@tjrobertson52

We're entering the next chapter of Google Search, where AI features aren't just in search. Google Search is AI search through and through.

That's a direct quote from the head of search at Google, Liz Reid, announcing at Google I/O something I've been predicting would happen by the end of 2026, but it looks like it's coming a lot sooner. Traditional search is breathing its last breath. All search will be AI search.

Let's talk about what this means for businesses and anyone who's doing SEO. If you weren't aware, Google's big annual conference, Google I/O, just happened. This was by far their biggest Google I/O to date.

txt, but it was also the biggest change we've ever seen to Google Search, and that's what we're talking about today.

Google has switched to an intelligent search bar, which allows and encourages longer searches. It also allows you to include images and files with your searches.

For SEO, this means we can expect longer search queries on average. Tracking specific keywords will make less and less sense, and we'll be getting less data about the specific searches people are entering in tools like the Google Search Console.

But the more important changes for SEO are those changes happening to the search results. They announced a few specific cool features we should start seeing in search results.

Gemini will now start creating actual apps inside the search results in response to your query. Google can create persistent dashboards that exist after you're done with the search. And Google can spin up a long-running agents so you can ask it to check on the status of something, and every day it'll give you a notification on your phone, and all that's really cool.

But the thing that actually has an impact on how we do SEO is that all these results are being orchestrated by AI. Yes, we will still have blue links to websites in the search results. The process Google uses to select which blue links show up now has an added AI layer on top of it.

Instead of the human interacting directly with the search algorithm, the human is merely passing their prompt or query off to an AI. And it's the AI interacting with the algorithm. So the human never even sees the raw website rankings.

Instead, it's an AI looking through those rankings, curating them, and deciding which ones to show to the human.

And so traditional rank tracking breaks down. You have to be simulating the types of prompts and queries your users are entering and tracking the responses. Instead of identifying a static list of keywords you want to rank for and then making content for each keyword, the game is shifted to tracking which websites are actually being cited and influencing the AI response.

And then figuring out how you can get your brand recommended in those types of pages, either by adding a recommendation for your brand to the pages that are already being cited, or by creating similar or better content to replace those pages that are being cited.

The good news is, right now, most SEO agencies are still doing things the old way, and so there's not a lot of competition. Most of our clients are seeing quick results in the first three months.

Now, all of these updates are still rolling out in Google. I don't know when the entire search results page will be replaced by an AI response, but according to Google, we're now entering that chapter.