For 25 years, the Google search bar has been one of the most familiar sights on the internet: a slim white box, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google officially retired that classic design.
At its yearly I/O developer event, Google revealed a major overhaul of the search box itself — the actual text field where billions of searches start every day — turning it from a basic keyword entry into a dynamic, AI-powered conversation starter that can take text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also combining its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into one smooth search flow, removing the hassle that once made users pick between a standard results page and an AI-focused experience.
Liz Reid, Google’s vice president and head of Search, called it “the most significant upgrade to our iconic search box since it first appeared over 25 years ago” during a press briefing on Monday.
The news came alongside a flood of other announcements — new Gemini models, a personal AI agent named Spark, a smart shopping cart, a redesigned developer platform — but the search box overhaul may turn out to be the most impactful. It is the strongest sign yet that Google sees the future of its flagship product not as a place where users type short keywords, but as an interface where they have open-ended, multimodal conversations with an AI system powered by the entire web.
The new search box grows, accepts files, and guides you on what to ask
The changes reflect a fundamental shift in how Google expects people to use the product that brings in the vast majority of Alphabet’s income.
The box itself now automatically grows to fit longer, more conversational questions. Where the old design quietly pushed for short inputs — a narrow field made for two- or three-word keyword strings — the new layout encourages users to spell out complex questions in full detail. It also now supports multimodal inputs directly. Users can upload images, PDFs, files, and videos, or pull in content from Chrome tabs, right from the main search screen. Before, some of these features existed in AI Mode, but getting to them took extra steps. Now they are available at the main entry point.
Google is also rolling out what it calls an AI-powered query suggestion system that “goes beyond autocomplete.” Instead of just guessing the next word a user might type based on popular searches, the system helps users craft complex, detailed questions — essentially guiding them toward the kind of thorough questions that AI Mode handles best.
The new search box is beginning to roll out right away in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available.
Google is combining AI Overviews and AI Mode into one smooth experience
Maybe even more important than the box itself is the structural change happening behind the scenes. Google is bringing together AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary panels that show up above traditional search results — with AI Mode, the more immersive conversational search experience the company introduced at I/O one year ago.
Starting Tuesday, this combined experience will be live on mobile and desktop worldwide. A user can type a question, get an AI Overview alongside traditional results, and then move straight into a back-and-forth AI Mode conversation to ask follow-up questions — all without switching to a different screen.
Reid explained the reasoning during the press briefing: the new AI search box is “an upgrade of our traditional search box, and so the results take you directly to main search rather than AI mode.” She pointed out that while some power users deliberately looked for AI Mode, “for most users, they don’t actually want to have to think about whether they want more of a traditional page or an AI-forward search experience.”
The aim, she said, was to make sure that “for most users, they don’t have to think about where to go — they can just go to the search box they know, and it feels like they get the best experience afterward.”
One billion users and doubling queries show how quickly search habits are changing
Google’s choice to redesign the core interface of its most important product didn’t happen in isolation. The company shared a set of usage numbers during the briefing that show just how fast user behavior is already shifting.
AI Mode, which launched in the United States at I/O 2025, has passed one billion monthly users in its first year. AI Mode queries have been doubling every quarter since launch. AI Overviews, the lighter AI summaries, now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users. And overall search query volume hit a record high last quarter — a figure the company had already shared on its earnings call.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, presented these numbers as proof that AI features add to search usage rather than replacing it. “When people use our AI-powered features in search, they use search more,” he said. He added that he loves “how search has become less about individual queries and feels more like an ongoing conversation, giving users deeper insights and connecting you with the vastness of the web.”
Reid reinforced the point: “It’s not just that people are searching more — it’s that they’re searching differently. They’re fully expressing their questions in granular detail, asking those follow-up questions, and searching across modalities.”
Gemini 3.5 Flash gives Google’s AI search the speed it needs to work at scale
Under the hood, the new search experience runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google’s latest AI model, which the company also unveiled at I/O. Google upgraded AI Mode’s underlying model to 3.5 Flash to deliver what Reid described as “an even more powerful AI search experience.”
Gemini 3.5 Flash is the backbone of this year’s announcements. Google says it beats its previous top model, Gemini 3.1 Pro, on nearly all benchmarks while running four times faster in output tokens per second than comparable top models. Pichai described it as being “in a league of its own in the top right quadrant” of the Artificial Analysis index, which maps intelligence against speed — meaning it offers near-top quality at dramatically lower delay.
That speed matters hugely for search. A conversational AI search experience that feels slow would fail immediately for a product that handles billions of queries every day. By pairing the redesigned interface with a model built for both quality and throughput, Google is trying to make AI-powered search feel as instant as the old keyword experience — while being far more capable.
Search can now create interactive visuals and custom mini apps on the fly
The redesigned search box is also the entry point to a set of new features that push search well beyond text-based answers. Google announced what it calls “generative UI” — the ability for search to dynamically build custom widgets, interactive visualizations, and even mini applications in real time, tailored to a user’s specific question.
Reid gave a concrete example during the briefing: a user could ask “How do black holes affect spacetime?” and receive an interactive visual in an AI Overview that brings the
concept to life. Follow-up questions would trigger the system to dynamically generate entirely new visuals in real time. She explained this is possible because of “a novel real-time code generation system we built in partnership with the Google DeepMind team” that runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash. Generative UI capabilities will roll out to everyone this summer, free of charge.
But Google is going further still. For ongoing tasks — planning a wedding, organizing a move, tracking a fitness routine — users will be able to build what the company describes as customizable, stateful experiences within search, powered by its Antigravity development platform. These require no coding expertise. Users simply describe what they want in natural language, and search builds it. Those experiences will be available in coming months, starting with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the United States.
AI agents that monitor the web around the clock are coming to search results
The redesign also opens the door to what Google calls “information agents” — AI agents that users can configure directly within search to monitor the web 24/7 for specific conditions and deliver synthesized updates when those conditions are met.
A user could, for example, set up an agent to track market movements in a particular sector with specific parameters. The agent would create a monitoring plan, tap into real-time finance data, and proactively notify the user when conditions are met — complete with links and context for further research. Other use cases include apartment hunting, tracking sneaker drops, or monitoring any topic a user cares about. Information agents will launch first for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.
These agents sit within a much larger strategic pivot that Google articulated throughout the briefing: the company is going all-in on AI systems that don’t just answer questions but proactively take actions on users’ behalf. Beyond search, Google introduced Gemini Spark, a 24/7 personal AI agent that runs on dedicated virtual machines in Google Cloud. It unveiled the Universal Cart, an intelligent cross-merchant shopping cart. It announced the Agent Payments Protocol for agents to make secure purchases. And it expanded its Antigravity developer platform into a full ecosystem for building autonomous AI agents.
Publishers, advertisers, and SEO professionals face a new reality
The redesign raises profound questions for the sprawling ecosystem — publishers, advertisers, SEO professionals — that has been built around the old model of keyword search and blue links.
If users increasingly express their needs as full, conversational sentences rather than fragmented keywords, the entire discipline of search engine optimization will need to evolve. Keyword-density strategies become less relevant when the AI is parsing natural language intent rather than matching strings. Content that answers deep, nuanced questions in authoritative ways becomes more valuable; content engineered to rank for two-word keyword fragments becomes less so.
For publishers, the stakes are existential. AI Overviews already synthesize information from across the web and present it directly in search results, reducing the need for users to click through to source material. The new seamless AI Mode integration deepens that dynamic: users can now get an AI-generated answer and ask multiple follow-up questions without ever leaving the search page. Google has consistently maintained that its AI features drive more traffic to publishers, but the redesign puts that claim under renewed scrutiny as the search results page becomes more self-contained.
For advertisers — who fund the vast majority of Google’s revenue — the shift from keywords to conversations changes the calculus of ad targeting. Conversational queries contain richer intent signals, which could make ad targeting more precise and valuable. But they also create new ambiguities: when a user is in the middle of a multi-turn conversation with AI Mode, where does an ad naturally fit? Google did not detail changes to its advertising model during the briefing, but the structural shift in the interface will inevitably reshape how ads are surfaced and measured.
The search box was always more than a product — it was a habit for billions of people
There is a reason Google chose to redesign the search box rather than simply adding new features behind it. The search box is not just a product element at this point; it is a cultural artifact — one of the few pieces of digital infrastructure used by essentially the entire internet-connected world. Changing it sends an unmistakable message about where the company believes computing is headed.
For 25 years, the search box trained billions of people to think in keywords — to compress their curiosity into the shortest possible string of words. The new box invites them to do the opposite: to think out loud, to upload what they’re looking at, to ask follow-up questions, to let an AI system handle the compression.
Pichai tied the company’s broader ambitions to a striking statistic: Google’s surfaces now process over 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month, up seven-fold from a year ago. The company expects capital expenditures of approximately $180 to $190 billion in 2026 — roughly six times the $31 billion it spent four years ago — largely to support the infrastructure required for this AI transformation. When asked about the future of traditional search, he was direct. “Search is the most used AI product in the world,” he said.
The blinking cursor in Google’s search box still invites you to type. But after 25 years of teaching the world to speak in keywords, Google is now asking it to speak in sentences — and betting roughly $190 billion that it will.
