For years, typing things into a search bar and manually sifting through blue links has been the baseline digital behavior of an entire generation. But Google’s latest pivot suggests it wants to retire that ritual altogether—or at least outsource it. At I/O 2025, the company revealed that its future isn’t just about enhancing Search; it’s about making sure you don’t have to do it at all. Because why Google something yourself when Google can just… Google it for you?
That’s the core pitch behind AI Mode, the centerpiece of a search experience that now feels more like chatting with an overqualified research assistant than querying a database. Live now for users in the U.S., AI Mode transforms the classic search interface into something more task-oriented, conversational, and heavily abstracted. You ask a question—like where to eat and what to do in Nashville—and instead of returning a traditional list of search results, Google delivers a curated response bundle: restaurant picks for “foodies,” bars with live music, hidden gems, itinerary-style maps, and even personalized shopping suggestions. You’re no longer browsing the web; you’re delegating.
This isn’t a shallow re-skinning of the interface. Underneath, Google is leaning on a technique it calls query fanout, which is basically a massive parallel search operation handled by a custom-tuned version of its Gemini model. Here’s the idea: when AI Mode detects a question with layers—what Google euphemistically calls “advanced reasoning”—it dissects the prompt into multiple sub-queries, fans those out across its data pipelines (Knowledge Graph, Shopping Graph, local Maps data, etc.), pulls responses, and then re-synthesizes them into a single answer. If the AI thinks it missed something, it goes back, spawns more queries, and patches the holes. It’s recursive search wrapped in a chatbot UI.
Google’s engineers are clearly optimizing for speed and completeness, but there’s something fascinating—and a little unsettling—about how much of the traditional search process is becoming invisible. It’s all still happening, of course, but you’re seeing the output, not the method. This is the same sleight-of-hand that made autocomplete and featured snippets feel magical. Now it’s happening at scale.
Coming soon is Deep Search, a kind of query fanout on steroids. Think dozens—or even hundreds—of simultaneous queries executed in response to a single prompt. You’ll even get to see how many background searches Google ran to assemble your AI-crafted answer, which is kind of like watching your robot butler run around the internet to fetch your info while you sip coffee.
But Google’s ambitions go further than just surfacing data. Enter Project Mariner, a task automation engine that does more than search—it acts. The system is designed to take multi-step actions across websites on your behalf. Right now it can juggle up to 10 simultaneous tasks, and with the new “Teach and Repeat” feature, you can walk it through a process once—say, signing up for a newsletter or checking ticket prices—and it can handle future runs autonomously.
Project Mariner will also be integrated directly into AI Mode, which means Google Search is gradually evolving from a retrieval tool into a semi-autonomous agent platform. And it’s not the only one. The Gemini app is getting an Agent Mode powered by the same underlying tech. In one demo, it parsed Zillow listings to find apartments in Austin—one of those tedious tasks that many of us would happily hand off to an algorithm if the results were accurate enough.
The strategic throughline is clear: Google isn’t just adding AI to Search; it’s reshaping what the act of “searching” even is. In this emerging model, the user provides intent, and Google handles the execution—querying, parsing, decision-trees, and even action steps like booking or purchasing. You’re not exploring the web; you’re outsourcing that mental model to a machine that knows how to navigate it faster.
Of course, all of this assumes you trust Google to intermediate every layer of that experience. The trade-offs here are nuanced. You get convenience and time savings, but in return, you lose visibility into how information is sourced, what’s prioritized, and what doesn’t make it into your result bundle. As AI Mode and its task-oriented siblings become more capable, users will need to reckon with a shift from choice architecture to answer curation. The former gives you options. The latter assumes you’d rather skip the work.
Google frames this as an inevitable upgrade to how we interact with information—faster, smarter, more personalized. But to the more skeptical among us, it also looks like a new stage of enclosure. Where once Google helped you find your way across the web, now it increasingly suggests you stay in its orbit—and let it do the wandering for you.
Whether that’s progress, convenience theater, or a soft reboot of the internet as a walled garden remains an open question. But if you’ve ever wished for a clone to handle your weekend planning, inbox triage, or Zillow spelunking, Google’s answer is clear: You don’t need a clone. You’ve got AI Mode.
