Google overhauled Search at I/O. Its chatbot share is still 9%.
Google's I/O search overhaul and May 2026 core update arrived two days apart. The real story is who actually owns AI search retrieval — and it isn't Google.
Google had a busy week. On May 20 at its I/O developer conference, the company unveiled what it calls the biggest redesign of Search in 25 years — a Gemini 3.5 Flash–powered AI Mode, a dynamic search box that accepts text, images and Chrome tabs, and a new class of "Information Agents" that monitor the web in the background and ping users when something changes. Two days later, on May 21, Google quietly rolled out its May 2026 core algorithm update. Completion is expected around June 4.
The SEO industry, predictably, lost its mind. Hot takes flooded LinkedIn. Agencies emailed clients about "the biggest shift in search history." We don't quite see it that way.
Google's announcements are real engineering. Gemini 3.5 Flash is fast, AI Mode genuinely works. But it's worth checking what Google isn't saying. Per Statcounter's April 2026 data, Gemini holds nine percent of the global AI chatbot market. ChatGPT sits at almost 77 percent. Perplexity has 7.73 percent, Microsoft Copilot 3.76 percent, and Claude 2.66 percent. Gemini grew by 0.4 percentage points last month. We covered the broader splintering pattern in last week's post on ChatGPT hitting a record low.
The real story isn't in those headline numbers, though. It's in retrieval. Three of the four leading chatbots don't actually use Google's index to answer questions. ChatGPT uses Bing — the same Microsoft engine most marketing teams have ignored since 2010. Claude uses Brave Search, the independent Web Discovery crawler Anthropic integrated last year. Perplexity runs its own crawler with some Bing as fallback. Only Gemini is fully Google.
So when Google says AI Mode crossed a billion monthly users, what they're describing is a feature inside Google Search. They are not describing where AI answers actually get produced for most of the world. ChatGPT alone has around 900 million users, and the slice using web search are routing those queries through Microsoft's infrastructure, not Google's.
For brands in the GCC, the practical takeaway is uncomfortable. If your SEO budget is 100 percent Google, you're optimizing for nine percent of the AI answer market and a traditional search market that's gradually migrating into chatbots that bypass Google entirely.
That doesn't mean abandon Google. Search is still the largest single source of organic traffic for most of our clients. It means stop treating Google as the only source. Add Bing Webmaster Tools. Submit to Brave Search. Verify your llms.txt and structured data so AI engines can ingest you cleanly. Snapshot your Google Search Console rankings now, before the core update finishes, so you have a clean baseline a week after June 4 — which is when Google itself recommends evaluating impact.
The May core update will move things around for two weeks. The longer story is that AI search is no longer Google's market to define.
Written by Foreground Digital. Start a project →