Google has taken another big step in its embrace of generative AI and conversational search. It has announced its biggest update to search in 25 years, (19th May, 2026) with major implications for people and brands.
It confirms what the team here at The Folk Group laid out in our recent report, AI and the Disruption of Financial Search and Distribution.
Here’s what’s changed, what it means, and what you need to do about it.
What Google just announced
Before we jump into it, it’s important to understand what is driving Google’s changes.
When we search on Google, we’re all starting to use queries that are longer and more descriptive and natural. These queries are closer to the way we’d ask a question of a real person in real life, rather than a machine.
To respond to that, Google is building out its AI Mode. This is when it takes you into a full-screen AI search page to help dig into your needs.
In AI mode, the search box will now expand. This is to give you more space to use natural language to ask your questions. You will also be able to upload images, videos, files, and Chrome tabs alongside your query.
The feature will allow back-and-forth conversation, much like an AI chatbot, so you can dive deeper into the topic.
That’s not all. One of the biggest changes from Google is its announcement of ‘information agents’. These are personalised AI agents that it says will work in the background, 24/7, to find what you need, monitor evolving topics and help you take action.
So, you won’t have to keep on re-searching (yes, Google is helping us all search less). These agents will be rolling out this summer, starting with premium subscribers.
Say you need some new shorts (clearly this is on my shopping list!). With information such as your size, brands you like and price points, the agent will find you options and add to your shopping cart via the new universal cart feature or agentic check-out. It will also use your Google Pay details for the purchase, but it does need your final confirmation to buy.
The key thing here is that over time and in the background, it will be consistently building up a picture of the things you like, from all of the data it collects, so it will be genuinely proactive in assisting you. This functionality is rolling out in the summer (although the UK won’t get it as early as the US).
Agents will also help for things like booking local experiences, hotels and services, based on the criteria you shared.
For example, imagine you are after a private karaoke room for six on a Friday night that serves food late. Google’s agents will serve up the latest pricing and availability with direct links to finish booking through the provider of your choice.
In some cases, Google says it will call businesses on your behalf (this will be an automated service, not a human-sounding conversational AI). Again, US Google users will get access to this first, starting this summer.
Now you begin to see why all of this amounts to Google’s biggest update in a quarter of a century. In a nutshell, it is going to do more of the heavy lifting for us than ever.
You might be thinking we’ve been here before with Google hype. For example, with voice assistants back in 2016, when the company made a huge fanfare over its Google Home launch, promising that voice assistants would be the equivalent of a PA. But back then, they went too big too early and overhyped the potential for voice assistants.
So, what’s different now? Well, there are several factors at play. Firstly, competition. Google can’t sit on its laurels. It’s in a race with OpenAI and Anthropic to develop the best and most advanced agents in the world. And secondly, us people. We’re embracing AI, we have shown the appetite (despite trust issues) and that is aiding the pace of innovation too. So will this latest Google Update turn out to be much ado about nothing? I don’t think so, not this time.
Hello? Is your brand out there?
As well as us humans, this all has huge ramifications for brands. If we no longer have to search, then how do brands ensure they are visible to us humans? There is a real and growing risk you will simply not exist in any of the information being served up.
These changes give us yet another reminder of why brands can’t solely rely on AI platforms or Google. To stay visible, brands will need to widen their digital footprint and invest more in other platforms; think TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, depending on your sector and where your audiences are.
You need an active presence for two reasons. Firstly, so that when a consumer turns to AI Mode for a recommendation, your brand is already a recognised part of the conversation. And secondly, so you are visible more broadly in case AI simply does not mention your brand in its response to a query. What this means is that creators become even more important to your marketing strategy because they can talk about your product or service helping with credibility and digital share of voice.
But if I were running a marketing department right now, I’d also be investing in real life experiences, stepping out of the digital space and creating opportunities where people come together. I wouldn’t be risking putting all my eggs in the digital basket.
This is something that Google itself has acknowledged.
Whether through OOH, experiential, or community-led initiatives and integrated campaigns, we’ll all need to work harder to create moments that matter to make sure we give people a reason to search for brands or ask about them in AI Mode.
We said this was coming
When we published our AI and the Disruption of Financial Search and Distribution, report in March we made the case that brand has never been so important. This is what Google has confirmed with its update.
In our report, we warned that as discovery moves into AI summaries and zero-click search, brands that don’t adapt would face a gradual thinning of traffic. We flagged the shift towards agent-to-agent models, where consumers delegate decisions to AI and the consumer may never visit a brand’s website at all. We highlighted the risk of absence from AI-generated answers and recommendations. Jump to page 27 of the report to see what else we had to say about that.
Google’s changes make all of this real. It’s happening at breakneck speed, with some of the biggest changes coming this summer, in the US at least.
Your goal: being who AI trusts enough to surface
For early movers, there are huge opportunities in this new era of AI discovery, provided you offer unique human perspectives and expertise. This means making sure more people are talking about your brand, your expertise is clear and doing things that resonate emotionally with people.
It means that everything you create online matters, perhaps more than ever before. A piece of content, PR placement, forum mention, social post, product page… it will feed signals into Google and LLMs. You are teaching AI, and hence your customers, what you’re about and who you’re for.
It also means what other people say about you is critically important in shaping what appears in AI results. So, you’ll need to work harder than ever to influence what others are saying about your brand.
In our report, we made the case that communications and marketing teams will play a starring role in this shift. AI assistants prioritise authoritative editorial coverage, clear thought leadership, expert commentary, people’s actual experiences and perspectives, well-structured FAQs and consistent third-party validation. That’s the territory comms and marketing teams already operate in, the bar just got higher to make sure people know and choose your brand.
Understanding human behaviour has never been so important
I’m constantly reminded of the irony that AI is teaching us all to focus more on humans. Google’s AI sees people as individuals, not personas and brands cannot lose sight of that. That’s something we’ve been saying here at The Folk Group for a few months now. Brands need to be constantly thinking about people, putting them at the heart of their strategies, really understanding them, not just operating off the same old customer demographics they have always used.
To lead in your category and in this era, you need a better understanding of real people than you have ever had. No broad assumptions, but understanding the real people buying your products or services, their pressures, their priorities, their mood, their culture, their mindset. Content created with real people, based on real life, on the big topics that matter to your audience, is the content that gets cited and will do more and more as it should always have. No keyword stuffing, just content that reflects what users need.
This is precisely what we do at The Folk Group and it’s why we built the Real Folk Panel, our community of lived experience experts who help our clients to really understand people, and build important emotional and behavioural cues into their marketing and communications strategy.
What to do now
Much of this isn’t new. We should always have been creating content that solved problems, for example. But the latest updates are an intensification of the challenge and one that can’t be ignored. Getting seen, being known, being wanted and chosen, that’s every brand’s priority or challenge. But now, with less chance of being seen, approaches and investment need to shift.
Here’s where to start to keep up with the changes and protect your brand visibility:
1. Build audience-first strategies: rather than surveys that give you data and an illusion of understanding of your customers, run panels with real people, in real life.
Make sure you are speaking to diverse audiences who have lived experiences of disability, neurodivergence and mental health, ethnicity, faith, sexuality, caring responsibilities, financial pressure and more. What will set you apart is making sure people with lived experience of your product or service shape your work and what you sell.
Real people, with real lived experience, will help you build a more authentic human connection with your audiences and that’s something Google wants to see. Track sentiment, share of voice, map user journeys, give them a great experience and you’ll be rewarded for it. Know your audience better than Google does!
2. Create content that solves problems, not content that games algorithms: trustworthy content that helps people with decisions and is not cookie-cutter or generic or created by AI itself – that’s what AI assistants draw on when surfacing information to help people navigate decisions.
Say you are a supplement brand for women in the menopause – do you know all of the symptoms she’s going through before she even thinks about buying? Do you understand her thought process for choosing a product?
Creating specific conversational content that taps into our needs is better for everyone, more helpful and what we should be doing anyway.
3. Invest in building your FAQ content: clear, direct answers (no fluff or keyword stuffing) will help you get surfaced. Think about the different ways real people ask the same question and the different questions they ask.
4. Don’t rely on measuring visibility or share of voice alone: research and analyse the prompts your customers are using and how they behave to understand how they are shaping your brand presence in AI results.
5. Invest in the product or service: this is not the time to skimp on the quality of your offering. With real people’s opinions and experiences more important than ever, good enough will not do.
6. Get in touch with us: our Real Folk Panel helps clients understand how AI is reshaping behaviour, and helps them get closer to their customers so they can put that real human, audience understanding at the centre of their brand and growth strategies. hello@thefolkgroup.com