Google’s Sundar Pichai recently said that the future of Search is agentic, but what does that really mean? A recent tweet from Google’s search product lead shows what the new kind of task-based search looks like. It’s increasingly apparent that the internet is transitioning to a model where every person has their own agent running tasks on their behalf, experiencing an increasingly personal internet.
Search Is Becoming Task-Oriented
The internet, with search as the gateway to it, is a model where websites are indexed, ranked, and served to users who basically use the exact same queries to retrieve virtually the same sets of web pages. AI is starting to break that model because users are transitioning to researching topics, where a link to a website does not provide the clear answers users are gradually becoming conditioned to ask for. The internet was built to serve websites that users could go to and read stuff and to connect with others via social media.
What’s changing is that now people can use that same search box to do things, exactly as Pichai described. For example, Google recently announced the worldwide rollout of the ability to describe the needs for a restaurant reservation, and AI agents go out and fetch the information, including booking information.
Google’s Search Product Lead Rose Yao tweeted:
“Date nights and big group dinners just got a lot easier.
We’re thrilled to expand agentic restaurant booking in Search globally, including the UK and India!
Tell AI Mode your group size, time, and vibe—it scans multiple platforms simultaneously to find real-time, bookable spots.
No more app-switching. No more hassle. Just great food.”
That’s not search, that’s task completion. What was not stated is that restaurants will need to be able to interact with these agents, to provide information like available reservation slots, menu choices that evening, and at some point those websites will need to be able to book a reservation with the AI agent. This is not something that’s coming in the near future, it’s here right now.
That is exactly what Pichai was talking about when he recently described the future of search:
“I feel like in search, with every shift, you’re able to do more with it.
…If I fast forward, a lot of what are just information seeking queries will be agentic search. You will be completing tasks, you have many threads running.”
When asked if search will still be around in ten years, Pichai answered:
“Search would be an agent manager, right, in which you’re doing a lot of things.
…And I can see search doing versions of those things, and you’re getting a bunch of stuff done.”
Everyone Has Their Own Personal Internet
Cloudflare recently published an article that says the internet was the first way for humans to interact with online content, and that cloud infrastructure was the second adaptation that emerged to serve the needs of mobile devices. The next adaptation is wild and has implications for SEO because it introduces a hyper-personalized version of the web that impacts local SEO, shopping, and information retrieval.
AI agents are currently forced to use an internet infrastructure that’s built to serve humans. That’s the part that Cloudflare says is changing. But the more profound insight is that the old way, where millions of people asked the same question and got the same indexed answer, is going away. What’s replacing it is a hyper-personal experience of the web, where every person can run their own agent.
Cloudflare explains:
“Unlike every application that came before them, agents are one-to-one. Each agent is a unique instance. Serving one user, running one task. Where a traditional application follows the same execution path regardless of who’s using it, an agent requires its own execution environment: one where the LLM dictates the code path, calls tools dynamically, adjusts its approach, and persists until the task is done.
Think of it as the difference between a restaurant and a personal chef. A restaurant has a menu — a fixed set of options — and a kitchen optimized to churn them out at volume. That’s most applications today. An agent is more like a personal chef who asks: what do you want to eat? They might need entirely different ingredients, utensils, or techniques each time. You can’t run a personal-chef service out of the same kitchen setup you’d use for a restaurant.”
Cloudflare’s angle is that they are providing the infrastructure to support the needs of billions of agents representing billions of humans. But that is not the part that concerns SEO. The part that concerns digital marketing is that the moment when search transforms into an “agent manager” is here, right now.
WordPress 7.0
Content management systems are rapidly adapting to this change. It’s very difficult to overstate the importance of the soon-to-be-released WordPress 7.0, as it is jam-packed with the capability to connect to AI systems that will enable the internet transition from a human-centered web to an increasingly agentic-centered web.
The current internet is built for human interaction. Agents are operating within that structure, but that’s going to change very fast. The search marketing community really needs to wrap its collective mind around this change and to really understand how content management systems fit into that picture.
What Sources Do The 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 apps, and completed tasks on its own.
That’s when something clicked…
This isn’t just AI assisting anymore.
This is AI operating on your behalf.Google’s CEO is already talking about “agentic search” — where AI doesn’t just return results, it manages the process.
So the real questions become:
👉 Who controls the journey?
👉 What sources does the agent trust?
👉 Where does your business show up in that decision layer?
Because you don’t get “agentic search” without the ecosystem feeding it — websites, content, businesses.That part isn’t going away. But it is being abstracted.”
Task-Based Agentic Search
I think the part that I guess we need to wrap our heads around is that humans are still making the decision to click the “make the reservation” button, and at some point, at least at the B2B layer, making purchases will increasingly become automated.
I still have my doubts about the complete automation of shopping. It feels unnatural, but it’s easy to see that the day may rapidly be approaching when, instead of writing a shopping list, a person will just tell an AI agent to talk to the local grocery store AI agent to identify which one has the items in stock at the best price, dump it into a shopping cart, and show it to the human, who then approves it.
The big takeaway is that the web may be transitioning to the “everyone has a personal chef” model, and that’s a potentially scary level of personalization. How does an SEO optimize for that? I think that’s where WordPress 7.0 comes in, as well as any other content management systems that are agentic-web ready.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Stock-Asso
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