Google's AI-Driven Search Evolution: Ambitious Plans for 2025

Google plans to make search even more AI-driven in 2025

In a recent earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressed the company's plans to incorporate AI more deeply into its online search functionality. "As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet," Pichai said during his opening remarks. Since the release of ChatGPT, Google has gradually shifted towards a more AI-driven search model, first introducing 'AI overviews' in May of 2024. The feature was released to mixed reception, with many users reporting inaccurate information and strange hallucinations. Such as recommending to add glue to pizza, or to stare at the sun for 'health benefits'. There are also concerns regarding how Google's AI overviews affect brand visibility, with many businesses reliant on search results to drive customer acquisition. During the earnings call, Pichai further outlined the company's plans to pack AI features into Google's search functions. He particularly highlighted the technology's potential to evolve into a 'chatbot' style tool - allowing users to interact and ask follow up questions, as you would with current AI assistants. "I think the [Search] product will evolve even more," said Pichai. "As you make it more easy for people to interact and ask follow-up questions, etc., I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth." One of the key concerns for users is reliability. The tendency for AI chatbots to hallucinate or be confidently wrong is well-established among frequent users of the tools. If Google plans to expand AI-driven search further, it's possible that those errors will become magnified, to the detriment of audiences who are less informed about its limitations. The prioritization of AI-driven over human content is also of increasing concern. While Google still maintains close to a 90% market share in search engines, it's becoming more common for users to head to social media platforms to find their search results. If the market begins to show a preference for human-driven search first, Google's new direction may end up pushing users even further towards such alternatives.

Google wants Search to be more like an AI assistant in 2025 | TechCrunch

Google Search is in the midst of a "journey" around AI, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said during the company's earnings call on Tuesday. The start of that journey was AI overviews, a controversial and monumental shift in how Google delivers information to billions of Search users. But that was just the beginning. "As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet," said Pichai during his opening remarks on the call. Throughout the call, Pichai laid out the next phase of Google's plan to pack Search with AI features from the company's research lab, DeepMind. The Search product is slowly becoming more like an AI assistant that browses the internet for you, looks at web pages, and returns an answer. It's a long way off from a simple search system that gives you ten blue links. Google has been on this path for a few years now, ever since the search giant was caught flat footed by the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022. The shift has massive implications for websites that rely on Google's traffic and businesses that buy ads on Google Search. Not everyone is happy about it, but Google is pushing ahead. When asked about the future of AI and Search, Pichai said that, "You can imagine the future with Project Astra," a reference to DeepMind's multimodal AI system, which can process live video from a camera or computer screen and answer user questions about what the AI sees in real time. Google has big plans for Project Astra, including having the system power a pair of augmented reality smart glasses one day. Apparently, Project Astra will also be part of Search. Pichai also mentioned Gemini Deep Research - an AI agent that takes several minutes to create long research reports - as a feature that could fundamentally shift how people use Google Search. Deep Research automates work that people have traditionally done with Google Search. But now, it seems Google wants to do that research for users. "You are really dramatically expanding the types of use cases for which Search can work - things which don't always get answered instantaneously, but can take some time to answer," said Pichai. "Those are all areas of exploration, and you will see us putting new experiences in front of users through the course of 2025." Pichai said further that Google has a "clear sense" of the Search experiences it could create with another one of Google's AI agents, Project Mariner. That system can use the front-end of websites on behalf of users, making it unnecessary for people to use websites themselves. Google's CEO also said there's an "opportunity" around letting users interact more and ask follow-up questions with Google Search. Pichai was light on details there, but it sounds like Google is considering ways to make its Search interface more like a chatbot. "I think the [Search] product will evolve even more," said Pichai. "As you make it more easy for people to interact and ask follow-up questions, etc., I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth." Today, ChatGPT has matured into one of the internet's most used products, with hundreds of millions of weekly users. It presents an existential threat to Google Search's long-term business. To address it, Google is not only building a competitor AI chatbot with Gemini, but also injecting AI features directly in Search. Of course, the first step on Google Search's AI journey did not go very well. When Google rolled out AI overviews to all of Google Search, the system displayed inaccurate and weird AI hallucinations. These included answers that told people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza. Google admitted at the time that AI overviews needed some work. Despite this negative rollout, it appears Google is just getting started putting AI into Search.

Sundar Pichai says even more AI is coming to Google Search in 2025

Google will continue to go all in on AI in 2025, CEO Sundar Pichai announced during the company's Q4 earnings call Wednesday. Alphabet shares have since dropped more than 7% on news that the company giant fell short of fourth-quarter revenue expectations and announced an ambitious spending plan for its AI development. "As AI continues to expand the universe of queries that people can ask, 2025 is going to be one of the biggest years for search innovation yet," he said during the call. Pichai added that Search is on a "journey" from simply presenting a list of links to offering a more Assistant-like experience. Whether users actually want that, remains to be seen. Recommended Videos "I think the [Search] product will evolve even more," Pichai continued. "As you make it more easy for people to interact and ask follow-up questions, etc., I think we have an opportunity to drive further growth." And with any luck, Google's AI empowered Search of tomorrow will stop recommending glue as a pizza topping. The company also announced that it plans to spend about $75 billion in AI capital expenditures this year in an effort to keep up with the rest of the rapidly growing AI market. For comparison, Meta has announced that it plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on its AI efforts in 2025 while Microsoft has committed $80 billion in AI capital expenditures. However, it is increasingly unclear if those levels of expenditure are actually necessary, given the efficiency revelations emerging from DeepSeek's recent model unveiling, which offers comparable performance to OpenAI's latest models but at a fraction of the cost and power consumption. Pichai played down some of those concerns during the call, stating that Google's Gemini family are, "some of the most efficient models out there, including comparing to DeepSeek's V3 and R1."