Google CEO Sundar Pichai says search will evolve into an AI agent manager handling long-running tasks rather than returning results

In a recent interview, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that many information-seeking queries will become “agentic search” where AI systems complete tasks on users' behalf, and that search itself will function more as an orchestration layer managing multiple AI agents simultaneously. Pichai declined to say whether the traditional search paradigm would still exist in ten years, saying the pace of model development makes planning beyond a year nearly impossible and that embracing uncertainty is more useful than envisioning a fixed future. Notably, across more than an hour of discussion about the future of search, Pichai never mentioned websites as a destination, raising questions for publishers and the SEO community about where the open web fits into Google's agentic vision.