I didn't watch the Google I/O 2026 keynote live, but I've been following it closely since. The Verge's framing has stuck with me:
Last year Google's future was googling for you. This year, Google wants to do everything for you, all from the search box.
This is a useful description of where search is actually heading, and it has real implications for how marketing leaders should be thinking about visibility, content, and the work their teams are doing right now.
Here's what I've been mulling over.
Six things from I/O 2026 are worth paying attention to, even if you only have ten minutes.
Worth saying plainly: every line above is Google's own framing from the keynote. What these features do in practice, and how people actually use them, is something we'll only know by watching.
That's the bulk of it. Six things, each one chipping away at a different assumption marketers have made about how customers find, evaluate, and choose us.
SEO assumed a human typed a query, scanned a list of links, and clicked through to a website. The website was the destination.
Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), which is what most of us have been adapting to over the past two years, assumed that AI tools would answer the question, citing sources. The job became being one of those cited sources, with accurate information, good framing, and visibility across engines.
Both of those still matter. SEO hasn't gone away. GEO is increasingly essential. But neither of them describes what's actually happening now.
What's happening now is that the user is no longer running a single query. An agent is running thousands of queries in the background on their behalf, indefinitely. Search isn't returning a page of links or even a paragraph of summary. It's building a bespoke interface, a mini-app, a custom dashboard for that specific person and that specific moment. The answer is being conditioned on the user's own data. And in many cases, the transaction is happening inside Search, with the agent completing the checkout.
That's not a search results page. That's a layer that sits between your organisation and your customer, doing more of the work each year.
I don't have neat answers to most of these. I'm not sure anyone does yet. But the search box is going to keep changing whether or not we're paying attention, and the questions are how you stay in front of it rather than behind it.
GEO isn't the answer to those questions. But it's the foundation that lets you start working through them honestly.
You can't adapt to a moving landscape if you can't see where you stand in it today. The work we do at Data Story on Generative Engine Optimisation is, at its core, measurement work. We build a library of the questions people are actually likely to ask AI tools about your organisation, run them across the major engines, and score the answers for accuracy, completeness, framing, citation quality, and whether your content is being used as a source at all.
That gives you a benchmark. It tells you which engines are getting your story right, which are missing you entirely, and which third-party sources they're relying on instead of you. From there, the action plan is concrete: the content gaps to fill, the structured data to add, the authoritative external sources to address.
But the deeper value of doing this work, and the reason I think marketing leaders should be doing it now rather than waiting, is that it builds the habit of measuring how AI tools represent you. Because that representation is going to keep changing. The Search box this year does things it didn't do last year, and it'll do different things again next year. The organisations that thrive aren't the ones who get GEO "right" once. They're the ones who build a measurement and adaptation loop they can keep running as the landscape shifts.
The instinct, when faced with a change this big, is to look for the new playbook. I'd resist that. We're in the early innings of an architectural shift in how people get answers, and anyone selling you a definitive playbook is selling you certainty they don't have.
What we can do is sharpen the questions, measure honestly, and build the kind of adaptive practice that doesn't require us to predict the future to keep up with it.
The search box is going to keep getting bigger, smarter and more autonomous. The job isn't to optimise for the search box of 2026. It's to build an organisation that can keep showing up as the answer, whatever the box becomes next.
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