Unpopular opinion: Google isn’t holding search hostage. It’s telling us what search is now.

You’ve probably seen the headlines this week. Google announced it would switch AI off by default for students in schools that use its education software, but schools that skip its AI services would also lose Google Search by default.

The reaction was fast. Within hours, a U.S. senator was calling it “extortion,” and others accused Google of caring more about pushing Gemini into schools than about helping students succeed.

I understand the reaction. Nobody likes an all-or-nothing deal, especially one that lands in the middle of the school year.

But here’s my unpopular take: the backlash is aimed at the wrong thing. Google isn’t bolting AI onto search and forcing us to take it. AI already IS search. The thing a lot of us are asking Google to keep around doesn’t really exist anymore.

Search stopped being “ten blue links” a long time ago

Think about it this way. Most of us picture Google as a box where you type a few keywords and get a list of links. That picture is about seven years out of date.

Back in 2019, Google rolled out a language model called BERT inside Search. Google said at the time that “At its core, Search is about understanding language,” and that BERT would help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English. That was AI running underneath your students’ searches years before anyone said “ChatGPT.”

Then Google introduced AI Overviews in May 2024. And at its developer conference, the head of Search, Elizabeth Reid, said it plainly: AI features aren’t just in Search anymore, because “Google Search is AI Search through and through.”

So when Google’s education VP says “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” that isn’t a negotiating tactic. It’s a description of the product.

Google was never really about the search box

Here’s what I mean. Search was the tool. It was never the mission.

In 2002, Larry Page explained Google’s mission to a room at Stanford. He said it meant Google “would basically understand everything in the world” and give you the right thing, and admitted they weren’t quite there yet.

Read that again. Understand everything. Give you the right thing. That’s not a description of a list of links. That’s a description of a knowledge engine, and 2002 Google didn’t have the technology to build it. AI is how they’re finally building it.

So the idea that we should tell Google to maintain an old, AI-free version of its core product, just for schools, because we haven’t figured out how to teach with the new one... honestly, I don’t think that holds up. We didn’t ask encyclopedia publishers to stop printing because kids could copy the entries. We taught kids how to use them.

Where the critics have a point

I want to be fair here, because the concerns aren’t made up.

A recent Common Sense Media risk assessment rated Google Search’s AI features an “unacceptable risk” for kids and teens. Its testers found AI Mode completed every homework assignment they gave it across 180 tests, and sometimes delivered wrong answers just as confidently as right ones. The same report flagged serious gaps in how the AI handled students in crisis. That matters, and districts should take it seriously.

The rollout also didn’t help Google’s credibility. Google had turned AI features on by default back in August, according to the Times. Flipping to “off by default, but you lose search” a few months later feels like whiplash to a tech director who just finished configuring the last change.

But notice what those concerns actually ask for. They ask for a better student version of AI search. They don’t ask for the 2015 version. And Google is at least moving in that direction. The company says AI Mode and AI Overviews for schools will offer step-by-step guided learning so students don’t just get quick answers to schoolwork, and a Guided Learning pilot in Search starts at select U.S. schools later this month. Whether it works is a fair question. We should push hard on it. That’s a much better fight than trying to un-ring the bell.

What I’d actually do this month

First: don’t panic. Nothing changes this week. The changes are expected to start rolling out in early 2027, and Google says it will share more specifics with schools in the coming months so they have time to prepare.

Second: decide what you want before the toggles show up. If your board hasn’t talked about AI yet, Montana already has a starting point. OPI, working with the Frontier Learning Lab at Montana Digital Academy, developed the Montana Artificial Intelligence in K12 Education Guidelines to help district leaders build implementation guidance and AI policies. The Frontier Learning Lab is the right call for the instructional side.

Third: get your admin console house in order. Know who in your district controls these settings, and plan to test them with a small group of staff and students before you flip anything district-wide. That’s the technical side, and it’s where we can help.

Fourth: teach the skill that actually matters now. Not “find the link.” It’s “check the answer.” Kids are going to get AI-generated answers everywhere they look, on school devices or not. The district that teaches them to question those answers is doing them a far bigger favor than the district that hides the answers for six hours a day.

Search isn’t what Google is. Finding knowledge is. AI is how Google is going to deliver that from here on out, and our job as educators is to get our students ready for that world, not to ask a company to freeze the old one for us.