What Google I/O 2026 Means for Search, Shopping, and Local Media

In the third installment of BIA’s AI podcast series, BIA’s Celine Matthiessen and media analyst Mike Boland unpack the biggest announcements from Google I/O 2026 and what they signal about the future of search, shopping, and discovery. As Google continues to reinvent search around AI, the conversation explores how intelligent agents, AI-powered shopping, and conversational experiences could reshape the way consumers find information and make decisions. 

Building on BIA’s recent discussions about AI advertising and conversational discovery, Celine and Mike examine what these changes could mean for advertisers, broadcasters, local businesses, and media sellers. They discuss the growing role of AI agents, the value of intent-driven interactions, and why understanding Google’s AI roadmap may be critical for staying visible and competitive as search continues to evolve.

Transcript

Welcome And What Google I/O Signals

Celine Matthiessen 0:00

Hello and welcome to BIA Advisory Services Leading Local Insights Podcast. My name is Celine Matthiesson. I'm the VP of Insights and Analysis here at BIA today. We are digging into everything Google that Google recently dropped in May at IO 2026. Here to help us navigate is my colleague Mike Bolin. Mike, thanks for joining us.

Mike Boland 0:21

Yeah. Hi Celine. Good to be with you.

Celine Matthiessen 0:23

Yeah. So, Mike, let's just jump in. Give me your honest hot take. Was this Google's best IO um in years? And you know, are they are they still playing catch up to open AI? You listen, you listened to it, right? Yeah.

Mike Boland 0:37

Yeah, yeah. I watched it live and have been ruminating over it ever since. So anyway, um I wouldn't say it was the best I.O., but certainly the most consequential in terms of their sort of ongoing efforts to take a wrecking ball to their core search business so that they can compete with OpenAI, to your point. And I think like so that that's like the hot take. And the the slightly longer answer would be that um, you know, I think we can sort of take a step back and contextualize um what Google's doing and what's driving them over the last like year and a half

Google Chooses To Disrupt Search

Mike Boland 1:15

to sort of, I think I think that will set the stage for a lot of stuff we're gonna talk about. So as you remember, Celine, everyone about I don't know, two years ago when open AI started to bubble up, um, everyone was was calling Google dead, right? Um, and I think Google's next few moves after that were pretty critical. Like so, so it was faced with the decision do do we disrupt ourselves and really lean hard into this this new thing, this sort of AI fueled search, or keep doing what we're doing. Um, and it did the former, and I think it chose the right path because it had its most you know high performance, high revenue profitability year in history in 2025. I think its stock price grew 40% last year. So um, you know, I think, and I also I remember when everyone was saying that back then, like, you know, this this is gonna be the death knell for Google, this new open AI thing. I remember saying at the time that, like, don't worry, Google is gonna be just fine. No one is better prime for AI than Google in terms of having a knowledge graph from being the world's search engine for the last 25 years. Um, you can't ask for a better AI training set for sort of human knowledge and a foundation on which to build an AI business, right? So that that was the capability. But the question is what Google decided to do at that point again. And again, I think it chose right. Um, and if you think about it, Google is it's faced with a classic innovators' dilemma, right? Like it's the incumbent, it has this new sort of challenger called OpenAI and others. And, you know, it learned really well throughout the process of being the disruptor to media companies, to everyone over the last you know, a few decades, you know, how to handle disruption and and how not to handle disruption. So I think it learned that lesson well for being on the other side of the table. And now it's just leaning hard into disrupting itself. And when I say disrupting itself, it's that classic 10 blue links, search engine results page, few ad slots. Um, and and and what it's sort of finding, the irony in all this is that by disrupting itself to compete in this new world, it actually may find things that were more valuable than that traditional search model, the unit economics of search. You have a few ad slots, the cost per click you get for them. And we can get into like the things it's doing to get to that. But I think that's sort of the background or the backdrop to what we saw at I.O. this year. And and then sort of what we saw was, you know, we can get into more detail, but at a high level, it was Google sort of continuing that progression of integrating AI as like a primary modality of search um and and disrupting sort of the search model it had before.

Celine Matthiessen 4:07

Yeah, so they really it's really not a catch-up game for them, it's more a catch-up to themselves, right? Yeah, good way to put it. Right. So it's like, you know, we have our own universe here. We're just gonna upgrade the Google Uniscape and we'll let everybody else kind of rotate around us, right?

Mike Boland 4:24

Yeah, and like to prevent other people from eating our lunch, we're gonna eat our own lunch and for prevent them from being able to do so, right? To use that tired metaphor.

Celine Matthiessen 4:33

Yeah, anyway, so yeah, so yeah, they had a lot. Project Astro, Gemini 2.5, AI mode in search. So, you know, if you had to pick one uh announcement that they made, because there was there's so we'll get into more of them, right? That actually changed how people use the internet day to day. Uh, what is it out of all of it? What do you think?

Mike Boland 4:51

Yeah, you just mentioned a bunch. I think we can walk through several of them, but but I think

From AI Overviews To Agents

Mike Boland 4:55

the headline, the one I would point to most, is these things called information agents. So, um, and that relates to another thing. So, first of all, they announced Gemini 3.5 Flash, which is basically their latest and greatest generation of Gemini's model. You see OpenAI and um and all the other engines, um uh especially anthropic, like in terms of like they're they're they're in this like arms race for for their their new models, just a core foundational model. They it just keeps the the frequency and the pace keeps picking up for them, launching new and new models. So basically, Gemini and their underlying model, the latest is 3.5 flash, and and what this version or generation of Gemini is sort of built for is agentic AI. Um, and that leads to these information agents that I'm talking about. So so stepping back slightly, Google's sort of progression of integrating AI and search was first it was you, as you remember, AI overviews. Everyone remembers they they're still there, they answer questions directly, and it sort of sits above the traditional model. So we had this like hybrid search engine result page that had the traditional 10 blue links, but it was sort of preemptive by a direct answer to the question. Then it rolled out AI mode, which is basically a variation on that where okay, we gave you more of a direct answer to a natural language question. Now ask follow-up questions. Let's have a dialogue about it. I like that same jacket, but I would like it in blue. Does it come in small? Uh, does it come in kid sizes? Like just it's follow-up questions as opposed to what we used to do, which is these just one-off disjointed searches, you know, all within this general sort of thing we're researching. It's this, it's now more of a uh conversation. That was sort of leading up to IO. These information agents at I.O. now um go the next step, which is towards a gentic AI. So it's you know proactively and persistently work in the background for me. I'm interested, I'm I'm searching for a new car, I'm in the market for a new car, or I'm in the market for a new apartment. Here are my conditions that I'm looking for. Um, and it just sort of searches for you, it monitors marketplaces and you know, whatever sort of places it needs to go, and then automatically uh notifies you when like it, you know, it hits a target in terms of those like specific things you were looking for. Um, and if you think about it, what that does is it gives you sort of perfect market knowledge as a buyer. And in situations where buyer responsiveness um is an advantage, it it gives you that, like searching for an apartment or something like that. So I guess those are limited use cases, but but the the the thing the thing is I think people are gonna get creative with that in terms of finding these things that this agent can do for me and just have it always work in the background. So I don't even have to go to the search engine to do the search. That's sort of the point. It just sort of makes search more automatic. Now, there are still things that are gonna come up on a daily basis that you need to go search for, but these broader things in your life, it's just you have these agents working in the background, crawling the web for you, looking for the specific things that you've identified.

Celine Matthiessen 8:07

So that's exciting. Wow, for information agents for consumers. But you know, what does it mean for local business or someone selling to local shops? Does it open up new opportunities? What's your take on that?

Mike Boland 8:18

Yeah, so let's bring it back to our world here of sort of local commerce. So um, a few things there. There's local businesses you mentioned, and then also someone like selling into those businesses, like the the media sales folks that are that are in our orbit. So I guess tackling those one at a time as a local business, I'm sure there's a lot you can do in terms of sourcing local supply chains and always looking for better prices, those manual things that um proprietors will do in terms of managing their business, in terms of you know, finding better prices for their either ingredients or supply chain or whatever the business happens to be, um, or just sort of more market knowledge that helps you as a small business, um, opportunities to advertise. Um, you know, there's a new Liddley team that's gonna be starting. Oh, that's an

Information Agents For Everyday Life

Mike Boland 9:10

opportunity to sponsor a team, stuff like that. Um, on the ad sales side, I think it's equally a market intelligence tool to know, you know, search public databases, chambers of commerce, or building codes to know, hey, there's all these new businesses opening. They're gonna be on my target list. I'm gonna be at their door the day they open before my competition competition gets to. Um, it's stuff like that. Those are a few examples. But once you start to think about it, the wheels turn on how you use an agent to just gain sort of better market intel that can serve you as a sales rep, as a media executive, as a small business, as a consumer. I mentioned some of those examples like finding an apartment or a car or things like that. So I think once you start to think about it, the the examples themselves are are gonna really start to blossom as the people start to use them and get creative with it. It's probably a lot of stuff we're not even thinking of today.

Celine Matthiessen 10:06

Oh, yeah, especially for travel. I mean, it can travel's a great one. Travel's right, especially if you're trying to plan a trip for the day, even if it's to go into town and to, you know, it can do that step by step instead of just you know downloading ways and hoping the traffic's okay, right? And getting it.

Mike Boland 10:24

Yeah, it'll be able to find all of the like the local business promotions that are happening in the little sort of part of time you might be visiting, and just say, Hey, by the way, so-and-so is having like a happy hour, and it's just whatever the case may be. It's again, it's perfect market knowledge, which is always sort of the like theoretical, uh economical sort of uh holy grail.

Celine Matthiessen 10:44

Yeah. So I'm switching to YouTube. Uh, YouTube also got some uh major AI features like Ask YouTube and um Gemini Omni. For someone buying local video advertising, does YouTube become more compelling by after these or um after the announcements, or is it just like, oh, that's great, it's just gonna be better, you know, measurement, better placement, you know?

Mike Boland 11:06

I think it's all all of the above. So I think this is well, this is Google's effort to bring everything we just talked about to all of the its full sort of surface area. Um like for example, um, it's it's doing this Gemini Spark is something that's gonna work with Google Workspace, your inbox, your Word docs, your, you know, and just sort of be like everything from a research assistant to a calendar manager. And so for what you're talking about at YouTube, I think it's bringing it there too. And I think it opens up other use cases, some of which you you mentioned that I think that's absolutely true. As a media buyer, I think you're gonna be able to get a lot more intelligence on the inventory that's out there and opportunity to like optimize uh placement. I think for a media seller, it's the ability to be able to um work with that inventory if you're an agency and sort of bring bring those ends together. Um, as a user, um, you know, it's it's the ability to better find what you're looking for on YouTube. Um, and I think that what it's doing there is utilizing what I think a lot of LLMs are doing this day these days, which is a longer tail of a search index, such as um the transcriptions from all that video that Google has uh and able to find that sort of long tail answers to questions. Like traditionally on YouTube, you go and you sort of search in a typical sort of keyword way. Like last last on the last episode we talked about this. Google has conditioned us to sort of search like cavemen, right? It's you know, coffee near me, uh, as opposed to just a more, you know, you're gonna be able to go onto YouTube and say, I'm looking for a video, I'm I'm renovating my house, I'm looking for um the best type of outdoor screws to use that are not galvanized, but they will withstand um, you know, outdoor weather in Southern California. Here's my zip code, and and it's just those long-tailed queries, and you'll get some

Local Business And Sales Advantages

Mike Boland 12:55

DIY video that has that, and you'll get the deep link to minute three, second 23, where there's someone wrong.

Celine Matthiessen 13:01

Yeah.

Mike Boland 13:02

Um, so I think it's just it brings what we were doing to much more granular levels. And I think that's the theme for all of this.

Celine Matthiessen 13:07

It's just granular, more right where you need it. Yeah, I can understand that. So, speaking of consumers and searching, uh, tell me more about Google's pitch for mini apps um that users can create, because this kind of goes hand in hand, right?

Mike Boland 13:20

Yeah, so mini apps sort of work with the concept of the information agents, those things that are just working in the background, right? And Google has sort of packaged it in a way. I think they're smart to do this. They didn't just say they're not gonna roll this out, like they said it at I.O. because this is all the industry geeks and analysts and people like us that are watching it. And but I think when they roll this out in a consumer-facing way, they're gonna package it more as not to say information agents, it's gonna be these apps. Everyone can just sort of create these apps, and I think that's smart because agentic AI doesn't sound as palatable and and it it's it's a lot scarier sounding to the average consumer than saying, you know, create your own app. So it's the app is basically just sort of like a euphemism for these information agents, where it's like you build your own app to do something that is, you know, find me an apartment or find me a car, or just all those examples we gave. It's they're they're just sort of like calling them apps. Um and I think that the the other angle here is with these apps and with the information agents. I sort of teased this earlier, where Google, like in that sort of its endeavors to disrupt itself, it may end up with something that's more valuable than the traditional search model. So if you think about it, the 10 blue links and the three ad slots, right? That's the three ad slots, that that's like a lot of inventory, and that's how it made its money based on search query volume and having those um those those CPCs that were you know inherent in in those like top three spots that were sponsored. Now, with AI, I think the worry that everyone had was it's going from those three spots down to like one or even less than one, because there's only one answer. You're not gonna put three sponsored results on one answer. But I think with all these things we're talking about, like these apps that are working in the background, um, and the AI mode conversations you're having back and forth with it, and the intelligence agents, these are all ripe for monetization, I think, in a couple of ways. So the first is more quantity. So again, the worry was it's gonna go down from three ad slots down to one, but there's just so much more interaction happening. It's gonna make up for the quantity with like with AI mode, you now ask it six questions where you used to ask it one. Um, and I think that the the the query volume, the query length, we talked about this in the last episode. The query length of an AI query, because it's natural language, is six X that of traditional queries. And then if you talk about these AI agents that are persistently working in the background, it's like it's always working. So, from all that, that leads to a basically a quality advantage in in like ad terms. It's it's their quality, I don't want to say impressions, they're quote it's quality inventory because Google knows so much more about you now.

YouTube Search Gets Supercharged

Mike Boland 16:05

It used to be able to have to discern user intent from like three words. Again, coffee near me. Now it has so much more to be able to discern user intent. And as you know, Google feeds on user intent, so it's gonna be able to essentially sell those sponsored slots at much higher premiums. Um, and I think it's just gonna play out in all of these different ways that it's developed again. But tying that back to the information agents, that information agent is gonna pull so much more information out of you to find out exactly what you need. And Google is going to I don't want to say exploit because that sounds bad. It's gonna monetize that information. Yeah, and and it probably won't be like on a cost per click basis, but if we were to like measure it in apples to apples to what we know today, which is CPCs, the CPCs are gonna be so much higher from from just like this just hyper nuanced intent that they're being able to like pull out of you with all of these things we're talking about. But so you asked about the apps, and I think that that that that was more than you asked for, but the the apps I think are gonna provide a springboard for Google to be able to like answer that question that everyone's been asking in like in as you disrupt yourself in this new world, how the heck are you gonna monetize it? Um, and I think that that's basically how they'll do it.

Celine Matthiessen 17:31

I think we talked about that before too, that a lot of the monetization is gonna move towards attribution, attributing that to a purchase or a booking or a visit, and less on on the view or the click. It could still be click in some ways, right? But uh added to it or so it's gonna be really interesting on the measurement side what happens with that. And then, you know, just to top off on the mini apps, a lot of those apps um you can set up and automate. And if they're on your calendar, and let's say you have bowling on Thursday night and you go to dinner after, those apps can help discover, remind, and promote local restaurants, right? So there's other ways they can monetize off of consumer behavior and consumer scheduling or ritual, right?

Mike Boland 18:16

Totally. And and it will be welcomed by users, even if there's sort of like a commercial angle to it and they sense that like they're getting it's gonna be welcomed because it's gonna be so useful because it's gonna have up-to-the-date knowledge. It's gonna say something like, Um, hey, didn't you did you know this new restaurant just opened up? They're having a soft launch tonight, and it's within two blocks of of where your bowling um game is happening. Stuff like that. It's just gonna it's gonna be more proactive as like it's almost think of it like a personal assistant.

Celine Matthiessen 18:45

Personal assistant, yeah. Yeah.

Mike Boland 18:47

Yeah.

Celine Matthiessen 18:47

Okay, so well, let's pivot let's pivot to hardware. Um, you know, Google's launching intelligent eyewear, and I was really excited because Warby Park,

Mini Apps And Ad Monetization

Celine Matthiessen 18:55

I love these are Warby Parkers. Warby Parker is one of the one of the ones they're working with. Um it's open, right? They're I their their um ARVR is is open for people to develop on it too. So, what does that mean technically? And is it really a game changer for local marketing?

Mike Boland 19:12

Yeah, a few things there. So, yes, it is open. It's based on Android XR, and it just adapts the same model that Android had, which is it's you know an open operating system, just like Android, and and OEMs from Samsung to others, and in this case, iWare makers like Warby Parker can pick it up and build um like AI glasses based on this. And a quick sort of side note on that, it's interesting because I I follow the augmented reality space a lot, as you know. And about 10 years ago, when I started to track it, the industry was just so intent on this just fantastical over-the-top sort of user experience where you walk around and there's sort of like dragons flying out of trees and Pokemon over here, and just that highly dimensional and um nuanced sort of like UX where visually things could sort of hide behind trees, or you know, and that requires what we all realized after a long time was that it's so computationally intensive to do that, to scan surroundings, to know the dimensions of a space so that things can go inside and outside of certain objects. And that required glasses that were like $3,500 and no one is gonna wear out in public, right? So I think that the world has sort of uh sort of scaled back from that and realized that you know, let's do something that looks just like normal eyewear, because if it if it's not stylish, it's dead on arrival. No one's gonna wear it out of their house. And they don't need, no one's asking for that yet. All of those just heavy graphics, it's just sort of overwhelming. So let's just do a few things that are just sort of subtle pieces of intelligence, even if it's non-visual at all, a whisper in your ear about, you know, navigation or other just all these personal AI-driven things, like you have Gemini in your ear through glasses, or in some cases, just a small display that gives you sort of some of those functions. And this, of course, gets back to Google Glass and its failings, but I think Google was too early to market now with that, and now it now it feels like the culture is sort of ready for something that is um more functional, less sort of techie, and and with Google Glass, they just made them too geeky, no one wanted them. But partnering with fashion designers like um Gentle Monster in Korea, and um, you mentioned Warby Parker, uh, they they think these things are a lot more saleable. But really, the point is that they want to be vertically integrated, like Apple. They have the software, they have the operating system, and now they have the hardware. And I think AI is something in particular that benefits so much more in being an empowered and effective assistant for a given person if it's eye level, right? Because that gets into this sort of holy grail of AI that you may have heard the term physical AI. So all the AI to date has been confined to. The web, right? It basically crawls the web. It gives us intelligence. What about the real world? So once the AI is here on your face and Google can sort of build out an intelligent map of the world through just, you know, people walking around asking things, I think it's going to be open up use cases and open up a market for Google that takes it from the two-dimensional confines of our screens out into the physical world. And as you know, Celina, bringing it back to the local stuff, most commerce happens offline as opposed to e-commerce. So I think that that's that's really the end game for the intelligent eyewear. What we saw at Google I.O. was their next steps in rolling out these things that are um again fashionable, hopefully, sexy people will want them, and bring Gemini from your phone to eye level.

Celine Matthiessen 22:50

Interesting. Well, um, I mean we saved the best for last in my case. So the Google announcement

Smart Glasses And Physical AI

Celine Matthiessen 22:55

of a universal cart and agent shopping, um, making it so much easier to make more transactions. How does this work for local commerce and ad sales? Give us some details on it.

Mike Boland 23:07

Yeah, so the uh the universal cart um sort of is like a like a variation or a flavor of those apps we talked about in the information agents, but specifically built for shopping. So it will go out and do your shopping for you, find things, come back with updates on what it found. This is great for like collectibles or rare items, but it's also great for just you know every day. Like, hey, spring's coming up. Update my wardrobe with all the hottest new spring items, right? I guess that's not a good example for today's birthday party.

Celine Matthiessen 23:37

I have to plan a birthday party. I need to buy decorations and find me, you know, like I just like I can see that, right? Like, or I'm we're having a barbecue and you know, it's themed because everybody's really big on themed parties these days, right? Or themed get-togethers.

Mike Boland 23:53

So maybe that's fine all the things and and even the things you're forgetting. Like, have you have you thought you're gonna need some big trash cans because there's gonna be, you know, like stuff like that. But I think that the the cool th about this, in addition to just being like a shopping variant of the information agents, it brings in Google's AP2 protocol, which is agent payments protocol. So for the more daring early adopters in the AI world, you can actually tell it to just like if you find this, just buy it. You don't have to come back to me and ask, just buy it, which is kind of could be dangerous. But uh, that's the other thing that that's that's gonna start to do, which is which is interesting. But I think this also, this whole agent um universal cart and agent shopping goes back to something you were talking about earlier, which is the attribution and the analytics, where it might be tied more to action as opposed to clicks. I think the more Google can do under its own roof, as opposed to sending you somewhere else, which is not a new story. This is behind zero click search and where Google's been going for a while, but this sort of gets them there, which is the more that it can do for you with its agents or under its roof or whatever the case may be, it can have that full view of connecting the dots of the full consumer purchase funnel, which allows it to then report to its advertisers and have a stronger story to tell them to attract more ad dollars because it can say this resulted in a purchase through one of our you know fancy universal cart agents.

Celine Matthiessen 25:23

It's gonna be interesting. It's gonna be interesting to see how that works with Amazon if it's shots fired against Amazon for this, because you know, if they're gonna include Amazon in Discovery.

Mike Boland 25:38

Good good question. And I bet Amazon's working on something similar too. This is gonna be an arms race.

Celine Matthiessen 25:43

Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, I'm excited about it because it's the seamlessness of online shopping has changed so much from its inception, and it does make it a lot easier to purchase. Um, I'm yeah,

Universal Cart And Agent Payments

Celine Matthiessen 25:55

I'm a little scared about giving AI permission to do it for me. I mean, but anyways, is there any other announcements from IO that you think are important for our audience um on local and you know that covers local media or that people should know about or our our audience should know about?

Mike Boland 26:11

Yeah, I guess one thing we didn't talk about was the intelligent search box that's gonna be rolling out this summer. They sort of unveiled this at IO. Um, and and the thing is that this is gonna be now the primary interface for search. So I think the way I characterized it earlier was the steps they've taken to slowly integrate AI into search, which was first the overviews, then AI mode. But like the comfort blanket of the 10 blue links was always sort of there in the traditional search box. Google is actually now with this intelligent search box that's gonna be rolling out pretty soon, making all of these like new AI tools the primary, like they used to be secondary, now they're the primary interface. Um, and it's gonna be interesting to see what the SERP, the search engine result page, looks like and what it does with those two 10 blue links. Like, are they still gonna be there? Um, but basically what it's doing is it's combining overviews in AI mode, and that's the new norm, that's the new primary search interface. And I think that that's cool. But one thing that like I don't think a lot of top people are talking about is is the world ready for this? Right? AI still has trust issues and some bad PR surrounding it, and it's like with this intelligent search box, is Google going overboard again in that like effort to like cannibalize itself, which I think is smart. I think it's it's doing the right thing, but like is it overcorrecting and maybe rolling it out too fast? Um, so the question is how this is gonna be received. Um, I think that I've already read some headlines that like people don't like this, and the installations for DuckDuckGo, um, you know, a competing search engine are up by 30% since Google IO. Um, so we're gonna see if people like this or not. Um, but I think from Google's perspective, it could be one of those situations, like to paraphrase a quote that's often attributed to Henry Ford, and it was always cited by Steve Jobs. If I asked people what they want, they would have said faster

Intelligent Search Box And Trust

Mike Boland 28:05

horses, right? So Google's sort of just like preempting. It's like, I know what you want, this is gonna be better. Trust me, there might be growing pains, but like this, this is the best thing for everyone. Uh, but I think there will be some backlash to that, but we're gonna see how how consumers, you know, the market's gonna speak as it always does.

Celine Matthiessen 28:22

Interesting. Well, thank you so much for being here today and sharing all your knowledge and insights. I always appreciate and value your time with us. And for everyone out there listening, thank you for joining us as well. We hope you're enjoying our podcast this year. And if you have any topics you'd like to suggest or want to come on as a guest, reach out to us at podcasts @BIA.com. And we look forward to bringing you more insightful conversations on local media throughout the year ahead.