Google is testing a Search homepage that does without a search button. The redesign, spotted by Search Engine Watch and reported by TechSpot on 11 August 2026, is shown to people who are not signed in to a Google account. Where the button used to be there are now three choices, and all three are AI: create images, ask about files, brainstorm. The first still asks you to sign in; the other two do not. Ordinary web search has not been removed. It has been moved down the page.
The box itself survives, and so does the one button nobody uses: I'm Feeling Lucky, at the bottom right. Ask about files takes an upload and answers questions about it. Brainstorm hands the query straight to Gemini's AI Mode, the feature Google added to Search in March 2025 and has been advertising inside the box ever since. Sign in and the old homepage comes back, AI Mode still there, still optional.
Google has said nothing about it. That silence is the part worth watching, because the company has room to call this a small test that was never meant to be seen widely, and has used that description before. What the page cannot be called is an accident of layout: a button does not lose its place on the most visited page on the web without somebody deciding it should.
It arrives on a company already answering for its position in search. A US federal judge ruled in 2024 that Google runs an illegal search monopoly, and the appeal is still going. Penske Media, which owns Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, is suing over AI Overviews, on the argument publishers have been making for two years: an answer assembled out of reporting sends nobody back to the reporting. Early reactions to the new page were not warm.
The issue is BELOW THE FOLD, an original cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Each search result is a ledge and the only direction is down. Stand on one and read it and you are paid, and the answer panel above you slows; take its summary instead and you are paid more, and the panel comes down faster for the rest of the run. It only ever descends. Reach the bottom of the page before it reaches you.