Google announced the launch of "Multimedia AI Search" on July 4, 2025, the most significant and fundamental update to its search engine in the last decade. This move, announced on the official Google blog and already actively covered by leading tech publications, including The Verge, marks a definitive departure from the classic "10 blue links" model to a full-fledged, conversational, and multimodal AI agent. The new search interface now allows users to ask questions using not just text, but a combination of images, voice queries, and, in the future, short videos. The artificial intelligence at the systems core can understand complex, mixed queries (e.g., "show me dresses similar to this [photo], but in blue and under $100") and maintain context within a dialogue to answer follow-up questions. The key difference from previous versions, including AI Overviews, lies in the answer format. Instead of a simple text summary, the new search generates a dynamically composed multimedia synopsis. The response can include synthesized text, relevant images, infographics, video clips, and interactive maps, all seamlessly integrated into a single, user-friendly interactive module. For Google, this is an existential step to preserve market leadership amid growing competition from native AI search engines like Perplexity. For web publishers, however, this update presents serious risks, as direct and comprehensive on-page answers may drastically reduce referral traffic.
Google Launches "Multimedia AI Search," Changing the Search Paradigm
