Google Search is turning into a system that helps people complete tasks. Sundar Pichai, the company’s chief executive, said on a podcast that Search will become an agent manager. He expects many searches for information to be handed to AI agents, software that acts on a person’s behalf. He also said people will run many tasks at once and let some of that work carry on after they move on.
An AI summary at the top of search results helps someone read faster. An agent manager helps someone get something done, such as checking several stores, gathering quotes or making a reservation. Those tasks used to mean visiting websites one by one. So more of the buying process can happen before a visitor ever lands on a company’s site.
Google’s documentation for AI Mode, an AI feature in Search, shows this taking shape. AI Mode is built for questions that need deeper exploration or complex comparison. One question can set off several related searches across subtopics and sources before an answer is put together. So being found no longer comes down to matching one keyword and waiting for a click. A business has to show up wherever AI Mode goes looking for supporting details.
That changes the job of a website. For years, SEO was mostly about helping a person discover a page and decide what to do next. The same site also has to work for software that gathers facts, compares options and moves a task forward. As a result, SEO becomes more important, and its target changes. The right information has to be easy for software to find, interpret and use.
Clear commercial information becomes more valuable: product details, pricing, policies, availability, service terms and contact options. If those details are missing, buried or inconsistent, the site becomes harder for software to interpret and harder for buyers to trust. A site built only to attract attention will be weaker than one built to support a decision.
If software is going to do more than read, websites need clearer ways for it to interact with them. Google says WebMCP, which it released as an early preview, is meant to let agents perform actions on a site with greater speed, reliability and precision. It lets a website offer AI agents a set of tools to use there, so software can work with the site as well as scan it.
