Google’s latest earnings call was all about AI. AI Overviews are popular (well, I mean, unless you are an SEO). We will see them appear for more queries. Project Mariner and Project Astra are going to change how we interact with computers. And Search is going to change significantly over the next year.
AI Overviews - more is coming
AI overviews are driving increased user satisfaction and more search usage.
From Sundar Pichai:
”AI Overviews are now available in more than 100 countries. They continue to drive higher satisfaction in search usage.”
AI Overviews are not going away. When they are present, people tend to use Search more. We are learning that we can ask longer, more detailed questions.
“We have 7 products and platforms with over 2 billion users and all are using Gemini. That includes Search where Gemini is powering our AI overviews. People use Search more with AI overviews and usage grows over time as people learn that they can ask new types of questions. This behaviour is even more pronounced with the younger users who really appreciate the speed and efficiency of this new format.”
We will see more AI Overviews in Search.
From Philipp Schindler:
“We have already started testing Gemini 2.0 in AI Overviews and plan to roll out more broadly later in the year.”
“We have already started testing Gemini 2.0 in AI Overviews and plan to roll out more broadly later in the year.”And from Sundar Pichai:
Ads are in overviews already in the US on mobile (I haven’t seen any yet. If you have, please shoot me a message in the Search Bar and I’ll include you in newsletter.)
Philipp said,
I expect we’ll see more ads in AIOs. And as those happen, we will likely see AIOs appearing for more transactional queries.
Are ads coming to the Gemini Chatbot?
It sounds like they will one day, but not for a while yet.
Circle to Search is popular
Yup, I’m amongst those users. (The ones who use Circle to Search, not the younger users 😂).
If you haven’t yet used Circle to Search, it’s hard to explain just how useful it is. You long press a line at the bottom of your screen and the screen goes all sparkly, indicating you are now able to “circle”. Your circle might be an actual circle or a squiggle over certain words. I’ll often use the translate feature for quick translation. Sometimes I’ll do a reverse image search, but most often, I’m looking for more information on something I’ve just read on my screen. A new search pops up when you do so.
Circle to Search will be super helpful when we start using extended reality devices - more on this next.
Extended Reality (XR) is coming - Project Astra
Oh boy this will be interesting.
Check out this review of Project Astra by Marques Brownlee:
You can skip to 8:15 to see Circle to Search in action.
A lot of people don’t know that you can use an early version of Google’s XR in AI Studio. Choose “Stream Realtime” and “Show Gemini” and then you can talk to Gemini about the world around you. I find it helpful for learning how to care for my plants. I cannot wait till I can use it in glasses while cooking.
Will this be a fad that comes and goes, kind of like Apple Pro? Perhaps, but I don’t think so. I think that AI in glasses will permanently change how we interact with machines. We will one day laugh that we used to tap plastic keys with our fingers in order to communicate with computers.
And if you’re thinking that you wouldn’t use it because you don’t like searching with your voice, there’s lots of innovation that will potentially solve this. Meta is working on a device that reads the neural impulses that travel through your wrist as you think about typing.
And here’s a Google patent for an interface that allows a user to make selections via facial expressions or even our thoughts via a brain computer interface.
Many others are working on brain computer interfaces as well.
Project Mariner is coming - will use your browser for you
I personally think this feature will radically change how we use the web. OpenAI recently released, “Operator”, a system that can take over your browser, search the web and do things like fill out forms, click buttons and more.
Google has their own version of this which is coming soon - Project Mariner.
It’s hard to grasp what this means for the average user. I think it will be incredibly helpful for SEOs. We may be able to give it tasks to perform for competitor research like, “Research to see if our competitors have created any new content. If so, summarize what was created, what intent it is serving and whether we have similar content or perhaps brainstorm on ideas to create something better.” Or maybe, “Compare my webpage against the ones that are ranking well for this query. Speculate on what makes those pages likely to be more helpful for searchers, keeping in mind both Google’s Guidance on Helpful Content and the information in the Quality Rater Guidelines.”
I’m even more excited when I think about using Project Mariner as an assistant. Similar to hiring a human assistant, it may take some time to teach Project Mariner how to correctly do its jobs. I picture I could teach it to proofread my newsletter, publish it to my website, write the email to go out to my subscribers, write social media posts and then present it to me for approval before sending it all out. This would save me so much time.
When is Mariner coming? Pichai says that both Project Mariner and Project Astra are coming soon:
Google Lens usage is growing
Have you tried searching with an image? Google Lens has improved significantly. When it first came out, I found it awful for advice on gardening. Recently I took a picture of a plant that was not thriving. Lens took me to Reddit discussions showing the exact same image. The suggestion was it was Thrips - a nasty parasitic infection. I then conversed with Gemini to help me further diagnose it. Augh. After following the instructions I did see the tiny little white bugs. I ended up tossing a few plants and then Gemini walked me through planting new ones which are thriving.
It is worth noting that other than Reddit, I didn’t visit any websites in this quest.
However, sometimes Lens searches do suggest helpful websites.
Sundar Pichai said, “Lens is currently used for over 20 billion visual search queries each month.”
Lots of changes are coming to Search
Sundar Pichai recently said that Search will change profoundly in 2025.
And in this earnings call:
Also,
“There’s a lot more to come. I think we’ll continue to bring in AI in more powerful ways, in multimodal ways, things like what we’ve done with Lens and circle to search. You can imagine a future with Project Astra. You can also imagine areas like we have done in Gemini Deep Research. You are really dramatically expanding the types of use cases for which search can work - things which don’t always get answered instantaneously, but can take some time to answer. Those are all areas of explorations and you will see us putting new experiences in front of users through the course of 2025.”
Let’s talk a little about Deep Research. I think it’s a little odd that OpenAI launched a similar product this week and gave it the same name as Google’s. Google’s Deep Research is available to Gemini Advanced users. I find it so incredibly helpful.
We recently started doing worm composting. I wondered if you could make a liquid from the worm poop instead of using it directly in the garden. Gemini told me this was called “worm tea”. (I grossed out a few of my friends by telling them about this and neglecting to mention the tea was for our garden, not for them.) So, I set Deep Research off to find me loads of information about making worm tea. It took about 5 minutes to get my report. I then spent the next hour visiting the websites in it and learning more. And now I make a weekly worm tea by putting worm castings (their poop) into a foot of a nylon and soaking it in warm water. My plants are so happy!
Deep Research is an agent that did the searching for me, saving me time, and allowing me to learn something new.
I highly suspect Deep Research will eventually become a part of Search.
Some have already seen AI Overviews in Search that are entire articles, quoting many different websites. Here is a story on Search Engine Roundtable about one spotted that referenced 61 sites.
What does this mean for SEOs? I’ll soon be publishing more about Google’s recently updated Quality Rater Guidelines. There is so much emphasis in there on originality and not paraphrasing what’s already on the web. There is no point in publishing articles that simply rewrite what’s already known on a subject. Unless perhaps you are the go-to source on a topic, what will be valuable in search is new information, new research and interesting things that don’t already exist online.
What does Google think about DeepSeek?
This new model out of China has caused quite a stir because it is able to reason and chat at greater efficiency and less cost than many other models.
When Pichai was asked about this he said,
A lot of DeepSeek’s popularity came from the fact that you could use a thinking model for free instead of paying $20/month to use ChatGPT’s o1. Again, a lot of people don’t realize that you can use Gemini’s Thinking models for free in Google’s AI studio.
If there’s all of this innovation, why is Google stock down?
I’ve seen a few people look at the stock price and proclaim that Google is getting it wrong by thinking that people want AI in their Search results.
I am no financial analyst, but my suspicion is that investors are not happy because Google is going to pour $75 billion, a MASSIVE amount of money into growing in the next year.
From Anat Ashkenazi:
“We expect to increase our investments in technical infrastructure primarily for servers followed by data centers and networking. We expect to invest approximately $75 billion in CAPEX in 2025 with approximately $16 billion to $18 billion of that in the first quarter.”
“We expect to increase our investments in technical infrastructure primarily for servers followed by data centers and networking. Also,
“We expect some headcount growth in 2025, in key investment areas such as AI and Cloud.”
In the short term, that will make Google less attractive to investors. If you’re in it for the long haul, it sounds like a wise investment to me. I am betting on Google to continue to grow immensely as AI changes the world.
(This article was written by me, Marie, a human. The featured image of Sundar the man who Pitches AI was made with Grok.)
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