[0:00]Sundar Pichai sat down for a long interview about Google's AI strategy. Now, a lot of this is about TPUs and capital allocation and stuff that doesn't really matter that much for local SEO, which is what I want to look at. But there's one six-minute stretch where he answers the exact question every local SEO person is afraid to ask. What happens to search when agents take over? And I'm pretty sure most agencies and business owners worried about local SEO are not watching this hour-long interview. Now, I've been doing local SEO since 2016. I've worked with over 200 local businesses and I'll tell you what, the panic in the SEO community over the last 18 months has been deafening. Search is dead. AI overviews are killing us. Google's cooked. Pichai addresses all of this, not directly, but if you know what to listen for, he's telling us exactly how search is going to evolve and exactly why the people panicking are getting it wrong. Four clips, let's go ahead and get into this. How do you think about the future of search actually? Because a lot of people now are talking about chat as a new interface. Obviously, Gemini is incorporated or search has incorporated Gemini or AI results in the context of Google. But a lot of people are not talking about agentic flows and everybody's going to have a personal agent who instead of typing in a query, it'll go and do something for you. You know, instead of asking about trips, it'll go and plan a trip for you. What do you view as the future of search? Is it a distribution mechanism? Is it a future product? Is it one of ways people are going to interact with the world? I feel like in search with every shift, you're able to do more with it. And, you know, we have to absorb those new capabilities and keep evolving the product frontier. You know, if it's mobile, product evolved pretty quickly. You're getting out of a New York subway, you're not looking for web pages, you want to go somewhere, how do you find it? Yeah, I've been there, right? You walk out of the subway, you're hungry, you're you want something for lunch, you open up Google and you start looking and yeah, you're not going and reading websites. You're glancing at the GBPs, you're glancing at the reviews, you're looking at the business titles to try to find someplace. You're not like sitting down and doing 20 minutes of research, reading web pages. And what's interesting to think about here, when mobile first happened, I remember that everyone was saying desktop search was dead. People are going to use apps, Google is cooked, SEO's over, every couple of years people freak out that SEO is dying. Sound familiar? Instead of dying, search got bigger. More queries, more intent, more context, it just looked different. Right? And the guy coming out of the subway, looking for a restaurant, they just want three quick options with reviews. Someone who is a restaurant that's a couple minute walk away, right? That's local search. That's GBP management. That's what we do. The interface changed, right? We're not pulling up websites, we're looking at the GBP, but the intent didn't. Okay? So keep that in your head as we start to dive into the agent stuff that the interface doesn't necessarily change the intent. people's expectations shift and you're moving along. If I fast-forward, a lot of what are just information-seeking queries will be agentic in search. You'll be completing tasks. You'll have many threads running. Will search exist in 10 years? Well, you know, you may just evolves into something. It keeps evolving. You know, search would be an agent manager, right? In which you're doing a lot of things. So this is it. This is what so many people are missing. You just heard it from the CEO of Google. Of course Google's not saying that search is going to die. But he very specifically said that search doesn't die. He doesn't say that Google becomes chat GPT and a chat interface. He says that search becomes an agent manager. Okay? So what does that mean? An agent manager? Google is still the orchestration layer. Google is still the one routing the intent. The agents are doing the tasks, but Google is running the show. So if you ask yourself, if an AI agent is going to go find a plumber to book, or to use the prior example, go find a restaurant to eat lunch at. What does that AI agent needs? It needs structured data, it needs verified business information, it needs reviews it can trust, it needs hours, service, categories, location, it needs basically a Google business profile. Okay? This agentic future doesn't kill local SEO. If anything, it makes it more important because when a human is searching, a human can tolerate messy data. They'll figure it out. When an agent searches, it needs clean, structured, machine readable entity data. The plumbers whose GBP is well optimized, whose services are aligned, whose categories are correct, whose website actually matches their GBP, that's the plumber the agent is going to choose. Who has reviews that mention the exact service that was just searched for? This is literally the Core 30 methodology that I talk about all the time. Align the website with the GBP categories and services. It's been the right answer for 10 years and it's going to be the right answer for the AI agents coming up next. Everyone is panicking about AI killing local SEO, but they're looking at the wrong layer. AI isn't replacing the index, okay? AI is instead the new user of the index and the agents just aren't as good at humans at understanding messy information. I think in some ways, I use antigravity today and you know, you have a bunch of agents doing stuff. And, you know, I can see search doing versions of those things and you're getting a bunch of stuff done. I think the root of your question is, if you think of search as a prompt that is not longer than one line, returning a bunch of different ranked results as opposed to just telling you the right answer or something. I think your question is, does that product modality exist? But today in AI mode in search, people do deep research queries. Right? So that doesn't quite fit the definition of what you're saying. Yeah, so this is interesting, right? So he's trying to say, hey, will what Google does now exist later and what Pichai is saying is Google doesn't do that now, dude. Like, Google is already moving toward AI search. People are already having deep AI conversations in the search bar. Like the old type in three or four keywords and get a list of 10 blue links, that ain't Google anymore. That doesn't quite fit the definition of what you're saying. But people adapted to that. Right? So I think people will do long-running tasks. Sure. It can be asynchronous. We all started, or the the you know, life started as unicellular organisms, and now we have this complex life. And so the question is almost like, does that former version or paradigm eventually go away and really what was search becomes an agent and your future interface is an agent and the search box in 10 years or N years is no longer in the- I mean, the form factor of devices are going to change. IO is going to radically change. And so, you know, so it's tough to I think you can paralyze yourself thinking 10 years ahead. But we are fortunate to be in a moment where you can think a year ahead and the curve is so steep. It's exciting to just do that year ahead. Whereas in the past, you may need to sit and like envision five years out. Wow, okay. Uh so this one's a reality check. The CEO of the most important search company on Earth is talking about planning one year in advance. Not five, not 10, just one because the curve is moving too fast for the ability to plan farther than a year in advance. Okay, this is kind of insane to think about that the CEO of Google is saying they're not planning more than a year out. Right? So think about what this means for you or me, running an agency or running a local business, right? Stop building a five-year SEO strategy. Stop writing content calendars for 2028. Okay? Stop worrying about what search looks like a decade from now. The CEO of Google isn't worried about what search looks like a decade from now. Instead, focus on what works today and what is obviously going to be coming up in the next 12 months. And right now, that's GBP optimization, it's entity alignment, it's review velocity, it's review attributes, it's local content that actually matches your services. That's what's working today, that's what we see coming based on very recent, like March 2026 updates, the Google Ask Maps feature. We see attributes being more important, we see proximity being less important, but it all still centers around GBP optimization and entity alignment. So basically, in 12 months that list is the same as it is today, except we have the added task of making sure that your data is clean enough that an AI agent is able to parse it and understand what your business does. The models are going to be dramatically different in a year's time. And so, you know, so I think riding the curve itself is exciting and and so I think I think I think it's good to have both and uh embrace it.
[9:49]So this is something that I want every business owner watching this to really internalize. So what Pichai is saying, the AI moment isn't a pie that's getting split up, okay? It's the pie getting 10 times, 100 times bigger, okay? We know that YouTube didn't die because TikTok showed up. YouTube got bigger when TikTok showed up. Amazon didn't die because Google showed up. Amazon got bigger. Right? The market expands to accommodate new technologies, to accommodate new entrance. Local services can be that same story. More searches, more intent, more agents running queries, that means more businesses that are needing to be findable. The losers in this shift aren't going to be the agencies that adapt. They're going to be the agencies that are playing defense. The ones writing is SEO dead articles instead of learning how to optimize for agentic search. When we talk about search and where it's going and things like this, I'm reminded of the fact that basically a year ago, kind of spring/summer of '25, sentiment was very negative on Google. Uh, the prevailing view was that, you know, Search is cooked and, you know, we're going to have a really hard time. The core business model is under attack, blah, blah, blah. You know, uh, Google was trading for $150-ish dollars a share and now people have realized that's silly. You know, Google has up and down the stack, whether it be applications or models or TPUs or whatever, as well as, you know, Waymo and YouTube and all the cool bats. What do you think investors, as a proxy for kind of informed sentiment, um, misunderstood this time last year? Because clearly, there was some big misunderstanding. You know, it was obviously kind of very invert-focused in that moment. So, you know, to me, it was very clear in that moment, hey, the Overton window shifted. We have like, I felt like the company was built for that moment. Um, you know, the vertical thing, it's it's it's not an accident or something, it was a very intentful. We were in the seventh version of TPUs. Yes. I remember it might have been 2016 Google I/O where we announced the TPUs and spoke about we are building AI data centers. This was 2016. We were thinking about, you know, uh, well you know the company was operating in an AI-first way. Yeah, this is the move, right? Everyone starts to panic, but the ones who know the fundamentals end up winning. And local SEO fundamentals haven't changed and they won't change with agentic search, as far as we know in the next year or so. So align your entity, own your GBPs, match your services, earn your reviews, the interface will change, but the game won't. That's what Pichai is saying happened to Google. They started building AI data centers in 2016 before they'd even invented the Transformer technology. Yet, in 2025 people were saying that they're behind the curve. So overall here, we have three takeaways. Number one, search doesn't die. Search becomes an agent manager, which means structured business, organized information for local businesses matters more in the future, not less. So if you're not optimizing your GBP and aligning your website to your GBP, you're going to be invisible to both humans and search agents. Number two, plan for 12 months, not for five years. The curve is too steep, change is happening too fast. Execute on what works now and stay close to the changes. Number three, the agencies and businesses that win from here on are the ones who stop treating this as a zero-sum game. More queries, more intent, more opportunity. Play offense. Google had their best quarter ever last quarter. More searches than they've ever had before. In the era of chat GPT, months after people said that Google was going to die, they had their best quarter ever. I've been teaching this framework for years and nothing Pichai said today changes anything. If anything, it doubles down. I'll see you in the next one.
