Google enters the chat: What I/O 2026 means for comms

Skim the headlines from Google’s 2026 I/O conference this week, and it is easy to write the whole thing off as another keynote. Another Gemini. Another agent. Another set of demos that look slicker on stage than they do in your inbox.

Fair enough.

But take a step back, and what Google laid out this week looks less like an annual upgrade, and more like the moment its two great strengths – discovery and intelligence – really come together.

For those of us in comms, that coming together is worth paying attention to. For roughly two decades, PRs have had a clear answer to the question: "how do people find us?"

Search. We optimised for it, fed media relations into it, tracked our share of voice in it.

AI Overviews already chipped away at that model. Now Gemini 3.5, Google’s new generative UI and Spark (the always-on agent Google previewed in beta for Ultra subscribers) push it further. None of it is finished. Spark is not yet generally available, AI Overviews still has rough edges, and generative UI is being rolled out cautiously – but the direction of travel is set.

So what does it actually mean for comms over the next few months? None of this requires a complete strategy overhaul. But it will reward those who lean in.

1. Stop asking "are we ranking" and start asking "are we being cited"

Rankings still matter, but the AI-cited mention is fast becoming the more useful signal of authority. That does not mean dropping SEO. It means adding a citation audit to monthly reporting – where is the brand appearing inside AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini? Where are competitors showing up? Where are we missing entirely?

2. Lean harder into original data

As Google all but spelled out at I/O, generative engines are quietly down-weighting derivative content and rewarding sources of unique, structured information. That makes commissioned research, first-party survey data and proprietary indexes arguably the best thing a comms team can produce this year (and, guess what? These are all tactics PRs have been doing for years). It’s not because the model "likes" the data, but because the data is the bit hardest to summarise away.

3. Treat media monitoring as an agent problem, not a dashboard problem

Spark is not live for most of us yet, but the direction of travel is clear: 24/7 agents transforming routine processes a comms team runs every day. Think of it as Google Alerts on steroids. You do not need to wait for Spark to land. The same workflow can be stitched together today using existing tools and a careful prompt library.

4. Brief your CEO before someone else does

Your chief executive is (or should be) reading the same I/O coverage you are. She will ask what it means for the brand. The bits worth flagging are not only the obvious "we'll appear in AI search" pieces, but the less obvious ones too. SynthID watermarking and C2PA Content Credentials make AI-generated content traceable for the first time, and that has clear reputational implications down the line.

To paraphrase Bill Gates, we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of this stuff and underestimate the long-term. This is not the death of anything. Search has not died, journalists have not died, and your existing relationships are not suddenly worthless.

But Google has spent more than two decades building the world's deepest understanding of intent – an asset OpenAI and Anthropic cannot easily replicate or buy.

Whether or not Spark is the agent that ultimately wins, the discovery-and-intelligence layer Google has assembled is the one comms will increasingly need to plan around.