Google CEO Describes A 2025 Beyond A Search Box

Google’s Sundar Pichai laid out the strategy for 2025, highlighting consumer-focused AI, rapid development of agency apps, a Chrome AI prototype called Project Mariner, and upgrades to Gemini and Project Astra, signaling a shift toward AI apps as the user interface for search.

While Pichai didn’t say that Google is de-emphasizing the Google Search box, he emphasized that in 2025 it will increase the focus on AI applications as the main point of contact between users and how they interact with Google.

For example, Project Mariner is a Chrome AI extension that can do things like take a list of top ten restaurants from TripAdvisor and drop it into Google Maps.

This focus on AI shows that Google is transitioning towards AI-powered user experiences that represent a broader interpretation of what Search means, a search experience that goes beyond textual questions and answers.

Google’s future depends on artificial intelligence

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has laid out a vision for 2025 that emphasizes the urgency to return to its roots as a fast-innovating company, which Pichai called “shabby” meaning being tough and resourceful, able to achieve a lot in a short time (and less resources). Most importantly, he emphasized solving real-world problems.

It also prioritizes “building big, new business” which could mean creating new business opportunities with AI, reflecting a strong focus on AI as a driver of innovation in 2025.

The Gemini app

Pichai also listed the Gemini app as a central focus for 2025, commenting that they are seeing growth with Gemini and that increasing the wider adoption of Gemini will be a focus in 2025. This is in line with the observation that Google is increasingly focusing on search adjacent access to products and services consumer-oriented artificial intelligence.

What this means for SEO is that we really need to start thinking in terms of the bigger picture of what search means. Perhaps in 2025, after more than 15 years of Google’s departure from the ten blue link paradigm, the SEO community will think more deeply about what search means when it’s multimodal.

Pichai was quoted as saying:

“There is strong momentum with the Gemini app, especially over the last few months… But we have more work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well. …Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year.”

AI products will be “massively developed”

The co-founder of Google Deep Mind was quoted as saying that Google “turbo charging” Gemini app, saying the following:

“… the products themselves are going to evolve massively over the next year or two.”

This means the Gemini app will get more functionality in an attempt to be more ubiquitous as an interface between potential website visitors and Google searches, a significant departure from the search box interface.

This is something publishers and SEOs need to think about as we move into 2025. Google is focusing on increasing user adoption of the Gemini app. If that happens, it will mean that more people will have an interface with that instead of the Google search box.

Universal Assistant (Astra Project)

Another thing that the SEO industry needs to seriously consider is Google’s universal assistant codenamed Project Astra. The Deep Mind co-founder has been reported to have discussed his Universal Assistant, which is being called Project Astra.

He is quoted as saying that he can:

“…they work seamlessly on any domain, any modality or any device.”

The word “domain” means that it can work in any topic, such as answering questions about health, how-to, entertainment, in any topic. The modality section covers text, voice, images and video.

This is a serious situation for SEO. Google’s new Deep Research agent search is an example of a disruptive technology that can have a negative impact on the web ecosystem.

One of the Google Deep Mind researchers said to be working on Project Astra is also listed as a co-inventor of a patent on controlling interactive AI agents through multimodal inputs.

The patent is titled, Controlling interactive agents using multimodal inputs. The description of the invention is:

“Methods, systems and devices, including computer programs encoded on data storage media, for controlling agents. Specifically, an interactive agent can be controlled based on multimodal inputs that include both an observation image and a sequence of natural language text.”

This is just one of dozens of researchers who are said to have worked on the Astra project. Astra is another project Google is working on that replaces the traditional search box as the point of contact for people to interact with web data.

The takeaway about Google’s plans for 2025

The takeaway from all of this is that publishers and SEOs need to take a break from focusing solely on the search box and take some time to consider what’s happening in multimodal AI. In 2025, AI is not just AI Views. AI is Gemini, these are new features coming to Gemini and a possible release of features developed from Project Astra, a multimodal universal agent. Agentic Search is already here in the form of Gemini Deep Research. All of this is a departure from the traditional search box as the point of contact between users, Google and websites.

Read the report on CNBC

Google CEO Pichai tells employees to prepare for big 2025: ‘The stakes are high’