Google rebuilds the search box around Gemini 3.5 and background AI agents

Google used I/O to push AI Mode from optional surface to default Search experience, swapping in Gemini 3.5 Flash globally and replacing the keyword-shaped query box with a dynamically expanding multimodal input that accepts text, images, files, videos, and Chrome tabs. Follow-up questions now flow from AI Overviews into a conversational AI Mode session with persistent context. The company claims AI Mode has crossed one billion monthly users and that overall query volume hit a record last quarter, framing the redesign as a response to demand rather than a hedge against it.

The more consequential shift is agentic. Information agents will run continuously in the background, monitoring the open web and Google’s real-time data for user-defined triggers like apartment listings or product drops, launching this summer for AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. Agentic booking expands to local services, including Google placing phone calls to businesses on a user’s behalf in categories like home repair and pet care. Search will also generate custom UI on the fly via Google Antigravity and Gemini 3.5 Flash’s coding capabilities, producing interactive visualizations and persistent mini-apps such as fitness trackers tailored to the query.

Personal Intelligence, which connects Gmail, Google Photos, and soon Calendar into AI Mode, is rolling out to nearly 200 countries and 98 languages with no subscription required. The combined direction collapses the line between a search query, an assistant session, and a long-running automation — and routes more of the open web’s traffic through Google-synthesized answers and Google-initiated phone calls rather than outbound clicks.