Part 1 - Google Just Rewrote the Rules of Search: What AI Mode Means for the Future of the Internet

May 20

By Ryan Edwards

For more than two decades, Google has been the architect behind how most of us access the web.
A blank search bar.
Ten blue links.
A near-invisible sorting algorithm that shaped what we saw, believed, and bought.

That era is ending.

As of May 2025, Google’s AI Mode is no longer experimental. It’s live, public, and opt-out—not opt-in. What started in Search Labs just months ago has now “graduated,” as Google’s head of search Liz Reid put it at Google I/O. And with it, the interface, purpose, and power of search have all shifted.

What’s replacing the old model isn’t just faster. It’s fundamentally different. AI Mode doesn’t point you to the web. It interprets the web for you. And in doing so, it changes the game for users, businesses, educators, and the entire economics of visibility.

From Search Engine to Thought Partner

At its core, AI Mode replaces the traditional "index-and-rank" model with a system that thinks through your query. It doesn’t wait for you to compare. It does the comparing. It does the summarizing. It anticipates your follow-up questions and in some cases, your next actions.

Deep Search: A research-grade feature that can launch hundreds of queries behind the scenes to deliver a fully cited, expert-level summary.
Complex Analysis & Dynamic Charts: Integrated visual reasoning for data-heavy topics like finance or sports.
Agentic Capabilities via Project Mariner: The ability to book tickets, navigate forms, and deliver decision-ready options for tasks like trip planning or shopping.
Multimodal Search: Voice, text, image all understood in a single interface.
Personal Context Integration: Optional connections to your Gmail, Calendar, and past searches to shape personalized results.

This isn’t an evolution. It’s a reframing. Google is no longer just a portal to websites. It’s becoming a proactive information layer over your life.

What This Means for the Web

The web, as it evolved over three decades, was built around discoverability. Page rank mattered. Links mattered. Attention moved through clicks.

But AI Mode reduces that friction and with it, the traditional web model itself. The implications are both immediate and structural.

1. Search is now a synthesis engine, not a directory

AI Mode's query fan-out system disassembles your prompt into subtopics, launches parallel searches across the open web, then rebuilds the pieces into a narrative. This process compresses hours of human effort (tabs, scanning, comparisons) into seconds.

With Deep Search, that synthesis can take on the form of a fully cited report, complete with real-time data, images, and visual breakdowns.

In other words: You no longer search for the information. You search with it.

2. Traffic patterns will shift, possibly permanently

Google insists that AI Mode still drives clicks, claiming users who click links from AI-generated summaries stay longer and engage more. But fewer people will reach websites as a first step. Links are now outcomes, not starting points.

Expect a new calculus: Fewer impressions, but higher quality sessions. Possibly fewer users, but more intentional ones. Businesses will need to rethink their acquisition strategies accordingly.

3. AI Mode decides what gets shown and what doesn’t

In traditional search, ranking could be earned (or gamed). In AI Mode, visibility depends on a model’s understanding of your relevance, trustworthiness, and usefulness.

That’s not transparent. While Google says Gemini 2.5 uses models trained to decide when and how to link or include visuals, the rules are opaque. There's no roadmap for how to get cited or excluded.

For publishers, creators, and brands, this represents a new kind of algorithmic power. The question is no longer “How do I rank?” but “How do I get included in the summary?”

The Strategic Shift: From Optimization to Participation

Here’s how companies and content creators should be thinking immediately:

Rethink SEO as AI Participation

Classic SEO optimized for ranking. AI Mode requires being useful enough to be summarized. This means structured content, clear sourcing, concise ideas, and being the kind of resource AI wants to quote.

Design for Extractability

Your content must be machine-readable and human-valuable. Bullet-point takeaways, definitions, and structured data are more likely to surface in AI Mode’s answers.

Prepare for Multi-Intent Journeys

Searches in AI Mode are longer - 2 to 5x, according to Sundar Pichai. That means people are asking layered questions. Expect compound intent. Design content and services to meet multi-phase queries, not just single-keyword ones.

Get Ready for Embedded Transactions

Project Mariner's agentic checkout shows where this is going: You won’t just list products, you’ll complete bookings, forms, and purchases from inside the search result. Think of it as Google becoming the front end to your business logic.

What About Trust?

With any AI system that intermediates information, trust becomes central. Google is rolling out AI Mode slowly, responsibly but even they admit it won’t always be accurate. Misleading answers, missing nuance, false equivalence: these are risks baked into the model.

To mitigate that, they’re making responses citation-rich, sourcing pages with visible links, and allowing users to dig deeper. Personalization is opt-in, not default. And actions (like purchasing) require explicit consent.

Still, the trust dynamic is new. You're not just trusting Google’s sources. You're trusting Google's synthesis of those sources. That’s a much greater leap.

Why This Moment Matters

There’s a reason this moment feels bigger than a product launch.

In 2017, Google researchers introduced the transformer architecture that now powers almost every modern AI system, including their own Gemini. As Nick Fox, head of Google’s knowledge products, put it: “We invented a lot of this for search.”

AI Mode is the realization of that vision. A search engine that doesn't just index knowledge, but understands it. That doesn’t just route you to the answer, but becomes the answer.

That changes the power dynamics of the internet.

Final Thought: The Interface Is Now the Authority

Google once prided itself on “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.” For 25 years, it focused on “organize” and “accessible.”

AI Mode is the beginning of Google’s long-awaited push on that third word: useful.

But useful isn’t neutral. It’s interpretive. When the interface becomes the editor, the difference between what’s out there and what you see grows invisible.

Search used to show you the world. Now it shapes how you understand it.

If the web was once defined by openness, links, and choice, AI Mode offers something else: a curated front-end to the world’s knowledge, with AI at the wheel.

Whether that’s liberating or limiting will depend on how we use it and how much we ask what’s happening behind the prompt.

If you'd like a version of this tailored for a board presentation, investor memo, or CX strategy brief, I can quickly adapt it. Would you also like a companion piece breaking down how to track brand impact inside AI Mode (even without full Search Console integration yet)?

Ryan Edwards