For a first-time visitor, Google I/O’s energetic, optimistic atmosphere is almost like an anointing.
The bet of last year has become the pillars of growth because it worked. Ask Maps has been the playbook for Ask YouTube releases. Gemini 3.5 Flash powers Antigravity – think Claude Code, but Google – and Googlers are already using it to build features that have been demoted.
Everything was shipped quickly, and everything felt secure.
There was something for everyone.
- Gemini Omni, which was compared to Nano Banana but with a video (I have weird proof).
- Smart glasses are making a comeback.
- It feels like a video game that can be told and played out in real time.
- The workspace can now tell the documents to exist.
- Google Maps images can be transformed into surrealistic fever dreams by using information (I asked what the use was, and it sounded like a solution looking for a problem: Hollywood studios can stop shooting on location?).
- I even have Gemma running on my phone so I can chat with the little model on the plane. (PS American Airlines now has free Wi-Fi, so I’m good.)
But I haven’t even gotten to the most curious part yet.
Gemini is becoming like Sesho. Search has become like Gemini.
Now there are features in both products that work in the same way: monitoring the web and notifying you immediately when something related appears.
In search, information agents. For Gemini, Spark or Daily Brief. The overlap is obvious.
So I asked one of the product managers directly: “What do you think about long-term feature management and a lot of overlapping resources?”
Answer: “Right now, it’s all about speed.”
They post relentlessly. The other three PMs behind the main I/O features mean the same thing. All those features were launched and shipped this year, 2026. That was impressive.
The PM added: “How speed is achieved is up to the administration.”
I took that to mean: get on board now and get it later.
Once you see it, you can’t get rid of it
In that frame, the whole day looked different. I’ve seen a lot of impressive demos, but I keep asking myself: what should I actually do with the next one?
Now I have Gemma on my phone, but one of the developers couldn’t give me a daily use case. I got a demo of AI Mode’s monitoring capabilities by telling me to “keep up” and seeing how the pieces connected. But when I ask the follow-up – “How do I manage these alerts and everything else? What happens when they expire?” — was not answered. Granted, it’s still a demo, but the lack of response was telling.
The second-order effects of many of these factors seem not to be fully considered. It gave me the impression that developers are dogfooding these models from the command line, not from scratch.
One small but telling example: as of this writing, I can’t delete old Gemini chats in the web browser, nor can I in the Mac app.
Universal Cart: The feature that got everyone talking
One feature that came up repeatedly in conversations with both developers and users was Universal Cart, Google’s new shopping protocol.
When people asked what I thought, I said: “If you’re Google, you should be very happy, because if this is accepted, you own the ultimate experience. If you’re someone else, you’re probably worried.”
That didn’t seem to worry the group I spoke to, most of whom felt alienated from the growing anti-AI sentiment in the US.
Later, I spoke with an SEO expert at a large ecommerce company that already uses Universal Cart. When I mentioned the speed comment, they said: “That sounds like what we experienced during the implementation.
A puzzle of AI content guidelines
The velocity-over-oversight mentality also helps explain why Google’s AI content guidelines have been so controversial.
Four days before I/O, Google’s Search quality team told publishers to “write for people, not AI.” The AI agent team then took the stage and demonstrated a future where Google agents browse, interpret, process, and generate content across the web.
If the future is increasingly AI-mode – with agents creating, downloading, and creating for users – the direction for publishers is starting to become meaningless.
Why this is important in the web ecosystem
I don’t want to diminish the work these engineers are doing. I told them exactly that. As someone who builds search products and our customers, I empathize. Most of the time you hear criticism, not praise.
But I can’t help but wonder what happens if all these overlapping features – the bloat, the inability to remove, manage, or sync things cleanly – become technical debt that needs to be removed. Right now, the AI playbook seems to be: feature implementation first, fix later.
Still, I sincerely respect that a company as large and established as Google is moving so quickly, and I’m really excited to see how some of this plays out. With their cash flow and their ability to make their own TPU chips, they can place more bets and see what sticks.
I wanted to continue talking to that PM, but we were unfairly kicked out of the area.
The bright spots are real
Google reported that the last quarter saw an all-time high in search queries. They take authentication and authentication seriously, with SynthID expanding to Search and Chrome, new discovery partners like OpenAI, and C2PA content authentication for transparency.
Those are logical steps forward.
But this move will likely cause unintended consequences. I hope that the rush to go faster doesn’t continue to devastate the already rocked web ecosystem by breaking too many things along the way.
All this to say: it’s an exciting time to be searching.
Celebrate deeply.
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