At I/O 2026 on 19 May, Google rebuilt the thing it is most known for. The new "intelligent search box" is what the company calls the biggest change to Search since the box debuted more than 25 years ago, swapping ranked links for AI-generated answers and conversational follow-ups. Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default model behind it.
CEO Sundar Pichai called this "the agentic Gemini era", reframing Google around models that act on your behalf rather than just answer prompts. For anyone who works in search, the headline is simpler: the ten blue links are no longer the priority.
What went down
AI Mode now runs on Gemini 3.5 Flash as the global default model.
AI Mode passed 1 billion monthly users, with queries doubling each quarter.
The search box was rebuilt to take longer, conversational, multimodal queries.
"Information agents" now monitor the web and gather results unprompted.
Personal Intelligence expanded to nearly 200 countries and 98 languages.
Why does this matter?
Search behaviour is changing, not just the interface. Queries in AI Mode are roughly three times longer than traditional ones, follow-ups are rising fast, and over 16% are now multimodal. Short-keyword pages built for a decade of SEO no longer match how people search.
Ranking and being cited are now two different jobs. A page can sit at position one and never get pulled into an AI answer, while a page two result gets cited across Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity. Visibility now means being named in the answer, not topping the list.
Our take
For two years Google looked like the incumbent on the back foot, watching OpenAI define the AI conversation while its Search business absorbed criticism for hallucinated overviews. I/O 2026 was the response. Rather than ship a single ChatGPT rival, Google used its distribution to push Gemini 3.5 into Search, Workspace and Android in one week, making agentic AI feel like a default Google feature instead of a separate product you sign up for.
For the SEOs amongst our readers, this is the moment the old blue links model breaks. Search is no longer a list with a snippet on top. It is an AI layer that synthesises, reasons and responds, often answering the query without a click.
The content that survives is specific, structured around concrete claims and built for the questions AI Mode is synthesising, not the broad "what is X" pages that ranked a decade ago. Google is now both the cause of the traffic erosion and the company selling the tools to navigate it.
Another big thing… AI overturns a 1946 maths conjecture
On 21 May, OpenAI said one of its internal reasoning models produced a proof disproving Paul Erdős's 1946 planar unit distance conjecture, finding a construction that beat the previously assumed bound.
External mathematicians, including Tim Gowers and Noga Alon, reviewed the work. It is being framed as the first time an AI system has been credited with overturning a famous open problem in mathematics.
