Google Enhances Search with Gemini 3.5 Flash, Adds Search Agents and Agentic Coding Features

Emma Okonji

Google has upgraded its search engine with the Gemini 3.5 Flash app, an artificial‑intelligence (AI) model that is now the default in AI mode for users worldwide.

The update, the most significant in 25 years, places powerful AI tools directly in the search box, enabling users to ask questions and receive rapid answers and ushering in a new era of AI‑powered search.

Gemini 3.5 Flash offers intelligence that rivals flagship models across multiple dimensions while operating at exponential speeds. It is Google’s strongest agentic and coding model to date, surpassing Gemini 3.1 Pro on demanding coding and agentic benchmarks and leading in multimodal understanding.

According to Google, “The balance of speed and performance makes 3.5 Flash ideal for tackling long‑horizon agentic tasks. What used to take developers days and auditors weeks, 3.5 Flash can now help complete in a fraction of the time, often at less than half the cost of other frontier models. It rapidly plans, builds and iterates to solve real‑world problems, whether it’s developing new applications, maintaining codebases or helping to prepare financial documents.”

When paired with the updated Antigravity harness, 3.5 Flash becomes a powerful engine for deploying collaborative sub‑agents that tackle large‑scale challenges for the most demanding use cases. Under supervision, it can reliably execute multi‑step workflows and coding tasks while maintaining frontier performance.

The enhanced agentic coding capabilities of 3.5 Flash also deliver more intelligent experiences across Search, including new information agents that operate 24/7 and more dynamic generative UI experiences.

CEO Sundar Pichai said, “Gemini 3.5 and Antigravity are unlocking a new world of agents and agentic capabilities. We’ve been bringing agents to developers and enterprises for a while. Now we are super focused on bringing the power of agents, safely and securely, to consumers so that it works for everyone.”

Gemini 3.5 was developed in accordance with Google’s Frontier Safety Framework. “We have strengthened our cyber safeguards, which makes it less likely to generate harmful content and to mistakenly refuse to answer safe queries. We achieve this with new, more advanced safety training and mitigations, including interpretability tools that help check and understand the AI’s inner reasoning before it provides a response,” Pichai added.

VP of Google Labs, Gemini App & AI Studio Josh Woodward said, “Gemini is becoming a more helpful AI assistant, with an intuitive new UI, proactive daily briefs and Gemini Spark, an agent to help you get things done around the clock, delivering proactive, 24/7 help.”

Speaking about search agents, Pichai noted, “We’re entering the era of search agents, where you can easily create, customise and manage multiple AI agents for your many tasks, right in search. We’re starting with i‑Information agents, operating in the background, 24/7. The agents intelligently reason across information to find exactly what you need at exactly the right moment. With i‑Information agents, you can stay updated on whatever matters most to you. Your agent will intelligently look across everything on the web, like blogs, news sites and social posts, plus our freshest data, such as real‑time info on finance, shopping and sports, to monitor for changes related to your specific question.”

In the area of agentic coding in Search, Pichai said, “We’re bringing the power of Google Antigravity and the agentic coding capabilities of Gemini 3.5 Flash right into search, to build the ideal response, in the right format for questions asked, tailored precisely to meet the needs of users.”

“Whether you want to wrap your mind around astrophysics or visualise how your watch works, Search can design custom layouts, assembling components (like interactive visuals, tables, graphs or simulations) in real‑time. These generative UI capabilities will be available for everyone in search this summer, free of charge.”