Happy Memorial Day and welcome back to The Daily Courant, your afternoon guide to Puck’s best new reporting. Here’s what you need to know… and stick around for the latest on Google’s A.I. search bombshell.

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Meanwhile, on the pods…

And now, a little more on Google’s A.I. search bombshell…

MEDIA

Last week, at Google’s annual developers conference, C.E.O. Sundar Pichai declared that search was getting an update for the A.I. future. Going forward, Google A.I. will personalize every query with follow-up questions while surfacing the results inside an interactive box, with a small roundup of links on the side. In other words, the 10 blue links we’ve grown accustomed to will be displaced by more A.I. Overviews, YouTube Shorts, and ads. Technologists cheered; publishers passed the antacids.

As Julia reports, the announcement was further confirmation that we’ve fully entered the era of Google Zero—the term that describes the looming death of search traffic. For publishers, the emerging challenge is to figure out how to monetize the agentic era’s robot crawlers. (OpenAI’s Sam Altman has suggested micropayments, while Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince is already implementing a “pay-per-crawl” service.) But as Julia noted, the publishers most likely to survive this revolution are those that double down on what A.I. can’t replicate: networking, obsessive analysis, and community. After all, less than 10 percent of U.S. adults reportedly use A.I. chatbots for news, and about half of those users don’t trust the results. Ironically, in an agentic-first internet, authoritative sites may be more important than ever.

Click here to read Julia’s full story.

WASHINGTON

Trump has spent his second term largely getting what he wants from Congress as he’s launched wars, imposed tariffs, and accumulated crypto wealth with little scrutiny. But last week, he encountered more resistance from his party on the Hill than at any point since his second swearing-in.

FASHION

Neil Blumenthal, co-founder and co-C.E.O. of the Millennial-beloved eyewear brand, discusses its big, Google-backed bet on A.I.-powered smartglasses—and how he plans to get people to wear them.

ART

A timely look at the market themes, top lots, and various peculiarities of a short, buoyant New York auction cycle that still seemed unusually long.

SPORTS

The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand joins John to discuss Apple’s use of numerous iPhone 17 Pros to produce a live soccer match, and whether iPhone broadcasting could become the norm. They also get into the 2026 World Cup and whether issues like ticket pricing, immigration concerns, and stadium occupancy will significantly impact the event. Finally, they discuss Netflix’s acquisition of the Women’s World Cup.

WASHINGTON

John welcomes former Bloomberg Businessweek editor and current Atlantic staff writer Josh Tyrangiel to discuss his new book, A.I. for Good: How Real People Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Things That Matter. Tyrangiel, who until recently wrote a column on A.I. for The Washington Post, weighs in on the verdict against Elon Musk in his $150 billion lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI; why the wannabe kings of the A.I. industry are less interesting than the question of what—today and in the future—A.I. is actually good for; and why, despite enraging both the left and parts of the military establishment, Palantir isn’t so bad after all.

MEDIA

On a very special Memorial Day episode, Jon Kelly rejoins the show to discuss a plethora of pressing digital-media agenda items: the second- and third-order effects of James Murdoch’s Vox acquisition; Barbara Peng’s ouster from Business Insider; and the between-the-lines on Jeff Bezos’s warning shot about The Washington Post during his CNBC sit-down.

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