The Google app stopped being a search box and became a Gemini front door.

The Google app on Android in 2026 is no longer the lightweight search box it pretended to be for a decade. The home widget now says “Ask Google” instead of “Search,” the G has been swapped for a plus button that opens the camera, the gallery, image generation, or a full AI Mode prompt, and Gemini 3 sits underneath every query as the default model for AI Overviews. What used to be a query field is now a chat surface with a search engine bolted to its side.

That shift is the entire story of this release. Circle to Search — long-pressed from the gesture bar — can now identify multiple objects in a single image at once, and the latest beta extends “Ask about screen” to read URLs and PDFs in their entirety before answering. AI Mode runs in more than 200 countries with Search Live, Canvas, and Personal Intelligence layered on top in the U.S. The Discover feed, accessed by swiping right on the Pixel launcher, is still here, still algorithmically arguing with you about what you care about today.

The case for keeping it as your default is the integration. The case against is that the AI is wrong often enough to matter, and you cannot always tell which answer is which.

features

The app has four jobs now. The first is classic Search, which still works the way it always did — typed query, ten blue links, except the top of the page is an AI Overview written by Gemini 3. The second is AI Mode, a chat-shaped lane you can open directly from the search bar’s plus button or by tapping into a follow-up on any Overview. AI Mode runs more searches per query than the old model and supports Canvas for longer plans and projects, plus Personal Intelligence in the U.S. that pulls in your Gmail, Calendar, and shopping history when you opt in.

The third is Circle to Search, summoned by long-pressing the home button or gesture bar from anywhere in Android. February’s Gemini 3 update lets you scribble across multiple objects in one frame and get them resolved separately — an outfit broken down into shirt, jacket, and shoes, each with its own shopping carousel. The May beta extends the same gesture to URLs and PDFs, reading the whole document for context before it answers. Translation, math homework, and the older “search this” workflow all still live in the same overlay.

The fourth job is Discover, the swipe-right card feed of news, sports, and “you might be interested in” surfacing. The February 2026 core update tilted it toward locally relevant publishers and away from the most obvious clickbait, but the experience is still passive — you scroll, Google guesses, you correct it by tapping the three-dot menu.

missionAccomplished

Circle to Search is the feature that justifies the install on its own. Being able to long-press the navigation bar from inside any app — a screenshot in Messages, a frame in YouTube, a paragraph in a PDF — and ask a question about exactly what is on the screen is genuinely useful in a way the old “share to Google” workflow never was. The multi-object update made the shopping use case real instead of a demo, and the PDF/URL extension closes the gap between “what’s on my screen” and “what does this document actually say.”

The Android integration is the second win. Voice search, lens, the assistant handoff to Gemini, the home widget, the now-conversational placeholder text, and the in-Chrome AI Mode entry point all share state. Switching between typing, talking, pointing the camera, and circling something on screen takes one tap. Nothing else on the platform — not Perplexity, not Copilot, not the standalone Gemini app — has the same level of OS-deep wiring, because nothing else is allowed to.

roomToImprove

AI Overviews are confidently wrong often enough to be a problem. A New York Times analysis cited by reporters earlier this year put accuracy around nine out of ten, which sounds great until you do the volume math — at trillions of queries a year, that leaves an enormous absolute number of bad answers in the wild. Google quietly removed AI Overviews from a swathe of health-related queries in January after a Guardian investigation found the system advising pancreatic cancer patients to avoid high-fat foods, which is the opposite of current guidance. The “2026 is next year” screenshots that went viral were funny; the medical ones were not.

Discover remains the weakest surface. The feed still leans on engagement signals that reward outrage and sports gossip, and there is a documented ad-fraud campaign exploiting it to push scareware-style notification prompts. The February core update helped at the publisher level, but the per-user controls — thumbs down, “not interested in this topic” — still feel like they barely move the needle. And while Personal Intelligence is genuinely useful when it works, handing Gmail and purchase history to the same model that occasionally invents citations is a tradeoff worth thinking about before you flip the toggle.

conclusion

If you are on Android, this app is non-negotiable infrastructure — Circle to Search alone earns its keep, and the OS hooks are deeper than any third-party alternative will ever get. Treat AI Overviews the way you would treat a confident intern: useful for shape, not for facts you cannot verify in one click. If you want a more disciplined research surface with tighter citations, install Perplexity alongside it; if you live in Microsoft 365, Copilot is a defensible second seat. Watch what Google does with Personal Intelligence over the next two quarters — that is the dial that decides whether this app stays a utility or becomes something you have to actively manage.