⚖️ Court to Google: keep Chrome, hand over data

Today’s Insights

✦ Google will be forced to share search data with rivals
✦ Google’s AI Mode gets first Agentic feature
✦ Bloomberg: Apple is working on Siri Search upgrade

Feature

Last year, Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google had illegally monopolized online search. Now, instead of a breakup, the court will let Google keep Chrome and continue paying companies like Apple to preload its search engine.

But it wasn’t all good news for the search giant. Google must hand over some of its data to competitors.

Mehta said Google’s dominance rests on exclusive deals and a massive dataset built from years of crawling the web and tracking billions of user interactions. Rivals face a “chicken-and-egg” problem: without users, they can’t build a big index; without an index, they can’t attract users. To break that cycle, Google must share portions of its search index data and user behavior data with qualified competitors.

Excluded from the order are Google’s knowledge graph, ad data, and certain proprietary ranking signals. Still, companies like Microsoft, Perplexity, and OpenAI would likely be very eager to get their hands on this data.

Google is expected to appeal. The company said the ruling “recognizes how much the industry has changed through the advent of AI,” and that overall “competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want.”

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🤖 Google launches new agentic features in AI Mode

The company has started with restaurant booking support, allowing users to check real-time availability across multiple platforms directly from Google. In the U.S., AI Mode has also started delivering personalized dining recommendations based on users’ past preferences. Google says it plans to expand these capabilities beyond dining to local services and event ticket bookings next.

🛍️ AI shopping agents are coming to other platforms too

The FT wrote how agents will “transform ecommerce”, pointing to how OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft have also recently introduced AI-powered features that allow users to search for products within chatbots and use agents able to complete orders on behalf of consumers.

💰 Benchmark leads $85 million investment in Exa Labs AI search

Exa is developing a search engine tailored for large language models, providing an alternative to Google’s ad-driven model. The funding values San Francisco–based Exa at $700 million, a tenfold jump from last year.

🔍 Bloomberg: Apple is launching an AI-powered search tool for Siri

The new system, internally called “World Knowledge Answers,” aims to function as an “answer engine.” According to Bloomberg, Siri’s update will include text, video, local results, and AI-powered summaries and launch in March 2026.