Home / Google News / Google On AI Overviews & AI Mode Being Isolated Systems (Or Not) May 4, 2026 - 7:21 am 0 — by Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, spoke about a presentation he gave at Zurich in December at Google Search Central live (I was there). He dug into it on a recent Search Off the Record named How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO. In there, he explained how AI and machine learning have been used in isolation within Google Search. The reason these technologies have been used in isolation (and I covered this before ) is because it is hard to debug and fix these types of systems otherwise. If you use them in specific cases, you have a better chance at understanding why something went wrong and how to adjust it to fix it going forward. So it was used for SafeSearch, image comprehension, specific signals, etc.…