Summarize with AI
On June 25th, Pink Dog Digital hosted a webinar to break down the most significant announcements from Google I/O 2026 and Google Marketing Live, and explain what they mean for businesses of all sizes. Cory Wasielczyk and Coral Norman led the session, with Gina Ramsey joining from vacation to add some final thoughts. You can watch the full webinar replay here.
Here’s a recap of what we covered.
The Biggest Change to Search in Google’s History
That’s how Google CEO Sundar Pichai framed it, so we’re going to take it seriously. Google I/O 2026 was centered around a fundamental reimagining of the search experience; not just a new feature here and there, but a structural change to how search works.
If you’ve opened Google lately, you’ve probably noticed the search box looks different. There’s a prominent AI Mode button, a plus sign to add images, and the ability to change the AI model. It looks a lot like ChatGPT or Gemini, and that’s intentional. Google VP of Search Liz Reid put it plainly: before, the search box was a contained space. Now it’s totally reimagined with AI.
The technical term for this is multimodal search. You can give Google any input – a long prompt, a short one, an image – and get relevant results based on that. It functions more like an AI product than the keyword box we’ve been using for 25 years.
AI Mode, AI Overviews, and What the Numbers Mean
AI Mode isn’t the default yet, but it’s coming. Right now, when you search normally, you still get the traditional results page, but the big AI Mode button is right there at the top, and that’s by design. Google wants users to click it. They also recently announced they’re piloting ads inside AI Mode, which tells you where their revenue roadmap is headed.
The numbers around AI Overviews are significant. AI Overviews now trigger on about 58% of all search queries, up from 14% roughly a year ago. For local searches specifically, they’re triggering on about 40% of queries. And here’s the stat that matters most for business owners: when an AI Overview is present on a results page, the click-through rate for the first organic position drops from 27% to 11%.
That’s a sizable decrease. Now, that’s not to say that organic rankings don’t matter anymore. But it does mean the metric you should be watching is conversions, not just clicks. When users do make it through to your website from an AI-assisted search, they tend to be more qualified leads. They’ve already read the AI’s answer and still want to hear from you.
Additionally, search will soon retain memory across sessions and support follow-up questions within the same thread, functioning more like a conversation than a one-off query.
Agentic Features
Google also pushed hard on what they call “agentic” capabilities: AI that doesn’t just answer questions, but takes action on your behalf. This includes setting up alerts for things like flight prices, concert tickets, and product drops, with direct action links built into the AI output so users (or their AI agents) can follow through on those alerts without leaving the experience.
Most of this is currently limited to Google’s paid AI tiers (AI Pro and AI Ultra, at $100/month and $200/month respectively), but broader rollout is expected later this year.
Ask YouTube
Google announced Ask YouTube, a Gemini-powered feature that lets users ask questions directly on YouTube rather than browsing search results. The AI will surface relevant videos and drop the user in at the exact timestamp where the creator addresses their question; no scrubbing through intros.
Right now it’s live for YouTube Premium subscribers. For businesses that have been putting off video content, this is worth paying attention to. A few practical steps: add transcripts to your videos, use chapter markers on longer content, and make sure your titles and descriptions actually reflect what’s in the video. These aren’t new best practices, but Ask YouTube gives them new weight.
For those already producing long-form video, repurposing is the move. One recording can become a full-length YouTube video, a set of 30-second shorts, a blog post, and five social media posts. You don’t need to create from scratch every time: get more mileage out of what you already have.
Agentic Commerce and the Universal Cart
Google introduced a Universal Cart — a single hosted cart where users can add products from multiple retailers and either check out directly on the retailer’s website or hand off payment to Google entirely. It includes features like sale alerts and automatic coupon application.
This is primarily relevant for e-commerce businesses right now, but the broader implication applies to anyone with a scheduler, a contact form, or a booking system. Google is building infrastructure so AI agents can take action on those touch points. Making sure your website’s forms and interactive elements are readable by AI agents is something we’re going to need to pay close attention to as this develops.
What Businesses Should Actually Do
Coral and Gina wrapped up the session with the practical checklist, and it’s worth repeating:
Start with your website. Make sure the information is accurate and up to date. Check that your site doesn’t have any code that blocks LLMs from crawling it; this is more common than people realize, and we run audits for exactly this (reach out if you’d like one). Your website is still the source of truth for everything AI will surface about you.
Then your Google Business Profile. A complete profile makes consumers 2.7x more likely to view a business as reputable, and gets seven times more clicks than an incomplete one. Get it claimed, fill it out completely, and keep it current.
Focus on human-written content. We ran a case study and the results were consistent: content written by a human outperforms AI-generated content on both clicks and engagement, every time. You can use AI to assist, but a human needs to be the author. (Click here to sign up for our newsletter and download the case study for free.)
Show up in more places. Reviews, social media, publications, podcasts, LinkedIn, Substack – the more places AI can find credible references to your business, the more likely it is to surface you. Reddit can work too, but carefully: the community expects authentic contribution, not promotion.
Don’t panic. The fundamentals of good SEO are still the fundamentals of good AI optimization. If you’re helpful to your customers, accurate in your information, and active in building your online presence, you’re already doing the most important things.
We hosted another webinar focused on AI workflows and how to build systems that save time and stay effective as everything continues to shift – look forward to the replay and recap in the next few weeks.
In the meantime, if you have questions about any of what we covered, feel free to reach out to us directly.
Boost Your Site’s AI Visibility with the Experts at Pink Dog Digital
At Pink Dog Digital, we’re committed to helping Baltimore SMBs navigate the ever-changing world of online search. From boosting visibility with AI optimization and SEO best practices to closing sales with paid media, we know what it takes to build a content strategy that converts.
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