Sundar Pichai wants Search to become your “agent manager.” Judge Brinkema just made sure Google still owns the ad ops underneath it. Convenient timing.
No breakup, just new rules. Google won’t be forced to sell AdX, despite being found to have illegally monopolized key parts of the ad-tech market.
It got six years of good behavior instead, such as real-time bids for rival ad servers and no more first look or last look.
The front end shifted, too. WeatherNext 3 brought hourly, AI-generated forecasts directly into Google Search. But it’s not about the weather. It tells us something about the future of search.
Search is moving from finding information to delivering answers you can act on immediately. Pichai calls it “agentic search”. Something to think about.
But the task-based shelf is tiny. Productrise matched two million listings and found AI Mode returns 3.9 products per response, against 27.8 in classic Search.
Smaller and pricier, too. The lead price averaged 21.6% higher, the seller changed on half of matched products, and only 1.28% of Search-ranking products surfaced at all.
Losing that slot costs more now. John Mueller says recovery takes many months, three to six for disavows alone, because Google reprocesses signals slowly.
And for the end, your one new window. Merchant Center’s AI performance insights expanded to Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand, tracking brand visibility inside AI Mode.
Google owns the plumbing and the shelf. You get a report and a longer wait.
