Lenny Rachitsky interviewed Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google, who we cited here numerous times over the past couple of years. The interview covers how AI is not replacing search, search is not dead, how AI Mode will be incorporated within Google Search, how to do AEO or SEO for AI answers, how AI Mode came to market and more.
Here are parts of the transcript but here is the video if you want to watch the whole hour and twenty minutes:
AI Is Expansionary To Google Search - Not The Death Of Search
Lenny: As ChatGPT emerged over the past couple years, as Perplexity emerged and all these other chat bots. A lot of people were just like Google is dead nobody wants to sit through search results and click links why not just get your answer right there and it feels like that's not all happening it feels like you guys are doing just fine. What can you share but the I don't know the state of Google search specifically and then we'll talk about AI Mode just like how is traffic going how is search going considering all these things are out there and just what are you seeing in the data since the launch of say ChatGPT?
Robby: Well what's interesting is people come to search for just ridiculously wide set of things, like all kinds of things. They want specific phone number, they want a price for something, they want to get directions they want to find a you know payment web page for their taxes like every possible thing you can imagine. I think the vastness of that is underappreciated by many people and what we see is that that doesn't it's not changing like AI hasn't really changed those those foundational needs in many ways.
And what we're finding is that AI is expansionary. And so there's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI and so that's that's where you get the growth.
And so like the core Google search isn't really changing in my opinion, we’re not seeing that. But you're getting this expansion moment. And so what we're seeing is a few examples is you can now take a picture of something and ask about anything you and Google Lens, one of the fastest growing products out there, tt's growing 70% year-over-year increase in visual searches, which is already at like a massive scale. It's like billions and billions and billions of of searching in that way. But you can you can take a picture of your shoes, say, "Where can I buy this?" Or take a picture of your homework, say, "Hey, I'm stuck on question two." And then just take a picture of your bookshelf and say, "What are the books I should get based on these books?" And AI can help you with those things. Now, it's just an example of, I think, why there's so much growth left and, you know, why we're so excited.
Future Of Google Search - Three:
How we can think about AI search and kind of the next generation of search experiences. You know, one is obviously AI overviews, which are the the quick and fast AI you get at the top of the page, many people have seen. And that's obviously been something growing very very quickly. This is when you ask a natural question, you just put it into Google, you get this AI now. It's really helpful for people.
The second is around multimodal. This is visual search and lens. That's the other big piece. You go to the camera in the Google app and that's seeing a bunch of growth.
And then really with AI Mode, it really brings it all together. It creates an end-to-end frontier uh search experience on state-of-the-art models to really truly let you ask anything of Google search. Um you can go back and forth. You can have a conversation and it taps into and is specially designed for search. So, so what does that mean? I mean, one of the cool things that I think it does is it's able to understand all of this incredibly rich information that's within Google. So there's 50 billion products in the Google shopping graph, for instance. They're updated two billion times an hour by merchants with live prices, right? You have 250 million places and maps. You have all of the, you know, finance information. I mean, just the and then not not to mention you have the entire context of the web and how to connect to it so that you can get context but then go deeper and you kind of like put all of that into this um into this brain um that is effectively this way to talk to Google and get at this knowledge and and that's really what what you can do now. And so you can ask anything um on your mind and it'll use all of this information to hopefully give you super high quality and informed information um as best as we can and and and you can use it directly at this google.com/ai, but it's also been integrated into our core experiences too. So you know we announced you can get to it really easily. You know if you actually you can ask follow-up questions of AI overviews right into AI mode now. Same for the uh lens stuff. Take a picture takes you to AI mode. So you can have this back. You can ask follow-up questions and go there too.
AI In Search - How Does It Connect
Lenny: But what's the vision of how all these things connect? Is the idea continue having this AI mode on the side, AI over at the top and then this multimodal experience or is there a vision of somehow pushing these together even more over time?
Robby: I think there's an opportunity for these to come closer together to come closer together. I think that's what AI mode represents at least for the core AI experiences. But I I think of them as very complimentary to the core search product. And so you should be able to not have to think about where you're asking a question. Ultimately, you just go to Google and today if you put in whatever you want, we're actually starting to use um much of the power behind AI mode right in AI overviews. So you can just ask really hard. You could put a five sentence question right into Google search. You can try it. Um and then it should trigger AI at the p, it’s preview. And you can go deeper into AI mode and have this back and forth. So that's how these things connect. Same for your your camera. So if you take a picture of something like what's this plant or how do I buy these shoes? It should take you to an AI little preview and then if you go deeper again it's powered by AI mode. You can have that back and forth. So you shouldn't have to like think about that. It should feel like a consistent simple product experience ultimately. Um but obviously this is a new thing for us and so we wanted to start it in a way that people could use and give us feedback you know with with something like a direct uh entry point like google.com/ai.
AEO & SEO For AI Answers
Lenny: What's your take on uh this whole uh rise of AEO GEO which is kind of this evolution of SEO? I'm guessing your answer is going to be just create awesome stuff and don't worry about it. But you know there's a whole skill of getting to show up in these answers. Thoughts on what people should be thinking about here?
Robby: Sure. Sure. I mean, I can give you a little bit of under the hood like how this stuff works because I do think that helps people understand what to do. But, you know, when our AI constructs a response, um, it's actually trying to does something called query fanout where the model uses Google search as a tool to find to do other querying. So, maybe you're asking about specific shoes. It'll add and append all these other queries like maybe dozens of queries and start start searching basically in the background and and and it'll make requests to our data kind of back end. So, like if it needs real-time information, it'll go do that. And so at the end of the day, actually something's searching. It's it's not a person, but there's searches happening. And then each search is paired with with content. And so if for a given search, your web page is designed to be extremely helpful. And you can look up, you know, Google's um human uh raider guidelines and read, you know, it's a very long document that's been thoughtfully crafted for decades now around, you know, what makes great information. This is something Google has studied more than anyone. And it's like, do you satisfy the user intent of what they're trying to get? Do you have sources? is do you cite your information? Um, like is it original or is it repeating things that have been repeated 500 times? And there's these best practices that I think still do largely apply uh because it's going to ultimately come down to an AI is doing research and finding information. And a lot of the core signals, is this a good piece of information for the question? They're still valid. They're still extremely valid and extremely useful. And that will produce a response where you're more likely to show up in those experiences.
Now I think the only thing I would give advice to would be you think about what people are using AI for. mentioned this is an expansionary moment, right? Like seems to be that people are asking a lot more questions now, particularly around things like advice or how to or more complex needs versus maybe, you know, more simple things. And so if I were a creator, I would be thinking, what kind of content is someone using AI for? And then how could my content be the best for that given set of needs? Now, and I think that's a that's a really tangible way of thinking about it.
AI Mode Journey & Drive
I certainly believe that the next year or so of product is going to kind of establish how people use the next wave of products from for many years. And so at least I I can only speak for myself like I feel this obligation to our users to give them the best version of Google that's powered by AI and that gives them the full knowledge of everything Google knows about the world and information to people and accessible with AI. So that's that's that's driving a lot of the the excitement.
🆕 When asked about SEO and what brands should be doing? Google's Robby Stein said follow the public guidelines from Google + create higher quality content.
— Gagan Ghotra (@gaganghotra_) October 10, 2025
Also mentioned that brands and people in space should explore the new domains which AI is unlocking now. Look into things… https://t.co/J06jrUMqzz
🎧 Inside @Google's AI turnaround with @rmstein
— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) October 11, 2025
Robby is VP of Product at @Google where he oversees all things Google Search—including the new AI Overviews, AI Mode, search ranking, Google Lens, and more. Previously, he led consumer products at @Instagram, where he and his… pic.twitter.com/V8qqlnKcdg
Forum discussion at X.
