For a quarter century, the Google search box has been one of the most recognizable interfaces in computing: a thin white rectangle, a blinking cursor, a few typed words, and a list of blue links. On Tuesday, Google formally retired that paradigm.
At its annual I/O conference, Google announced a redesign of the search box itself — transforming it from a simple keyword input into a dynamic, AI-driven conversation starter that can accept text, images, PDFs, videos, and even open Chrome tabs as inputs. The company is also merging its AI Overviews and AI Mode features into a single, seamless search flow, eliminating the friction that previously forced users to choose between a traditional results page and an AI-forward experience.
Liz Reid, Google's vice president and head of Search, called it "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago" during a press briefing.
A fundamental shift in how we search
The box itself now dynamically expands to accommodate longer, more conversational queries. Where the old interface subtly encouraged brevity — a narrow field suited to two- or three-word keyword strings — the new design invites users to fully articulate complex questions in granular detail. It also now supports multimodal inputs directly. Users can upload images, PDFs, files, and videos, or drag in content from Chrome tabs, right from the main search interface. Previously, some of these capabilities existed in AI Mode, but reaching them required extra steps. Now they sit at the primary entry point.
Google is also deploying an AI-powered query suggestion system that "goes beyond autocomplete." Rather than simply predicting the next word a user might type based on popular searches, the system helps users formulate complex, nuanced queries — essentially coaching them toward the kind of detailed questions that AI Mode handles best.
Unifying AI Overviews and AI Mode
Perhaps more significant than the box itself is the architectural change happening behind it. Google is unifying AI Overviews — the AI-generated summary panels that appear atop traditional search results — with AI Mode, the more immersive conversational search experience the company launched at I/O one year ago.
Starting Tuesday, this merged experience will be live across mobile and desktop worldwide. A user can type a question, receive an AI Overview alongside traditional results, and then continue directly into a back-and-forth AI Mode conversation to ask follow-up questions — all without navigating to a separate interface.
Reid explained the logic: 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 noted that while some power users actively sought out AI Mode, "for most users, they don't actually want to have to think about, do they want more of a traditional page or an AI-forward search experience."
The numbers behind the shift
Google's decision did not happen in a vacuum. AI Mode, which launched in the United States at I/O 2025, has surpassed one billion monthly users in its first year. AI Mode queries have been doubling every quarter since launch. AI Overviews now reach more than 2.5 billion monthly users. And overall search usage grew last quarter — a data point the company had previously disclosed on its earnings call.
Sundar Pichai, Google's CEO, framed these figures as evidence that AI features are additive, not cannibalistic, to search usage. "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."
Gemini 3.5 Flash powers the new experience
Under the hood, the new search experience runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google's newest AI model. Google claims it outperforms its previous frontier model on nearly all benchmarks while running four times faster in output tokens per second than comparable frontier models. Pichai described it as being "in a league of its own in the top right quadrant" of the intelligence-versus-speed chart — delivering near-frontier quality at dramatically lower latency.
That speed matters enormously for search. A conversational AI search experience that feels sluggish would be dead on arrival for a product that serves billions of queries daily. By coupling the redesigned interface with a model optimized for both quality and throughput, Google is attempting to make AI-powered search feel as instantaneous as the old keyword experience — while being dramatically more capable.
Beyond text: Generative UI and AI agents
The redesigned search box is also the gateway to new capabilities that push search far beyond text-based answers. Google announced "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 offered a concrete example: a user could ask "How do black holes affect space time?" and receive an interactive visual in an AI Overview that brings the concept to life. 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.
For ongoing tasks — planning a wedding, organizing a move, tracking a fitness routine — users will be able to build customizable, stateful experiences within search. 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 Gemini Advanced and Google One AI Premium subscribers in the United States.
The redesign also opens the door to "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 set up an agent to track market movements in a particular sector, for example, and receive proactive notifications when conditions are met.
What this means for publishers, advertisers, and SEO
The redesign raises profound questions for the ecosystem 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. 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, 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.
For advertisers, 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?
The end of an era
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 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. "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.