Google Head Sundar Pichai Discusses AI Agents
Sundar Pichai expects AI agents to access website content through browsing and protocols, according to Search Engine Journal. He believes protocols will ultimately scale better but take longer to develop.
Original reporting · searchenginejournal.com
Original: “Pichai Says AI Agents Will Click Through Pages And Use Protocols via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern”
Read “Pichai Says AI Agents Will Click Through Pages And Use Protocols via @sejournal,…” at Search Engine Journal →
How this was written. Content Delta wrote this article with a language model from Search Engine Journal’s reporting (model: @cf/meta/llama-3.3-70b-instruct-fp8-fast); it describes that reporting rather than adding to it. The original, linked above, is the full story.
Key points from Search Engine Journal’s report
- Sundar Pichai expects AI agents to access website content through both browsing and protocols.
- Google is backing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to enable agents to shop online.
- Pichai believes protocols will ultimately scale better than browsing methods but take longer to develop.
Sundar Pichai, the head of Google, stated that AI agents may access website content in two ways: through a method similar to human browsing and through protocols specifically created for agents.
Pichai made these comments during an interview with Alex Heath of the Sources podcast, where he discussed the potential growth of both browsing and protocol methods.
Google has been backing the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a protocol to enable agents to shop online, and lists Google-Agent as the user agent it uses when hosted agents browse the web.
Pichai expects agents to allow users to have a unified experience across Search and Gemini, and discussed how the technology may get ahead of the ecosystem in terms of interoperability.
He pointed to the momentum behind agent protocols, such as UCP, and described browser-based computer use as an elegant way to work, but noted that better protocols are a more scalable approach.
Pichai also discussed how Google protects its interfaces when AI agents do the browsing, and stated that the right answer is to put users first and consider what they would want.
He described the current period as similar to the Internet's infancy, and expects micro equilibriums to emerge from AI agents, which may be even more disruptive. This article is based on reporting by Search Engine Journal.
Questions and answers
How does Google plan to make Gemini's agent features more accessible?
Google plans to make Gemini's agent features more widely accessible over the next few months.
What is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?
The Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) is an open standard for agent commerce that Google built with a group of companies.
How does Google's Google-Agent user agent work?
Google's Google-Agent user agent is used when hosted agents browse the web, and is classified as a user triggered fetcher, which usually does not follow robots.txt directives.
