Among the Search announcements at Google I/O in May was one that got less attention than the AI Mode headlines and may matter more over time. Google says it’s entering what it calls the era of Search agents.
What was announced
In Google’s words, users can “create, customize and manage multiple AI agents” directly in Search, beginning with information agents that operate in the background 24/7 to keep someone updated on a topic, task or project.
Alongside it, Google described a rebuilt Search box, which it called the biggest upgrade to that box in over 25 years: it expands as you type, takes longer descriptions of what you want, and offers AI-generated suggestions rather than autocomplete.
What it could mean
A background agent monitoring a topic changes the shape of a visit. Rather than a person searching, scanning results and clicking, a system checks periodically and surfaces what changed. The moment of retrieval separates from the moment of attention.
For anyone publishing content that updates, which includes this site, that raises an obvious question: does an agent revisiting a page count as anything, and does its user ever arrive? Nobody outside Google can answer that yet.
What nobody can tell you yet
- Whether agents will send traffic. No public data exists on referral behaviour from these agents.
- How sources get selected. Google has published nothing about how an information agent picks what to monitor and cite.
- Whether it will show up in reporting. Search Console has been expanding its AI-surface reporting, and how agent activity appears in it is unclear.
- How many people will use it. Announced features and adopted features are different things, and Google has retired plenty of both.
Treat anyone selling agent optimisation services today accordingly. There is no evidence base to build a method on, and the honest answer to “how do I optimise for Search agents” is that nobody knows yet.
What to do now
Nothing special, which is usually the right answer to an announcement. The things that make a page a good candidate for an automated system to cite are the things that already make it a good page: a clear answer, a date, a named author, sources you can check, and structure a machine can parse. That’s covered in EEAT and in the structured data entry.
We’ll update this page as real data appears rather than as speculation does.
Sources
Google Search’s I/O 2026 updates, 19 May 2026. Quotations are verbatim from that announcement.