Google’s Sundar Pichai recently said the future of search is agentic, but what does that actually mean? A recent tweet from Google’s search product manager shows what the new type of task-based search looks like. There is growing evidence that the Internet is moving toward a model in which each person has their own agent who performs tasks on their behalf, benefiting from an increasingly personal Internet.
Research becomes task-oriented
The Internet, with search as the gateway to it, is a model in which websites are indexed, classified, and served to users who use essentially the exact same queries to retrieve virtually the same sets of web pages. AI is starting to break this pattern because users are turning to search topics for which a website link doesn’t provide the clear answers that users are gradually conditioned to ask. The Internet was designed to serve websites that users can access, read content, and connect with others through social media.
What changes is that people can now use that same search box to do things, just like Pichai described. For example, Google recently announced a global rollout of the ability to describe requirements for a restaurant reservation, and AI agents will fetch the information, including reservation information.
Rose Yao, head of search products at Google tweeted:
“Date nights and large group dinners just got a lot easier.
We’re excited to expand agent restaurant booking in search globally, including the UK and India!
Tell AI Mode the size, time and mood of your group and it scans multiple platforms simultaneously to find bookable seats in real time.
No need to switch apps anymore. No more worries. Just good food.
This is not research, it is the accomplishment of a task. What hasn’t been stated is that restaurants will need to be able to interact with these agents, to provide information such as available reservation slots, menu choices that evening, and that at some point these websites will need to be able to book a reservation with the AI agent. It’s not something that’s happening in the near future, it’s already here.
This is exactly what Pichai was speaking when he recently described the future of research:
“I feel like in research, with every job change, you can do more.
… If I fast forward, a lot of what are just information search queries will be agent searches. You will be performing tasks, you have many threads running.
When asked if the research would still be relevant in ten years, Pichai replied:
“Search would be an agent manager, right, where you do a lot of things.
…And I can see research doing versions of these things, and you do a bunch of things.
Everyone has their own personal Internet
Cloudflare recently published an article arguing that the Internet was the first way humans interacted with online content and that cloud infrastructure was the second adaptation that emerged to meet the needs of mobile devices. The next adaptation is wild and has implications for SEO as it introduces a hyper-personalized version of the web that impacts local SEO, shopping, and information search.
AI agents are currently forced to use internet infrastructure designed to serve humans. This is the part that Cloudflare says is changing. But what’s deeper is that the old way, where millions of people asked the same question and got the same indexed answer, is disappearing. What replaces it is a hyper-personal experience of the Web, where everyone can manage their own agent.
Cloud Flare explain:
“Unlike all applications that have preceded them, agents are individual. Each agent is a unique instance. Serving a user, executing a task. Where a traditional application follows the same execution path regardless of who uses it, an agent requires its own execution environment: one in which the LLM dictates the path of the code, calls the tools dynamically, adjusts its approach, and persists until the task is completed.
Think of it as the difference between a restaurant and a personal chef. A restaurant offers a menu – a fixed set of options – and a kitchen optimized to serve them at volume. This is the most applications today. An agent is more like a personal chef asking: what do you want to eat? They may need completely different ingredients, utensils, or techniques each time. You can’t run a personal chef service with the same kitchen setup you would use for a restaurant.
Cloudflare’s view is that they provide the infrastructure to support the needs of billions of agents representing billions of humans. But that’s not the part about SEO. The thing about digital marketing is that the time for search to become “agent manager” is here, now.
WordPress 7.0
Content management systems are quickly adapting to this change. It’s very difficult to overstate the importance of the soon-to-be-released WordPress 7.0, as it’s packed with capabilities for connecting to AI systems that will enable the Internet’s transition from a human-centered web to an increasingly agent-centered web.
Today’s Internet is designed for human interaction. Agents operate within this structure, but this will change very quickly. The search marketing community really needs to think collectively about this shift and really understand how content management systems fit into this picture.
What sources do agents trust?
Search marketing professional Mike Stewart recently posted on Facebook about this change, reflecting on what it means to him.
He wrote:
“I let Claude take over my computer.
Not metaphorically: it moved my mouse, opened applications, and performed tasks on its own.
That’s when something clicked…
It’s no longer just about AI assistance.
This is an AI operating on your behalf.Google’s CEO is already talking about “agent search”: AI doesn’t just return results, it manages the process.
The real questions therefore become:
👉Who controls the trip?
👉 What sources does the agent trust?
👉 Where does your business appear in this decision layer?
Because there is no “agent search” without the ecosystem feeding it: websites, content, companies.This part is not going away. But it’s being abstracted.
Task-based agent search
I think what we need to understand is that humans still make the decision to click the “make reservation” button and that at some point, at least at the B2B level, purchasing will become more and more automated.
I still have doubts about complete purchasing automation. It doesn’t seem naturalbut it’s easy to see that the day may soon be approaching when, instead of writing a shopping list, a person will simply ask an AI agent to talk to the AI agent at the local grocery store to identify who has the items in stock at the best price, toss them into a shopping cart, and show them to the human, who will then approve it.
The takeaway is that the web may be transitioning to a “everyone has their own personal chef” model, which represents a potentially frightening level of personalization. How does SEO optimize for this? I think this is where WordPress 7.0 comes in, as well as any other web agent ready content management system.
Featured image by Shutterstock/Stock-Asso
