Google unveils AI chatbot, signaling a new era for search

Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, speaks during Google I/O, an annual conference for software developers, in Mountain View on Tuesday. “It’s a total reimagining of search,” Pichai said about the company’s new AI Mode, which will function like a chatbot to deliver comprehensive answers. photos by Mike Kai Chen — The New York Times

Attendees take pictures with the Google I/O sign at Shoreline Amphitheatre during Tuesday’s conference.

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By Tripp Mickle

The New York Times

MOUNTAIN VIEW — Google became the gateway to the internet by perfecting its search engine. For two decades, it surfaced 10 blue links that gave people access to the information they were looking for.

But after a quarter century, the tech giant is betting that the future of search will be artificial intelligence. On Tuesday, Google said it was introducing a new feature in its search engine called AI Mode. The tool will function like a chatbot, allowing people to start a query, ask follow-up questions and use the company’s AI system to deliver comprehensive answers.

“It’s a total reimagining of search,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, in a news briefing before the company’s annual conference for software developers. In tests of the feature, he said people dramatically “changed the nature of how they are interacting with search.”

The new feature headlined a list of new AI abilities, including more personalized and automated email replies and a shopping tool to automatically purchase clothing after it’s put on sale.

With the introduction of AI Mode, Google is essentially trying to disrupt its traditional search business before upstart AI competitors can disrupt it. The search giant has been nervous about that possibility since declaring a “code red” two years ago after the arrival of ChatGPT, a chatbot from OpenAI that ignited a race to add generative AI into tech products.

But Google has been hesitant to fully embrace AI because it has so much to lose. The company’s search business generated nearly $200 billion last year, more than half of its total sales. And the bedrock of that business has been how it has reliably provided people with the best answers to questions.

Though they are a technical leap, AI systems have one big shortcoming: They are prone to giving incorrect answers, like recommending people eat rocks, which one of Google’s AI systems did last year.

AI might have already begun to cut into Google’s popularity as the default for finding digital information. During testimony in a Justice Department antitrust case against Google this May, one of Apple’s top executives, Eddy Cue, said Google search traffic declined for the first time in 22 years because more people are using artificial intelligence. Google said afterward that it continued to “see overall query growth” in search.

“They hesitated on this for a long time because they didn’t think the quality was good or know how to monetize it,” said Pete Meyers, the principal innovation architect at Moz, a software company focused on search engine optimization that tracks changes to Google Search. “Now they’re doing what they think they have to do to compete, and it’s uncomfortable.”

AI Mode, which launched in the U.S. on Tuesday, won’t serve ads initially. Google is holding an event for marketers and advertisers today where it could unveil more.

The AI transition comes amid mounting antitrust pressures to break up Google’s business. Over the past two years, Google has lost a string of antitrust cases after being found to have a monopoly over its app store, search engine and advertising technology. The U.S. government argued this month that the company should have to give competing search engines and AI companies access to its data on what users search for and click on.

Google’s new AI features are also bound to deepen tensions between Google and web publishers who are concerned about traffic. Chatbots often lift information from websites and deliver it directly to people, upending the traditional search model that has sent people across the web.

The company has sought to downplay publishers’ concerns that AI will disrupt their businesses. Pichai said AI Overviews, a feature the company introduced last year to generate summaries above traditional search results, has increased the number of searches people do and often leads people to spend more time on suggested websites.

At its Silicon Valley event, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, the company’s artificial intelligence lab, presented Google’s newest model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, which does more “reasoning” to deliver more accurate results than its predecessor. He said the lab has continued its work to turn Gemini, its AI chatbot and app, into a virtual assistant that can identify and address real-world problems, like fixing a broken bicycle.