CEO of Google has also mentioned an “opportunity” to allow people to engage more and ask follow-up inquiries using Google Search. Pichai didn’t share many details, but it seems that Google is thinking about making its Search feature more like a robot.
“I think the [Search] product will evolve even more,” Pichai stated. “As you make it more easy for people to interact and ask follow-up questions, etc., I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth.”
After years of development, ChatGPT is now among the most popular products on the internet, with hundreds of millions of users every week. It poses a serious danger to Google Search’s future profitability. In response, Google is incorporating AI capabilities into Search and developing an AI chatbot in partnership with Gemini.
The first attempt at AI on Google Search did not go smoothly. All of Google Search began to show inaccurate and weird AI hallucinations when Google introduced AI overviews. Some of the responses suggested eating rocks or putting glue on pizza. When asked about the state of AI overviews, Google acknowledged that they needed significant improvement.
It would suggest that Google is only just beginning to integrate AI into Search, despite this unfavorable launch.