Blog post
July 27, 2026

What Google’s 2026 AI Search Overhaul Means for How APAC Brands Monitor Their Reputation Online

TL;DR

  • At I/O 2026, Google rebuilt Search around an AI-powered box and introduced “information agents” that watch the web 24/7 and alert users to changes, without anyone typing a search.
  • For brand reputation, the practical effect is that an AI agent may now surface a mention of your organization before your own team does, and it does this by doing, in miniature, what dedicated media monitoring already does at scale.
  • Being “findable” now matters in two places: the traditional search result and the AI-generated answer that increasingly sits above or instead of it.

At its I/O 2026 conference in May, Google reintroduced Search around artificial intelligence: a redesigned, multimodal search box the company called its biggest change to Search in more than 25 years, and a new class of “information agents” that run in the background around the clock, reasoning across news, blogs and social posts to alert people the moment something relevant changes. For APAC communications and marketing leaders, the headline is not really about search boxes. It is that Google has just shipped, as a consumer feature, a rough version of what dedicated media monitoring has done professionally for two decades: watch everything, all the time, and tell you when your name comes up.

This matters for reputation monitoring in two distinct ways. First, an information agent set up by a journalist, an investor, a regulator or a customer can now surface a mention of your brand without that person ever running a manual search on you. Second, AI Overviews and AI Mode, which Google says now reach 2.5 billion and more than 1 billion monthly users respectively, are increasingly the layer people read before they click through to any website at all, which changes what “visibility” means for a reputation team.

This is a fast-moving, still-unfolding product change, and the rollout is staged rather than universal. What follows is a plain-language breakdown of what actually changed, what it means for how APAC brands should think about online reputation monitoring, and where the two problems (AI search visibility and reputation monitoring) now overlap almost completely.

What actually changed at I/O 2026

Three changes matter most for anyone watching brand or organizational reputation online.

A new AI-powered search box. Google replaced the familiar keyword box with a dynamically expanding, multimodal input that accepts text, images, files, video and even open Chrome tabs, running on its Gemini 3.5 Flash model. It is designed for longer, conversational questions rather than two- or three-word keyword strings.

Information agents. This is the feature communications teams should pay closest attention to. Users can now brief a persistent AI agent once, on any topic, and have it monitor blogs, news sites, social posts and real-time data continuously, then push a synthesized update when something changes, without the user searching again. Google has described the feature as the next evolution of Google Alerts, its 2003-era notification tool, rebuilt with a language model’s capacity for reasoning and nuance. Information agents began rolling out in June to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US, with wider Pro-tier and international availability expected through the rest of 2026.

AI Overviews and AI Mode at scale. Google reports AI Overviews, the AI-written summaries that sit above traditional results, now reach roughly 2.5 billion monthly users, while AI Mode, its more conversational search experience, has passed 1 billion monthly users with query volume more than doubling every quarter since launch. Traditional links have not disappeared, but for a growing share of searches they are no longer the first thing a person sees or acts on.

Independent reporting on the announcement has also flagged the flip side: referral traffic from Search to outside websites, already declining as AI Overviews expanded, is likely to fall further as agents and generative answers absorb more of what used to be a click. Regulators are watching too; the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act now requires Google to share anonymized search data with rival search and AI providers, with a compliance deadline of 27 July 2026, a sign that scrutiny of how AI-mediated search handles data is only going to increase.

What each change means for brand reputation monitoring

Read as a reputation-monitoring problem rather than a search-product update, the I/O 2026 changes map fairly cleanly onto capabilities media intelligence teams already build for. The table below sets out the connection.

Google 2026 changeWhat it means for reputation monitoringExisting media-intelligence equivalent
Information agents, 24/7 background monitoringAnyone, not just your own team, can now set an agent to watch your organization’s name and be alerted the moment coverage appearsReal-time crisis monitoring & instant alerts ✓
Multimodal search box (image, video, file input)Reputation exposure now includes what appears in images and video, not only text mentionsVisual intelligence & video-transcript analysis ✓
AI Overviews & AI Mode growth (2.5bn / 1bn+ monthly users)Being cited accurately inside an AI-generated answer is becoming as important as ranking in the list below itAI-visibility tracking ✓
Declining referral clicks to source websitesWebsite analytics alone will increasingly undercount real exposure; you need to know what AI answers say, not just what gets clickedNarrative & story-formation tracking ✓
EU regulatory scrutiny of AI search data-sharingSignals more compliance complexity ahead for how any monitoring tool sources and shares platform dataLicensed, compliant sourcing ✓

“An AI agent that watches the web on someone else’s behalf and alerts them the instant your name appears is, functionally, a media monitoring tool. The only question is whether your own team sees the mention first.”

— Isentia Insights team

Why this looks familiar to media monitoring teams

Isentia’s own technology stack is a useful reference point for what Google is describing, because the underlying idea (continuous, always-on watching that turns into a synthesized alert rather than a manual search) is exactly what dedicated media intelligence platforms are built to do. Isentia’s real-time crisis monitoring runs 24/7 with instant alerts via email, mobile app or chat, and its Lumina AI suite maps how narratives form and pivot across news and social channels in something close to real time, well before most stories reach mainstream coverage.

Much of that narrative-detection capability draws on Pulsar’s Narratives AI and broader social listening technology. Pulsar is Isentia’s sister company under Pulsar Group, and its advanced listening and narrative-detection engine complements Isentia’s Southeast Asian market expertise, licensed regional content and in-house analyst teams, which is what turns a raw detection signal into a decision a communications leader can act on.

Isentia also already partners with Google directly on the infrastructure side. Its broadcast monitoring solution, which converts television and radio speech to searchable text at scale, runs on Google Cloud’s Speech-to-Text API, a partnership documented in a published Google Cloud case study. The point is not that Isentia and Google compete on search; it is that the two organizations already sit close together in the same technical territory Google just brought to consumer search.

What APAC brands should do now

None of this requires a rushed response, but it does argue for a few practical adjustments to how a reputation or communications team plans its monitoring:

  • Treat AI-answer visibility as its own metric, separate from search rankings and website traffic. If AI Overviews and AI Mode already reach billions of monthly users, knowing what those answers say about your organization matters independently of your click-through rate.
  • Assume outside agents are watching too. A journalist, activist group, competitor or regulator can now set an information agent on your organization’s name for free. Your own monitoring needs to move at least as fast as theirs.
  • Extend monitoring to images and video, since the new search box treats them as first-class query inputs, not an afterthought.
  • Revisit sourcing and compliance now, rather than after a regulator asks. The EU’s push for AI search data-sharing is an early signal of where scrutiny is heading globally, and licensed, auditable sourcing will matter more, not less.

For more on how AI is reshaping the practice of monitoring and measurement more broadly, see how Isentia is responding to AI reshaping communications leadership and inside the AI shift: your questions answered. On the specific question of whether AI systems can find your organization at all, if AI can’t find you, neither can your stakeholders and introducing Lumina AI View go deeper on AI-visibility tracking specifically. For the underlying distinction this article builds on, see media intelligence vs media monitoring in APAC.

Frequently asked questions

+What is Google’s 2026 AI search overhaul?

At I/O 2026, Google redesigned Search around a multimodal, AI-powered search box built on its Gemini 3.5 Flash model, and introduced “information agents” that monitor the web 24/7 and alert users to relevant changes without them searching again. AI Overviews and AI Mode, its existing AI answer formats, now reach roughly 2.5 billion and over 1 billion monthly users respectively.

+What are Google’s “information agents” and how do they affect brand monitoring?

Information agents are persistent AI agents that a user briefs once, then leaves running in the background to watch news, blogs, social posts and real-time data on a topic. For brand reputation, this means outside parties, not just your own team, can now be alerted automatically the moment your organization is mentioned, which raises the bar for how fast internal monitoring needs to move.

+Does this make traditional media monitoring tools obsolete?

No. Google’s information agents are a consumer-facing, general-purpose version of a capability dedicated media intelligence platforms already provide at professional depth, including licensed news and broadcast sourcing, human-verified sentiment, and regional language accuracy that a general AI agent is not built for. The two are complementary rather than substitutes.

+What’s the difference between ranking in search results and being cited in an AI answer?

Ranking is about appearing in the list of links; being cited is about whether an AI-generated summary accurately represents your organization when it answers a question about you, often without the reader ever clicking through to a source. As AI Overviews and AI Mode take a growing share of searches, citation accuracy is becoming a reputation metric in its own right.

+How should APAC brands prepare for AI-driven search changes?

Start by tracking AI-answer visibility as a distinct metric, extend monitoring to images and video, assume outside parties are already watching your name via their own agents, and revisit sourcing and compliance practices ahead of tightening regulation. None of this requires replacing existing monitoring, but it does mean widening what “reputation monitoring” is understood to cover.

The bottom line

Google’s 2026 search overhaul does not change what brand reputation monitoring is for. It changes who else is now doing a version of it, for free, on your organization’s name, without you knowing. The practical response is not panic, it is making sure your own monitoring already covers what a general-purpose AI agent is only just learning to do: watch everything, in the right languages and channels, and tell the right person the moment it matters.

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The advent of LLMs and AI search means that there has been a colossal shift in how audiences are consuming information today,  and a reciprocal shift in how all types of organisations, from government agencies to brands are responding . But while discussion amongst PR and comms pros tends to fall disproportionately on how brands are impacted, the needs of the former are just as keenly felt, and often quite distinctive.

So how can government agencies respond, especially in a time of global flux, when major policy changes need to be communicated and important stakeholders need to be managed? After all, government organisations do care about reputation, much as brands do, but have quite distinctive goals when it comes to ensuring accurate information reaches the right audiences.

There is a new entry point for stakeholders


The era of "Let me Google that" is rapidly fading. Instead of clicking through to official websites, people are asking chatbots for direct answers.  What’s striking is that government agencies often have no visibility on how they’re being talked about in the LLM space, even as it becomes a central channel for messaging and reputation. 

When AI models become the primary gatekeeper, audiences bypass official portals entirely — driving down site traffic and leaving agencies vulnerable to misinformation, negative sentiment, or worse, being left out of the conversation altogether. 

Therefore, the entry point is different. For commercial brands, this shift is profound but in some ways mediated – an FMCG brand, for instance, often discovered through third-party platforms in any case. But for government entities, the stakes are entirely different. As the sole, authoritative source for public information, they need citizens on their websites to get accurate details. Government agencies, especially if they are the authority or regulator in a particular industry or sector, need to make sure audiences know where to go to get the right information.

Different types of government agencies have different considerations

Not all government agencies are alike, and they all have different parameters that are quite non-negotiable for them, just by the way they function. 

  1. Service delivery agencies - these rely heavily on content freshness. They can’t risk outdated sources impacting eligibility or process changes not reaching audiences.
  2. Regulators - these need to transmit authority and trust. Regulators have to make it a priority that they’re amongst the first place audiences go to for information and that the industry they’re regulating does not put them in the shade on the channels stakeholders are actually using
  3. Policy departments - did the AI's account of a policy match what was actually announced? They want to be able to make sure the accuracy of a policy (and ideally, its effectiveness) is translated when audiences search through LLMs.
  4. Local and state authorities want to make sure the services they carry out on behalf of locals are visible too. Much like service providers, there is a question around access and awareness of programmes and regulations, but also an added consideration: not appearing on LLMs discontent amongst those wishing to see a return on taxation and electoral mandates, and give credence to bad actors.

What do government agencies want to get out of this new LLM-mediated landscape? 

Reputation is important, but that exists downstream from maintaining a flow of accurate information. It’s useful for communications teams in government organisations to self reflect and ask themselves the following questions:

  • Where are citizens going to find information about your services if not your website — and do you know what they're being told?
  • If there was a significant policy change or incident in the last twelve months, do you know how it's currently being characterised when someone asks an Al tool about your agency?
  • When you communicate a major service change or policy update, do you have any way of measuring whether it’s surfacing in searches about you?
  • How do you currently understand the gap between what your agency publishes and what citizens actually receive when they search for information?
  • Are there community groups, advocacy organisations, or media outlets shaping perception of your agency - and do you know if that's feeding into what Al models say?

These are gaps they already realise, but they don’t actually know what to do about it – how to manage or measure them. They need a tool that allows them to know this critical piece of information and make informed decisions. 

Lumina AI View: AI visibility for PR & Comms


Lumina AI view is built for communicators who want to understand how their organisation and their competitors are being talked about by various AI models – including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. AI View users get an insight into which sources are being cited, and how they would need to respond as a way of protecting their reputation or making sure correct information about them is being disseminated. 

The tool provides an AI view score — a composite metric ranging from zero to 100, designed to help track brand performance over time and facilitate comparisons against competitors. It is calculated using five weighted factors — sentiment, visibility, authority, dominance and freshness. Beyond the overall score, the platform provides a summary of a brand's AI narrative based on four distinct reputation pillars — direction, performance, integrity and innovation. 

These pillars help users identify exactly which dimension of a brand's reputation is under pressure, offering specific, actionable insights for board presentations or reviews. Ultimately, while the AI view platform provides the necessary intelligence, the strategic decisions regarding how to respond to these insights remain with the organisation.

Spotlight: An Australian Council


This progressive local government council is located in Australia’s leading center for culture and sports.

The council earned an AI view score of 74 reflected by strong reach and authority. Publications like CBD News and its own website are the most cited by LLMs — interestingly, most of them being cited by Claude.

Content freshness scored lower at 48. Their website still carries error pages and annual reports from a few years ago. If a report — one that is seen as an organisation’s most comprehensive and authoritative content, is still being cited even if it’s older, might potentially be in the way of the organisation’s own perception. Which means more work is needed to prevent outdated content from still appearing.

What type of content is showing up?

Most citations for the council originate from government sources, followed by news outlets, reports, and blogs. The domain is evenly split between owned content and content earned from external sources media articles and independent authorities. 

While most are recent, some older articles from major outlets such as The BBC remain visible and may significantly influence how LLMs perceive the council. Owned content typically addresses last year’s budget plans and the council’s latest vision for the city, which LLMs are referencing. Government sources are the major content type, however, external sources have a greater impact on the council’s overall LLM score.

The stakes are higher for government agencies

When brands track LLM visibility, they often ask, "Are we shown in a positive light?" or "Are we cited accurately?" For the government, additional questions arise: "Is this information accurate enough for someone to act on?" and "Are we still viewed as more authoritative than what we oversee?" Mistakes can have serious consequences, such as individuals applying for ineligible programs or missing critical deadlines for new initiatives or elections. This can quickly lead to public frustration. It is essential for government communicators to recognize these risks.


If you would like to know more about our Lumina suite, please reach out here and our team will get in touch with for you a quick demo.

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Blog
Why is tracking government visibility on LLMs different from tracking brands?

Government agencies often can’t see how AI chatbots describe them. Here’s why LLM visibility matters and how to track it.

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There is a new frontier where public perception is shaped: Large Language Models. Right now, LLMs are answering critical questions about your organisation. What are they saying? And more importantly, which sources are shaping those answers?

To navigate this landscape, public relations professionals don't need generic tools, but rather technology that speaks their language, and addresses the realities of a changed media and informational landscape.

That is why we're unveiling Lumina AI View, the latest addition to our intelligent suite of AI tools from Isentia. Trained specifically on the workflows and challenges of modern PR & communications, Lumina AI View helps you understand exactly what AI knows about you, and how it learned it.

A new standard for AI visibility

AI View tracks your citation strength and source quality alongside those of your competitors, giving you a clear view of where you hold authority and where you have gaps.

Lumina AI View maps your AI reputation from the ground up, allowing you to:

  • See which sources matter: When tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini discuss your organisation, which outlets do they cite? Track your source footprint over time and view the impact of key target media on how you’re discussed. We measure your citation strength and source quality alongside those of competitors, giving you a clear view of where you have authority and where you have gaps.
  • Gain industry-specific insight: Your competitors get cited from Financial Times and Bloomberg. You get cited on Reddit. Each brings opportunity – and risk. Discover how you measure up against industry standards, and target the sources that actually influence how AI represents you.
  • Catch narrative shifts early: AI responses change when new sources appear, sentiment shifts, or old controversies resurface. Get alerts when citation patterns change suddenly, before they impact the way you’re perceived by stakeholders.

Measure your progress: From media monitoring to full media intelligence

Lumina AI View is built on the principle that insights get stronger with repeated measurement. To help you maintain a clear view of your reputation, our proprietary scoring system provides regular updates that show you:

  • Evolving trends in how sources cite your organisation
  • Competitive standing and benchmark metrics
  • Where models differ in information presented, and sources cited 

Whether you run it weekly, on-demand, or whenever you need a check-in, patterns will emerge, trends will become clear, and you will build a baseline that makes any sudden narrative changes both comprehensible and the prerequisite to action.

Lumina AI View is part of Lumina AI, a comprehensive suite of AI tools built specifically for communicators. Our Lumina suite evolves traditional media monitoring into narrative intelligence, enabling you to truly understand how perceptions form, evolve, and impact your reputation.


Get in touch to register your interest and see what Lumina AI View can do for you.

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Blog
Introducing Lumina AI View: AI Visibility Built for PR & Comms

Lumina AI View, the latest in Isentia’s AI suite, is trained on PR & comms workflows to help you understand what AI knows about you — and how it learned it.

Ready to get started?

Get in touch or request a demo.