As it stands today, I describe the company as offering four surfaces that serve two distinct behaviors.

Search remains information focused and now includes:

• AI Overviews for quick factual synthesis
• AI Mode for conversational, follow-up heavy queries

Gemini is positioned as the personal, proactive assistant for creation and tasks.

Why it matters comes down to focus and clutter. For information and commerce, most users still want the confidence of traditional Search. For more advanced projects, users want a ChatGPT inspired experience that helps them think, draft, code, or act. That said, the issue is that having these four distinct surfaces is confusing. Users don’t always know what to use and when.

Search is already broadening what a “query” looks like. The biggest noticeable change in an AI search world has been AI Overviews, which rolled out in May of 2024 and is now available globally. AI Mode rolled out later in May and is available in the U.S. and India, reaching about a quarter of global users.

Over the past two weeks, the update on the health of Search has been favorable as the impacts of Overviews and to a lesser extent AI Mode begin to shape the experience. The table below outlines key comments from the June earnings call, along with more recent remarks from Liz Reid, head of Search.

What’s most important is that queriers are growing. The hard number we got on the earnings call, up 10%, is encouraging and begs the question: what was query growth before generative AI took off? We reviewed the last 12 transcripts and found 16 comments about queriers. Unfortunately, none of them gave any meaningful insight into an apples to apples comparison with the 10% growth mentioned in the recent June quarter.

My sense is that query and click growth generally map to the same trend. On that metric, the company did provide details for the year 2022 showing paid clicks were up 10% y/y. In other words, the comment about queriers up 10% in June of 2025 is encouraging, given it suggests that dynamic has been stable over the past few years despite going up against the law of larger numbers.

We believe Google ultimately brings AI Overviews, AI Mode, and traditional Search onto a single page so users can see all three and choose the right tool per query, while Gemini remains a separate, more personalized agent focused on coding and task execution.

Think of a future results page that shows AI Overviews in the top left, AI Mode in the top right, and traditional Search below. I believe this shortens the path from answer to action by making conversation the first option.

Our basic rendering of what the future of Search could look like:

As for timing, my eyes are on next May at Google’s developer conference.

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