Google's Sundar Pichai Says Search Is Becoming an Agent Manager

Here's the Road From Here to There

Sundar Pichai was asked last week whether search would exist in ten years.

His answer: "Search would be an agent manager, in which you're doing a lot of things."

That's not just a prediction, it's pretty much a product roadmap. If you're running marketing for a mid-market business, the question worth asking isn't whether that future arrives, it's what your business needs to look like at each stop along the way.

Because there are stops. This doesn't go from a search box to a fully autonomous AI agent manager overnight. There's a road between here and there, and most businesses are going to get caught flat-footed at one of the transitions because they weren't paying attention to where they were on it.

Here's what that road actually looks like.

Stage One: Where We Are Now

Search today is still search. But the layer on top of it has changed significantly.

AI Overviews now appear on approximately 48% of all tracked queries, up from 31% a year ago. Google's AI Mode has reached 100 million active monthly users. The interface is still a box you type into. But what comes back is increasingly a synthesized answer instead of a list of destinations.

The downstream effect on traffic is already measurable. Organic click-through rates for queries where AI Overviews appear have dropped 61%, falling from 1.76% to 0.61%. In AI Mode specifically, 93% of sessions end without a click to an external site.

In B2B specifically, this is accelerating faster than most marketing teams realize. AI Overview coverage in B2B Technology went from 36% to 82% in twelve months. If your buyers are researching solutions in that category, the search experience they're encountering looks nothing like the one your content strategy was built for.

At this stage, your business still needs a website. You still need content. You still need to rank. But ranking alone no longer guarantees visibility, and visibility no longer guarantees traffic.

What Stage One demands from your business is source authority. The AI layer is pulling from somewhere to build those answers. The businesses showing up are the ones with content that's structured clearly, cites real evidence, and comes from domains with genuine topical depth. Not keyword stuffing. Not volume. Depth and credibility in a defined territory.

If your content infrastructure is thin, Stage One is already costing you pipeline you can't see in your analytics.

Stage Two: The Transition (12 to 24 Months Out)

Pichai described what comes next: "A lot of what are just information seeking queries will be agentic search. You will be completing tasks, you have many threads running."

This is where the shift gets material for businesses.

Right now, AI handles the answer. In Stage Two, AI starts handling the action. A user doesn't search for "best project management software for a 50-person team" and then visit six websites. They task an AI with evaluating their options, and the AI conducts that research autonomously, builds a shortlist, and surfaces recommendations without the human clicking through anything.

"The buyer's journey doesn't get shorter. It gets delegated."

This has a specific implication that most marketing teams aren't ready for. You're no longer marketing to the buyer at the moment of search. You're marketing to the AI that's doing the searching on their behalf.

"You're no longer marketing to the buyer at the moment of search. You're marketing to the AI that's doing the searching on their behalf."

That means your brand's discoverability can't depend on a person choosing to visit you. It has to depend on your brand being legible enough, credible enough, and structured enough that an AI agent includes you in the shortlist it builds for the human who tasked it.

The businesses that thrive in Stage Two are the ones who treated their data infrastructure, their content authority, and their digital presence as assets to be maintained rather than campaigns to be run.

Stage Three: The Agent Manager State

Pichai didn't put a timeline on this one. He said the models are changing fast enough that even thinking five years out is paralyzing. But the destination he described is clear:

"So I think people will do long-running tasks that can be asynchronous."

In this state, search isn't a moment. It's a process. A user sets a goal. AI agents work across multiple threads, over time, pulling from sources they deem authoritative, executing actions, and returning with outcomes rather than results.

At this stage, a business that isn't embedded in the agent ecosystem won't exist as an option to be considered.

"It won't get bypassed. It just won't come up."

What Stage Three demands is agent-addressability.

• Can an AI agent find your pricing?

• Can it understand your service scope well enough to evaluate fit?

• Can it access

  • your availability

  • your case studies

  • your differentiators

  • in a format it can actually process and use?

"This isn't a website problem. It's a data architecture problem."

The businesses that will be competitive in Stage Three are building that architecture now, not because they can fully anticipate what the agents will need, but because they understand that clean, structured, machine-readable information is the prerequisite for everything that comes after.

The Only Mistake That's Unrecoverable

Pichai made an interesting point about how to think about this moment:

"The curve is so steep. It's exciting to just do the year ahead."

He's right about the pace. But that framing is for Google, a company with the resources to bet on multiple futures simultaneously and absorb the ones that don't land.

For a mid-market business, the equivalent of "just do that year ahead" is not inaction. It's deliberate positioning for the next transition on the road, while keeping the longer arc in view.

The businesses that are going to struggle aren't the ones who can't predict exactly how Stage Three unfolds. They're the ones who stay in Stage One thinking while the transition to Stage Two is already happening around them.

Search is becoming an agent manager. The road between here and there is real, and it's already moving.

Where are you on it?

Want to understand where your business stands at each stage of this transition? That's the conversation we're having with every client right now. Let's talk.

Sources

1. Sundar Pichai interview.

2. BrightEdge Generative Parser, 12-month analysis February 2025 to February 2026

3. Seer Interactive, September 2025.

4. Google VP Nick Fox, December 2025, via Quantumrun, January 2026.

5. Exposure Ninja AI Search Statistics, February 2026. Zero-click behavior in Google AI Mode.