TL;DR

Google I/O 2026 confirmed that AI-driven features like the Intelligent Search Box, Antigravity, and UCP are likely accelerating a shift to a zero-click, walled-garden future, fundamentally breaking the contract with the open web. This means that while good SEO/AIO remains necessary, marketers must accept diminishing traffic returns and higher effort. The only viable path forward is to stop focusing on short-term tactics and urgently pivot to building and demonstrating brand domain authority and ontological relevance to secure sustainable business outcomes while making a big push to increase brand recognition and recall.

Introduction

We’ve covered these on one blog or another (from the videos, sadly, nobody has ever seemed to want to send us to California) for about 15 years give-or-take, but Google I/O 2026 was the one with what seemed to us to be the most noticeable disconnect between the conference presentations and the conversations and sentiment we’ve observed online – and was met with a loud and collective ‘meh’ from Wall Street – which, when Alphabet goes all out to proclaim itself the future of all things, is a particularly muted response.

We’re not anti-AI here – I’m using Google’s NotebookLM at the moment to store and search resources for this blog, for example. What is notable, however is that, as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was roundly and loudly booed for referencing AI and Gemini in a commencement speech (one of several notable AI related booings at US commencements in the last week), as reports rise about growing gen-Z skepticism and anxiety around AI, as the AI bubble seems ever closer to popping by the day, and as numerous other negative indicators abound, the self-congratulatory pomp seemed even more strange than usual.

Nevertheless, as ever there was a lot of information contained in the various presentations (both said and unsaid) that offer insight into where Google sees the future of search and the internet more broadly. 

Whether that’s the emphasis on agentic search, the move toward a longstanding prediction of ours around the UI of AI search with the GenerativeUI Antigravity demonstration, or the curious absence of hardware announcements (and the number of times presenters said “let’s dive in” – I found myself wondering if every presentation was AI written, or if AI is actually much better than I thought, but just based on the Googlers presenting at I/O), these conferences are packed with hints, obfuscation, boasts, nudges, pushes and hype that probably say more in a few hours than any given year of Google press releases.

So, let’s, um, dive in? Shall we?

Key announcements for search

As you’d no doubt expect, the vast majority of the announcements and launches announced at this year’s I/O were related to AI. I don’t think we’ll be surprising anyone. Since Sundar Pichai’s demanded Google rush out a clearly half-baked Bard LLM into search, leading to SERPs recommending glue as a pizza topping, and chipping in with advice on the number of rocks you should eat as part of a healthy diet, Google has been embarking on a serious ‘move fast and break things’ adventure. 

It has broken a lot of things.

That being said, when almost the entire world depends on Google as a defacto monopolist in the world of search, we have very little choice but to pay close attention to every action, every word (spoken and unspoken), and this year was not the best of news for search as brands have known it for 30 years.

Intelligent Search Box

“Before, the Search box was a contained space, but now, it’s totally reimagined with AI. It expands with your curiosity […] This is the biggest upgrade to our iconic Search box since its debut over 25 years ago”

While the above quote is directly from the transcript of the announcement, with all the pomp and circumstance you’d expect; what was probably more interesting about this particular reveal from Liz Reid was the extensive preamble:

“Now, as Sundar mentioned, AI Mode has surpassed more than 1 billion monthly users, and we’re seeing phenomenal growth, with AI Mode queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. As people have learned how much more Search can do, they started bringing more questions, so much so that last quarter, we saw Search queries reach an all-time high. 

“But what’s even more remarkable: You’re asking your real questions in all their super specific detailed glory, knowing Search can really tackle them. You’re having real conversations with Search, going back and forth, and deeper. So you’re not just asking nearby hikes. You’re asking “can you build an itinerary for [a] hiking day trip near me with great views and dog friendly trails, and a lunch spot with convenient parking?

“And now, we’re entering the next chapter of Google Search, where incredible AI features aren’t just in Search; Google Search is AI Search through and through. Now, it’s an AI Search that brings to figure out our most advanced Gemini models, our newest agentic capabilities, and the full breadth of the world’s information. With over 1 billion facts updated a minute, billions of new web pages indexed every day, and connections to an infinite range of human perspectives. So whatever is on your mind, you can come to Google and truly ask anything.”

You’ll notice here – as with Sundar Pichai’s now infamous podcast interview – there’s no mention here of sending people to web-pages, though Reid at least acknowledges that that’s where the information and billions of updated facts are coming from. The emphasis here is ‘you can come to Google’ and that is where many, many of the journeys will end.

While much of the SEO coverage has been on Google’s decision not to move to AI search as the default for all searches (though since we began writing, some more clear-eyed takes have begun publishing), the direction of travel here is still clear. 

Don’t get us wrong – some of the demonstrated capabilities are genuinely impressive (though we’d expect them to be less impressive in the wild for a little while at least – Google is very good at somewhat slick demonstrations followed by… less slick launches [there is already an example of this since we finished writing, see the post below[), but what this conference communicates – and past Google comms confirm – is that Alphabet is intending to push the same buttons as many of its FAANG counterparts to become a walled garden with little intention of sending traffic unless it absolutely has to.

The unfortunate thing for search and SEO specialists is – the advice we’ve been giving for the last few years remains the same. The majority of the best-practice SEO tactics are the same for AIO/GEO – but we cannot expect the same return in terms of traffic. Some of that will be recovered from a better standard of traffic, but a lot of it will require marketers to embrace the zero-click future and (again, as we’ve been saying for a while now) the ever increasing importance of brand.

Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity

“We’re bringing Antigravity and the agentic coding capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash right into Search. So Search can build you the ideal format exactly for your question, completely custom on the fly. We’re talking dynamic layouts, interactive widgets, entire experiences, all created just for you”

Another longstanding prediction of ours took another step closer with this release – though in the worst possible way. We’ve been talking about how surprising it’s been to see AI companies persisting with a command line/chat-bot style UI for a while (since the I/O that first announced Bard) and predicting a move to immersive, web-page style experiences. 

However, while we’d hoped for these experiences to be populated by existing content and elements created and published by brands, Google has decided instead to eat all of the published content and then refuse to acknowledge this, instead using Gemini 3.5 Flash and Antigravity to rebuild this content on the fly in one of the most hilariously high-tech and tone deaf recreations of the ‘You made this? I made this?’ meme in human history.

The announcement of Gemini Flash 3.5 and Antigravity, in addition to dashing our hopes and destroying our last remaining trust in Alphabet, also made the following claims:

• Speed and performance: according to the announcement, the model generates output tokens four times faster than other frontier models, and outperforms the previous Gemini 3.1 Pro model on challenging coding and agentic benchmarks.
• Cost efficiency: Google claims it delivers frontier-level capabilities at less than half the price of comparable models, making it highly efficient for executing massive agentic workflows (and executing potentially millions of small businesses at the same time).
• Immediate rollout: as of May 19, 2026, Gemini 3.5 Flash was rolled out as the new, default model powering Google Search’s AI Mode globally, the Gemini consumer app for all users, and the Antigravity developer platform.

Universal Commerce Protocol

“With incredible advancements in AI, we are entering a whole new era. We’ve been building the foundation for agentic commerce, and now, we’re bringing that future right to you. People shop across Google over a billion times a day, and for years, we’ve connected you with brands and retailers to help you get exactly what you’re looking for. 

“It starts with our Shopping Graph, the world’s most comprehensive catalog of products. It now has over 60 billion listings and they are constantly updated. Combine that, the scale of the Shopping Graph, with our most advanced Gemini models and you get entirely new ways to shop. More powerful, more intelligent, and more fun! 

“Now, when it comes to agentic commerce, we are focused on delivering three key building blocks to make this future a reality. First, the Universal Commerce Protocol, or UCP for short. UCP does for agentic commerce what HTTP did for the web: It gives agents and systems a common language. It’s an open-source standard that allows all of the key players to work across the entire shopping journey. 

“That means it makes everything from product research to checkout to shipment tracking totally seamless. And we’ve been thrilled to see the entire industry rally behind it. We co-developed and launched UCP with an incredible group of founding partners, and recently welcomed Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe.”

That’s right, the entire industry: Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe. I’m sure the average ecommerce business will be delighted to know that such wholesome and community focused brands are working to make sure that customers may never need to see their site again. The fact that it will be more fun will obviously help.

Snark aside – this is another launch that pushes SEO/GEO etc. into the “caretakers of the web” role, but this time with no real promise of any reward. In fact, along with removing many of the levers that could be pulled to improve brand visibility (by trying to effectively end the traditional search experience), search and SEO practitioners are left with all of the same work to do, additional work on demonstrating domain expertise on and off-page, and with only the promise of diminishing returns. 

The UCP announcement also made the following claims:

• UCP will do for AI shopping what HTTP did for the web, giving AI agents and commerce systems a common language.
• UCP will allow AI agents to communicate directly with merchant systems to handle everything from product research and discovery to shipment tracking and secure checkouts.
• UCP will mean AI agents can complete purchases directly within Google’s surfaces using stored payment credentials. 
• The protocol will automatically surface relevant fees and card rewards before checkout (ending the business model of voucher code sites and plugins), while allowing the brands to remain the merchant of record.
• Google originally launched UCP in January 2026 with partners like Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart and has extended this with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Stripe.
• UCP is expanded beyond standard retail into new verticals like hotel bookings and local food delivery.
• UCP-powered checkouts are also coming to YouTube in the US, and the protocol is expanding geographically into Canada and Australia, with the UK planned for later.
• UCP will serve as the foundational infrastructure for Google’s newly announced “Universal Cart,” an intelligent shopping cart that follows users across Google Search, Gemini, YouTube, and Gmail to monitor price drops, and track deals in the background.

What this all means

As we’ve stated throughout – the general advice we’ve been giving (that good SEO and Good AIO/GEO remain pretty closely related) remains true. What Google has revealed here is that they are intent on expecting far more of that work for an ever decreasing percentage share of traffic. We’d love to be pleased by this – brands are going to need SEO more than ever and in ever greater amounts – but due to what is, essentially, a broken contract between Google and the open web, we’re also looking at more work for less, and that is going to damage the reputation of the industry.

There are going to be hard working SEOs and marketers out there that will face difficult conversations following a series of decisions that are out of their control. Thankfully for us, brands that have been invested in pulling appropriate levers will face the coming influx of issues to a lesser degree than others, but it’s unlikely that any brand will remain untouched. There was research published recently (forgive us, we can’t remember who posted it or where we read it, it’s been a long week), that stated the average number of clicks per published page has decreased by almost 80% over the last ten years – it’s an unsustainable trajectory, but one Google seems intent on following.

The key to surviving the next few years – both for online businesses and for search as a profession – is for it to become the information retrieval arm of marketing, and to focus on (as we’ve said ad nauseum) building and demonstrating brand domain authority and ontological relevance, while supporting marketing efforts to improve brand recognition, salience and recall. The brands, and professionals, that make this move first are going to have the best chance of navigating what is likely to be a tricky old time for anyone outside of well established global brands.

The May 2026 Google Core Update

This is rolling out as we write this – so there’s not much we can say except that it would make sense for it to be directly related to some of the announcements made at I/O. For now, all we can say is that we expect high levels of volatility to continue during rollout (and likely for a while after), and point you to the only current Google communications on the update:

“This is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.”

Final thoughts

There were some good things for the open web – the SynthID project seems like a great idea, for example, and projects such as UCP are not, at least not entirely, bad for the wider web, but there was a clear disregard for online businesses on display that makes for some pretty grim reading. It will be an interesting few months as we see the reaction to this from actual searchers who have become increasingly wary of AI, and disenchanted with Google, but the message for now is clear – work harder, get less, go hard on “brand” to improve your outcomes.

• Developers are protesting the abrupt deprecation of the popular open-source Gemini CLI in favor of the closed-source Antigravity CLI (and a severe packaging error in the Antigravity 2.0 installer that bricked existing development environments).
• The SEO community has seen massive ranking volatility and a “content purge” that seems linked to the launch of various AI products lately  – and expects more of the same.
• Publishers remain terrified of an accelerating “zero-click” search crisis, with organic click-through rates dropping up to 89% when AI Overviews intercept user queries.
• Wall Street investors viewed the event mostly as a “product flex”, and the stock barely moved as a result, remaining cautious about Alphabet’s massive cap-ex (projected at $175 billion to $185 billion for 2026).
• Consumers have been largely hostile, with general technology forums criticising the keynote as a boring corporate spectacle of “AI, AI, AI”, while a pervasive, deep societal anxiety remains over the internet being flooded with “AI slop” and the impact of automation on jobs.

All in all, though Google presented this as a revolutionary I/O, it has understandably had a less positive reaction almost universally. How this impacts Google’s de facto monopoly position remains to be seen – no company has ever had such an iron grip on their vertical before now, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them to lose it.

If you’d like to know how to prepare yourself for the next phase of the web, you can drop us an email, call us, or use the contact form for a no obligation discussion.