For the past couple of years, Google I/O has been the stage exclusively for AI announcements, and this year wasn’t any different. This time, however, the focus was back on Google Search, but perhaps not in the way we expected. Instead of addressing the long-standing, fundamental problems with Search, Google introduced a lot of AI integrations into its marquee search engine — so much so that the line between Google Search and Gemini is increasingly becoming difficult to make out.
While AI Overviews and AI Mode have been meaningful additions to Search despite their rough start, it now seems that Google is merging two products with fundamentally different purposes. That makes one wonder: if Search can now behave like Gemini, what exactly is Gemini supposed to be?