It's been 17 years since I sat in on the iconic weekly search quality meeting in the Ouagadougou conference room at Google’s Mountain View campus. That Thursday morning, around three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives sat at a table or sprawled on the floor to discuss why certain search queries or categories didn’t yield a perfect result and to suggest fixes. In 2010 those meetings led Google to make 550 changes to its search algorithm, a number that seemed impressive at the time.
That memory seems like a tintype. At Google’s I/O developer conference this week, a keynote speaker—head of search Liz Reid—officially down-ranked good old-fashioned search to virtual oblivion. This was a continuation of a process that began two years ago, when Google introduced “AI Overview,” its summaries that sit at the top of its search results page and literally lurk over the famous “10 blue links.” By then those links had already been degraded, so that all too often the most relevant ones were buried beneath aggregators, spam, and Google’s own shopping results and maps. Now, in what Reid described as the most significant change to the search box in the company’s history, users are in direct communication with the latest version of Google’s Gemini. Even the term “query” seems outdated, as human inputs are conversation starters for the AI to collaborate. The process can also incorporate personal information Google knows about you, which can be a lot. The answer to a query could be a bespoke presentation, maybe bolstered by AI agents that forage digital backroads to root out information. The transformation is complete. Onstage, Google said it out loud: “Google Search is AI Search.”
The search box used to be a portal to the web. The new “intelligent” box is an invitation to order up a Gemini-powered, customized response to a user’s queries, sometimes even creating on the fly a bespoke mini-publication with charts, bullet points, and even animations. Google used to pride itself on interpreting cryptic search terms to divine user intent. Now it encourages searchers to engage with Gemini in a conversational prompt-a-thon. To emphasize the change, Google representatives at the conference wore T-shirts saying “Ask Me Anything,” reflecting the prompt that Gemini offers. Just as with the computerized version, if you asked for directions from these smiling aides, the answer did not result in a click to a website.
Our digital life these days is perched at an uncomfortable transition point. AI seems to be driving every business model, and giants like Google are weaving AI into all their products and operations. At the same time, there’s rising resistance and even disgust as this powerful and scary technology worms its way into our lives. Just note the boos when commencement speakers mention AI. But as Google sees it, AI search—if you still want to call it that—is an inevitability that even AI haters will embrace.
I was among those who recoiled at the introduction of AI Overview in 2024. Now I acknowledge that Overview—and the deeper “AI Mode” that it encourages you to use—is simply better for many things, whether finding out if Saturday Night Live has a new episode, getting an explanation of an agentic harness, or even finding a link. When I searched for my WIRED article where I described the meeting in the Ouagadougou, the blue links were less than useful. But when I explained in plain language what I was looking for, I found it immediately.
So it’s working. Google claims that more than a billion people a month are searching with AI Mode, a separate tab on Google’s website where links are even more peripheral. AI Mode queries are doubling every quarter.
Liz Reid, Google's head of search, walks on stage.
Photograph: Benjamin Fanjoy/Getty ImagesI spoke to Liz Reid after the keynote and asked her directly: How is she defining search? After a startled pause, she invokes Google’s mission: “Can you truly make information not just organized, but really useful and accessible to people?”
The original Google, of course, assumed that the key to that mission was a thriving and open web. According to Reid’s keynote speech, Google scrapes billions of web pages every day—but now the point is to gather facts and insights for its personalized responses.
In the keynote presentation, Google showed how a search query can dispatch an armada of AI agents to create a kind of personalized website on the fly. “We’re talking dynamic layouts, interactive widgets, entire experiences created just for you,” said search VP Robby Stein. To answer a query on black holes, AI agents might whip up an interactive graphic explaining how they work. But information has to come from somewhere. The raw material for that was the hard work of cosmologists, science writers, and visual artists, none of whom are easily credited or surfaced. These types of creators—and the web sites that hold their work—seem to be the losers in this transition.
Not surprisingly, Reid disputes the theory that AI search is a giant rug-pull for the traditional web. “Some people will skip over the AI response and go to links,” she insists. “Oftentimes people will click on the AI view, and then click on the links within.” I asked for metrics on how many people actually do that; Reid says Google doesn’t share that data.
Some websites will suffer, she says—those bottom feeders that offer generic content that an AI agent can easily duplicate. But she claims that original voices and uniquely reported or researched content will still find an audience. (Really? Tell that to news sites already devastated by AI Overviews.) “We’re also learning in new ways how to think about what web content is relevant,” she says, claiming that Google is at work sending users to those with “firsthand perspectives.” I eagerly await that traffic.
Of course, another problem with getting a single AI-generated answer is that, like other AI models, Gemini can be wrong, or even make stuff up. “The technology is certainly not perfect by any stretch,” Reid concedes, claiming that the errors and fabrications aren’t as prevalent as before,
My final question to Reid was whether Google still holds search quality meetings like the one I attended in 2009. Reid, who has been at Google for more than two decades, says that they’re now spread out over several meetings, but the goal is the same. “At the end of the day, there’s still a human judgment,” she told me. And no matter how much you hate AI, you’ll probably use it. Overall searches, says Reid, are at a record high.
This is an edition of Steven Levy’s Backchannel newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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