Google Search becomes an agent manager. Sundar Photosi said it clearly in two interviews this spring:
“A lot of quests will be running in Search. You’ll be completing tasks. You’ll have a lot of threads running.”
A week later, at Google Marketing Live 2026, Nick Fox, SVP of Search, Ads, and Commerce, said the following:
“The way to improve AI search is the same way to improve search. Create great content.”
When the CEO defines the direction of the product and the SVP ensures the direction of development, treating search and agents as two separate disciplines means using two playbooks for one product.
That face is already live. AI mode is in the Chrome address bar. Search agents run behind very long queries with one click. Chrome’s automated browsing fills out forms and completes bookings on behalf of users with OS-level permissions. These are not separate products with separate development playbooks. They all get the same web.
What Pichai Actually Said
Photosi gave two interviews this spring that together paint a very clear picture of where Google Search is headed. On the Cheeky Pint podcast in April 2026, he explained the process: “If I fast forward, most of the queries will be Search Agent. You’ll be completing tasks. You’ll have multiple threads running.” He called it “Search like an agent manager” and introduced it as an AI Mode, where users run deep research queries that don’t fit the old keyword model.
Then, at Decoder with Nilay Patel after I/O 2026, he did something very revealing. Patel showed him the live result of the AI Overview on his phone for “the best Chromebook.” Picashi looked at it and said: “He probably has more insight than you should have in a certain question you showed me.”
That acceptance is more important than a statement of association. It does not pretend that the product is finished. He called it scope for improvement in a rapidly growing area. In the same interview, he also said that Google is committed to sending traffic to the web: “Everything we do in everything, you’ll see us five years from now sending more people to the web. I think that’s the product direction we’re committed to.”
Both claims sit next to each other in the same debates. The direction of the product is convergence: search queries become agents, tasks are completed within Search, agents browse on behalf of users. The promise is continuity: traffic will still flow to websites. Hold both in your head at the same time, because that gap between direction and promise is where your risk lies.
Nick Fox Said The Same Thing From A Different Angle
At Google Marketing Live 2026, Nick Fox sat down with Semafor’s Ben Smith and answered the question of direct optimization. Fox is Google’s SVP of Information and Knowledge, overseeing Search, Ads, and Marketing. His statement: “The way to improve AI search is the same way to improve search. Create good content.”
He added one game: “Skip the top level.” His assumption is that AI handles the first-level answers, so the content generated by AI search is deeper content than the summary that is already generated by the model. “If you want to buy something, you don’t want to hear what the AI has to say. You want to hear from the person who used it.” This is the difference between commodity content and non-property content, which Google has been tossing around for a long time now: if AI can generate an answer on its own, your content needs to provide something that AI can’t.
This is what No Hacks guest Jono Alderson has been saying for over a year. The content that AI ignores is content that restates what the model already knows. Citable content is content that holds something the model must return because it cannot generate it: original data, first-person information, specification of a named entity, assuming the model is not confident enough to generate it for itself.
When the CEO says that products are integrated and the SVP says that development is the same, the explanation comes: one strategy, not two. The different “AEO strategy” or “GEO strategy” that advisors have been selling as a new discipline falls apart when the salesperson himself claims it is the same playbook. The r/TechSEO community came to a similar conclusion this week when Google published its official guide to doing AI: “Basically. SEO.”
What This Means for the Website You’re Building
The website that works for classic search is the same website that works for agents. Server-rendered HTML so content can be viewed without JavaScript hydration. A study I published this week measured 274 fintech companies and found that 36% are invisible to AI searchers because they rely on JavaScript to provide relevant content. 17% deliver zero content without the use of JS. Repair is not complicated. 99% of those similar websites deliver full content once served. The gap is the default: raw HTML first, not JS-rendered-last. Semantic markup so the agent knows what each element is. Structured data for machine-readable identity. Fast delivery so the browser or agent never expires. Internal linking so both guide and agent can navigate the full site.
There is nothing new about this. They are the same requirements that Google published in its agent-friendly checklist in April, and they map directly to what AI agents learn when they visit your website: accessibility tree, semantic structure, extractable content.
Companies that handle agent readiness and search optimization as the same method were accurate. It was not yet morning. The seller confirmed what practice has shown: search is the same test that is used in the guest class now that includes both people in Google Search and agents in AI Mode.
Build a single playbook: machine-readable identity, extractable content, available actions, server-side and semantic and organized and fast and well-connected. That definition fits the classic search and web agent and the product you’re describing Photosi, which exists both at the same time.
Pichai admitted that the product is not finished. “More visionary than it should be” is a refreshingly honest read of a moving production. The gap between where AI Overview exists today and where search-as-a-manager is going is your window. The direction is set. Build one playbook now, and build a product for Google.
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This post was originally published on No Hacks.
Featured Image: Meepian Graphic/Shutterstock
