Sundar Pichai on AI, the future of search, and what’s happening to the web

Today, I’m talking with Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, in a conversation we recorded just after the Google I/O developer conference. This is the fifth year Sundar and I have sat down after I/O, and it’s become one of my favorite Decoder traditions. There’s always a lot of news at I/O, and this year was no exception — Google has powerful new Gemini models, it’s putting AI agents in everything, and it’s making huge changes to Search on both the web and You Tube that will once again reshape the information ecosystem. That’s a lot to talk about, and Sundar and I got into all of it. But I also realized it’s been a long time since I’d asked Sundar the Decoder questions about structure and decision making, so I started there. You’ll hear Sundar say he realized he needed to rethink how Google worked a few years ago in response to ChatGPT, and he made a lot of executive changes and big decisions to get the company in a more aggressive posture. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Of course, we also talked about all those search changes, and how it seems obvious that the real future of Google Search is bringing things like the new intelligent search box together with the company’s new Gemini Spark agent platform. That way, searches can set off tasks, not just deliver results. That’s exciting, but it seems likely to yet again change the dynamics of the open web. If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ll know that I coined the term Google Zero a few years ago — that’s the idea that Google traffic to websites would fall to zero as the company answered more and more queries directly on the search results page. That’s gone from an idea Sundar batted away in previous interviews to something the entire media industry is grappling with. Even the CEOs of major publishers like Condé Nast are now publicly saying they’re planning for a world of zero search tra