The Future of AI Search

I wrote about AI search last year and a lot of those ideas have held up pretty well. I think we know a bit more now, though there’s lots of open questions still. Here’s some ideas about where things are going.

1. Search is about preference and brand perception, not passage ranking

Fan out queries aren’t going to use the same search as you and I. Google.

https://www.mariehaynes.com/could-optimizing-for-vector-search-do-more-harm-than-good/ https://waikay.io/how-to-turn-llm-noise-into-brand-strategy-using-entities-and-citations/

Relevance is an outdated concept. It’s about Useful. It’s not about how relevant your link is to the query, it’s about how useful your link is to the journey

JTBD

2. New search benchmarks will evolve

https://exa.ai/blog/evals-at-exa

3. Rich Search Interfaces Will Emerge

Google is a complex interface hidden under simplicity. What we consider “ten blue links” has been anything but for a long time. Producs, maps, videos, knowledge panels, peoeple also ask

We’re already starting to see the basics being re-built. Stuff like maps and product listings.

But what about interactice UI elements? For example if I ask what the best credit card is, why not give me a little form to select my credit score?

4. Push not Pull

AI search finally good now: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/ai-assisted-search/

searchllm benchmark?

Google Trends for specific terms (e.g. pickup lines)

Predictions:

• Google trends gets sunset as people start linking to declining volume terms
• Google gets aggressive in rolling out AI mode etc

Paying for Search Demand

LLMs open up a potential advertising vector.

chatgpt scheduled tasks are going to be killer. It’s early but the results are astonishing.

So we’re going to get very comfortable with LLMs texting us about things.

So, if you’re Google or chatGPT you would be able to create addressible markets of people at different points of the funnel and sell advertising prompts to them.

“Advertise Wells Fargo to people in the consideration stage of buying mortgages” and then our weekly message from Gemini includes a paid message from Wells Fargo to put people into a mortgage search.

What’s the UX here? How does it break trust with user when you confide your inner secrets to LLMs and