Google's AI agents will bring you the web now

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/21/googles-ai-agents-will-bring-you-the-web-now/

For the last two decades, Google has brought people a list of algorithmically selected links from the web for any given search query. At I/O 2025, Google made clear that the concept of Search is firmly in its rearview mirror.

On Tuesday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his executives presented new ways to bring users the web, this time intermediated through a series of AI agents.

“We couldn’t be more excited about this chapter of Google search where you can truly ask anything […] your simplest and hardest questions, your deepest research, your personalized shopping needs,” said Google’s VP of Search, Liz Reid, onstage at I/O. “We believe AI will be the most powerful engine for discovery that the web has ever seen.”

The largest announcement of I/O was that Google now offers AI mode to every Search user in the United States. This gives hundreds of millions of people a button to converse with an AI agent that will visit web pages, summarize them any way they’d like, or even help them shop. With Project Mariner, Google is delivering an even more hands-off AI agent to its Ultra subscribers. That agent will handle 10 different tasks simultaneously, visiting web pages and clicking around on those pages while users are free to plug away on something else altogether.

Google is also making its Deep Research agent, which visits dozens of relevant websites and generates thorough research reports, more personalized, and is connecting it to your Gmail and Drive. In a parallel development, the company is further integrating Project Astra — the company’s multimodal, real-time AI experience — into Search and Gemini, giving users more ways to verbally speak with an AI agent and let it see what they see.

I could go on, but you get the idea — AI agents dominated I/O 2025.

The rise of ChatGPT has forced an AI reckoning at Google, causing the company to rethink how it brings users information from the web. This reckoning really started at last year’s I/O, when Google introduced AI overviews into Search, a launch that was overshadowed by its embarrassing hallucinations. The rollout of AI overviews made it seem as if AI was not ready for primetime, and that Search as we know it was here to stay