Search Is Going 'Agentic': What Fort Wayne Businesses Do Now

If you read one headline this week, it might have been some version of “Google’s own CEO says search is being swallowed by AI.” That is a dramatic way to describe what Sundar Pichai actually said, and the drama is doing a lot of work. In a recent interview with journalist Alex Heath, Pichai talked about Google’s products — Search, the Gemini app, and its new agents — converging into what he called an “agentic layer.” Search Engine Journal’s Roger Montti used “absorbed” in his headline — but that word never shows up in the interview itself; Pichai didn’t say it.¹ Pichai’s own framing was gentler: an agent layer that *unifies* Google’s products, not one that deletes the search box.

That distinction matters for a Fort Wayne business owner, because the scary version of this story sells products you don’t need yet. This post is the plain-spoken version: what Pichai said, what is and isn’t changing for an Allen County HVAC company, dental office, or restaurant in the next 6–12 months, and a short “do this now / watch this later / ignore the hype” list. If you’re just getting your bearings on all of this, start with our Fort Wayne small business guide to AI — this piece is the strategy layer on top of it.

• Pichai described an “agentic layer” that unifies Google’s products — Search, Gemini, and agents — not search disappearing. The word “absorbed” came from a headline, not from him.
• He said the share of “more agentic” queries in Gemini has been “steadily increasing,” but gave no specific percentage, so treat it as a direction, not a number.
• Agents will reach your website two ways: by browsing pages like a person, and through machine protocols (MCP, payment protocols, Google’s commerce protocol). Both are early.
• The groundwork that makes you findable by a human is the same groundwork that makes you findable by an agent: a complete Google Business Profile, clear service and pricing pages, and real reviews.
• You do not need to buy an “agent optimization” product right now. The fundamentals are mostly free or low-cost.
• The one real risk for a local business: key information (service area, hours, prices, booking) trapped in a PDF or an image instead of readable text.

What did Google’s CEO actually say about “agentic” search?

Strip away the headlines and Pichai’s point was about *convergence*, not demolition. He described Google’s separate products starting to share one underlying foundation — in his words, “the same model, same harness, same runtime” — with agents providing a common thread across them. “I expect our agents to provide that unifying experience across these products,” he said, and later added that “the agentic layer offers us a chance to bring a unified product experience better than ever before.”¹ His near-term vision, per Montti’s reporting, is that the many ways you interact with Google collapse toward “one box.”

He also pointed to a usage trend: the share of queries that are “more agentic” — asking Gemini to *do* a multi-step task rather than just return links — has, in his telling, been “steadily increasing over time.”¹ Notice what’s missing there: a number. There’s no percentage, no growth rate, no dollar figure anywhere in the reporting. So the honest read is directional — more people are asking AI to complete tasks — not “X% of search is now agentic.” Anyone quoting you a hard statistic from this interview is making it up.

One more piece of context worth keeping in your back pocket: these agent features aren’t everywhere yet. They started with Google’s paid Ultra and Pro tiers and are only expected to roll out more widely “over the next few months.”¹ That timeline is your breathing room. The sky is not falling this quarter.

Is your Fort Wayne website about to become invisible?

Short answer: no — but its job is shifting, and that’s the part worth planning for. The fear underneath the “absorbed” headline is that AI answers everything, nobody clicks through, and your website stops mattering. The reality in the reporting is more mixed. Pichai’s own framing is that agents become a layer *over* the web, which still assumes there’s a web — your pages, your prices, your reviews — for those agents to read and act on.

We’ve written before about how this changes a site’s purpose rather than ending it, in your website’s new job in AI search. The gist: a website used to be a destination you tried to drive clicks to. Increasingly, it’s also a *source* that both humans and machines read to decide whether to recommend you. That’s a change in emphasis, not an eviction notice. A Fort Wayne furnace-repair company whose service area, pricing, and booking link are in clean, readable text is in good shape either way. The one whose key details live only inside a downloadable PDF or a graphic is the one that risks going invisible — to an AI agent and, frankly, to a lot of humans on phones too.

Do you need to buy an “agent optimization” product yet?

Here’s the part the local-expert part of us wants to say plainly: no, not right now. A small industry of “get your business ready for AI agents” tools and retainers is forming, and most of what they’ll do for you in late 2026 is the same work that makes you findable the old-fashioned way. We’d rather you spend that money on booked jobs.

The groundwork is boring and mostly free:

• A complete, accurate Google Business Profile — correct hours, service area, categories, and photos. This is still the backbone of local AI answers.
• Service and pricing pages written in plain text, with transparent ranges where you can manage it. If a human can skim it, an agent can parse it.
• Real reviews, responded to. Review signals feed both the Map Pack and the AI summaries that read from it.
• Structured, machine-readable basics — your name, address, phone, and services as text on the page, not baked into an image.

That’s it. That’s the “agent readiness” checklist for most Fort Wayne businesses today, and it overlaps almost completely with ordinary answer engine optimization — the same fundamentals that decide whether AI engines name you at all. And if you’re genuinely curious whether a bot can even read your current site, can AI agents even use your website? is the technical companion to this strategy piece.

How do AI agents actually reach your website?

This is where the second half of Pichai’s remarks gets practical. According to Search Engine Journal’s Matt G. Southern, Pichai expects agents to reach the web two ways: by browsing pages the way a person does, and through purpose-built machine protocols.² He called browsing “a very elegant way to work too, because that’s what you as a user would do,” and said “I think you have both ways and they’re going to develop” — but he expects protocols to be “a far more scalable approach” over the long run, even if they take longer to build. He was also candid that getting there won’t be tidy: “there’s going to be a chaotic evolution there.”²

The protocol half is already visible in commerce. Back in January, TechCrunch reported that Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard for agent-based shopping built with partners like Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target, and Walmart, and designed to work alongside other emerging standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent payment protocols.³ The same announcement quietly added new Merchant Center data attributes to help sellers show up in AI search — which is the tell: even the protocol future rewards structured, well-labeled business data. If you sell products, our look at whether Fort Wayne stores are ready for AI shopping agents goes deeper on exactly this.

For service businesses, the browsing half matters more in the short term, and it comes with one housekeeping note. Southern reports that Google identifies its hosted agents with a user agent called Google-Agent, and classifies it as a user-triggered fetcher — meaning robots.txt generally won’t block it.² The flip side: agents that *don’t* identify themselves are getting cut off. Southern notes Amazon blocked Meta’s Muse agent in September for browsing without identifying itself.² The lesson for you isn’t to start editing robots files; it’s that the whole system is tilting toward sites that are open and readable to well-behaved agents.

What should a Fort Wayne business do right now?

Let’s make this concrete. Here’s the triage for an Allen County owner, sorted by how much it should occupy you this quarter.

A quick local example of why the “readable text” point isn’t abstract. Picture two Fort Wayne HVAC companies. The first lists its service area — Fort Wayne, New Haven, Huntertown, parts of DeKalb County — plus its hours and a “book a visit” link, all as plain text on its site and its Google Business Profile. The second put the same information inside a nicely designed PDF flyer and a graphic on its homepage. When a homeowner near Dupont asks an assistant, “who does emergency furnace repair in my area tonight,” the first company’s details can be read and surfaced; the second company’s are effectively locked in a filing cabinet. No new product fixed that for the first company — just information that a human or a machine can actually read. Turning that visibility into tracked phone calls is the next step, and it’s the one we walk through in connecting AI search visibility to local leads.

This is also squarely a Northeast Indiana story, not just a Silicon Valley one. The businesses we work with across Fort Wayne, Allen County, Auburn, and DeKalb County don’t need to out-engineer Google — they need their basics clean and their reputation real. The agentic layer Pichai describes still has to decide *which* local HVAC company, dentist, or restaurant to put in front of a customer, and it makes that decision from the same signals that have always mattered here: an accurate listing, honest pricing, and reviews from actual neighbors.

Get agent-ready without the hype

If this shift has you wondering whether your business is set up to be found — by a person or an agent — the honest first move is a review of the free fundamentals, not a new subscription. We help Fort Wayne and Northeast Indiana businesses tighten the signals that AI engines actually read through our answer engine optimization work, and we build the practical automations and chat tools that handle the leads once they arrive through our AI solutions. If you’d like a plain-spoken read on what’s worth doing now and what’s safe to ignore, reach out — we’ll tell you if the answer is “you’re already in good shape,” because sometimes it is.