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Call My Agentic!

Agentic search will, at least in theory, spell doom for many of the billions of sites on the open web, and usher in a strange back-end micropayment marketplace where agents trade commissions piecemeal. But is that theory undervaluing the power of people and the publishers who know how to connect with them?

sundar pichai
Now that Google wants search and Gemini to become even more personalized for the average person, large-scale publishers need to figure out how to monetize the agentic era’s robot crawlers, especially as they continue to deal with the open web’s collapse. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Julia Alexander
May 22, 2026

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Earlier this week, on a sunny California morning outside Google’s Mountain View headquarters, C.E.O. Sundar Pichai stood onstage at the company’s annual developers’ conference and offered an unsurprising but nevertheless startling declaration. He proudly touted that search, the business on which the company’s $4.6 trillion market cap was built 30 years ago, was getting an update for the A.I. future. Longtime head of search Liz Reid followed up with the details: Google A.I. will now attempt to personalize each search prompt with follow-up questions, and throw all of the relevant information into an interactive on-page box with a roundup of links on the side.