Google buried the search box at I/O. It lasted 25 years.

For 25 years, opening Google meant a blank white rectangle, a blinking cursor, and the instruction to reduce your question to a handful of keywords. At I/O 2026, Google's head of Search Liz Reid called what they announced "the biggest upgrade to our iconic search box since its debut over 25 years ago." What she meant: it's gone. In its place is an AI input field powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash that accepts text, images, files, video, and open browser tabs, dropping you not into blue links but into interactive AI-generated experiences.

The headline feature is "information agents" — background AI that runs 24/7, monitoring blogs, news sites, social posts, and real-time finance, shopping, and sports data, alerting you when something relevant changes. Google describes it as Google Alerts rebuilt with a frontier language model. Information agents launch this summer for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US.

Also coming: generative UI that builds custom calculators, interactive maps, and visual tools based on what you search. And mini-apps — tools you describe in plain language that Search codes on the spot. AI Overviews, the feature that drops AI summaries above results, now reaches 2.5 billion monthly users. AI Mode, launched a year ago, crossed one billion. Google's bet is that the best defense against OpenAI and Perplexity is to make its own product unrecognizable from the one that defined the internet age.