This new agentic era? Only the other day Google said to keep an out for it. But apparently it isn’t coming, it’s already here! And I have a big feeling that it’s going to make some SEO conversations feel very outdated, very very quickly.
OK, so admittedly I didn’t quite catch Google I/O 2026 live, as I like to do, but I have caught up with the official YouTube video, transcripts, the inevitable Google Discover search announcements on my iPhone and couldn’t avoid the community buzz around this event. So here’s my quick take, and a personal attempt to figure out what this actually changes and practically means for people working in organic search/digital marketing and of course the clients out there.
The Numbers
Google’s AI Overviews now has 2.5 billion monthly active users. Similarly, Google AI Mode, which launched just one year ago, funnily enough, has already surpassed 1 billion monthly users, with queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. Google also says that when people use these AI-powered features, they use Search more, not less, and that total queries hit an all-time high last quarter.
This is important at a time when we’ve seen a huge increase in “zero click searches” and suppressed CTR from AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google is telling us that search volume is growing and what’s changing is the form of the answer, and where in the information chain publishers and businesses sit.
And don’t we feel that? We need mentions and citations more than ever because the chances of inclusion have reduced but the CTR from AI Search is supposedly greater than from organic.
The Search box is no longer just a box
So to the first big announcement, for me anyway; for the first time in over 25 years, Google has fundamentally redesigned the Search input itself. The new intelligent Search box dynamically expands to accommodate more complex questions, offers AI-powered intent suggestions that go beyond autocomplete, and accepts inputs across modalities; text, images, files, videos, even Chrome tabs. That’s multimodal or cross-modal search.
They said that the new intelligent Search box is “Starting today globally” but I’ve not seen it on my desktop Chrome in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.
But this last point on multi-modality, specifically the Chrome tab option, is hugely important – If you can drop a website into Search and ask a simple question like “what’s missing from this approach?”, the nature of competitive research and SERP analysis suddenly shifts really significantly. It also means that content needs to be comprehensible and useful not just to human readers, but to AI systems that may be consuming it as an input to synthesise an answer. That’s been a thing for a while now, but from today (yesterday) it’s critical.
So let’s see what this new “seamless AI Search experience” is like when I get up again in a few hours.
Search agents
The next biggie was Google announcing “information agents” in Search. These are AI agents that users configure to run continuously in the background, monitoring the web for updates on specific topics such as apartment listings, athlete news, product drops, finance changes, and delivering synthesised, actionable updates. So agentic AI is here for the masses.
This is hugely important for a number of reasons. First, it the search query and the search session are no longer one. Users won’t necessarily be coming to Search to simply ask a question, rather they’ll be delegating ongoing monitoring to an AI agent that will surface content (or not) based on relevance, freshness and authority. Publishers and brands that produce timely, structured, authoritative content suddenly become more valuable to these agents. On the flipside, those that don’t will get filtered out.
For SEO specifically, this is a huge shift from traditionally being “indexable” to “agent-readable.” The fundamentals such as clear structure, genuine expertise, accurate information of course remain, as Big G was saying only the other day in its documentation guiding SEOs to optimise for AI Search. But the consumer of your content may increasingly be an AI system deciding whether to surface your update to a human, rather than a human who clicked through from a SERP.
So whilst the advice always has been and always will be write by humans for humans, it’s unavoidable now that we really need to say we’re writing for the agents too. Once again, we always have been and we need to just admit our target audience is man and machine.
Agentic search and agentic SEO are go!
Generative UI: the zero-click evolution
Google said it is bringing agentic coding capabilities directly into Search, meaning that the search engine will now build custom interactive UIs, dashboards, data visualisations and tools in real-time in response to queries! Yes, I ended with an exclamation there, because this is more big stuff. Users can also ask Search to build persistent “mini apps” for ongoing tasks like fitness tracking, event planning or home management.
This appears to be the issue of the zero-click problem evolving further. A featured snippet gives you a text answer instead of a click. Now, a custom generative UI can give you an interactive application instead of a website visit. The gap between “found your answer” and “visited your website” is widening. The big question for brands and publishers is: what is your content’s role when the destination is being constructed on the fly by the search engine itself?
Now there may be an inclination here to be concerned at the widening gulf, and that zero click searches could get worse. However, trying to find a solution here, I think we need to be crystal clear about what kind of content and what kind of brand experiences can only exist on your own properties, and that we double down on those.
Personal Intelligence and the end of generic search
Google is expanding Personal Intelligence, the ability for AI Mode to connect to Gmail, Google Photos and soon Google Calendar, to nearly 200 countries and in 98 languages. No subscription is required.
Search is allegedly becoming contextually aware of the individual. Not just what they asked, but who they are, what’s in their inbox, what’s on their calendar. This is an enormous personalisation leap and, from a marketing perspective, it means the same query from two different users may now return meaningfully different answers. It’s starting to feel like brand consistency in AI-surfaced results is becoming ever harder to audit and harder to influence through traditional optimisation.
My Personal Take
None of this makes the fundamentals of SEO and optimisation for AI Search redundant. Genuine authority, well-structured content, accurate and useful (helpful) information, and a coherent website architecture matter more than ever in the agentic era than in the keyword era, because AI systems are increasingly the first audience that has to understand and trust your content before a human even sees it.
But the strategies built around ranking positions, click-through rates from blue links, and featured snippet capture really need to evolve some more. The new parallel question is: how does my content become the source an AI agent chooses to cite, surface, or synthesise?
That’s the question I’ll be working through, with clients and on this site, over the coming weeks and months. There’s a lot to test and digest but I’m looking forward to taking some of these tools for a spin first-hand.
If you need a chat about what we can do with AI Search, drop me a message on my contact form and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,