Google I/O 2026: Gemini 3.5 Revamps Search

Alphabet upgraded Google Search at its annual developer conference, Google I/O 2026, on May 19, 2026, deploying the Gemini 3.5 Flash model as the default in AI Mode. The company also introduced a reimagined AI-powered Search box and unveiled Search agents and agentic booking features designed to expand Search’s capabilities for users and developers.

Search Rebuilt With Gemini and AI

At Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai led the keynote for Google I/O 2026, the company’s largest annual event showcasing advances across Search, Workspace, Cloud, and extended reality. The company said it is upgrading Search globally with Gemini 3.5 Flash as the default model in AI Mode, describing it as delivering sustained frontier performance for agents and coding.

AI Mode will power conversational and generative Search experiences, including new AI Overviews and follow-up interactions that preserve context across exchanges. These features are live worldwide on desktop and mobile.

Google also introduced an intelligent AI-powered Search box, calling it the biggest upgrade in over 25 years. The box supports multimodal inputs—text, images, files, videos, and Chrome tabs—and dynamically expands to help users describe their needs. It offers AI-powered suggestions that go beyond autocomplete while maintaining traditional Search results. The new box is rolling out in all countries and languages where AI Mode is available.

Agents, Commerce, and Personalization

Google described a new era of Search agents, starting with information agents that users can create, customize, and manage. These agents operate continuously in the background, reasoning across web content and real-time data such as finance, shopping, and sports to notify users of relevant updates.

The company announced agentic booking and calling features that allow users to specify detailed criteria, aggregate pricing and availability, and complete reservations through provider links. In select categories like home repair, beauty, and pet care, users can ask Google to call businesses on their behalf. These commerce features will roll out across the U.S. this summer.

Google is integrating its Antigravity coding tools and Gemini 3.5 Flash’s agentic coding capabilities into Search to assemble custom generative interfaces on the fly. These include interactive visuals, tables, graphs, and simulations designed to present answers in formats tailored to the question. These generative UI features will be available free of charge to all Search users this summer.

Search will also offer reusable dashboards and trackers—mini apps for specific tasks that users can revisit and update. These tools are part of the new Search suite planned for release this summer.

On personalization, Google is expanding its Personal Intelligence feature in AI Mode to nearly 200 countries and territories across 98 languages. It allows secure connections to apps such as Gmail, Google Photos, and soon Google Calendar, with no subscription required. The company emphasized transparency, choice, and control in the design.

The event also introduced Pics, an AI-powered design and image-generation app for Google Workspace aimed at everyday productivity users, including teachers and small-business owners.

Investors and analysts framed Google I/O 2026 as a showcase of Alphabet’s full-stack AI capabilities, highlighting the Gemini models, emerging agentic commerce, and the company’s in-house TPU (tensor processing unit) chips. The company did not provide new formal financial guidance or segment forecasts. Several new Search features were described as free or requiring no subscription, with no details on monetization timing or formats.

“We’re also introducing a new, intelligent AI-powered Search box, marking its biggest upgrade in over 25 years,” the company said in its product blog.