They have no choice - if they don't offer AI assisted search, someone else will eat their lunch.

IMO they are being pretty smart about this - the conventional wisdom is to cannibalize your own products before someone else does, and LLMs are obviously a major threat to search, with ChatGPT probably the biggest threat.

Google's "AI Overview" search results, which started out awful, are now much improved - can be actually useful - as long as you are not asking specialist questions, and the Gemini chat and voice apps are also great for everyday use, although not sure if they are yet monetizing this (volume probably a lot less than search I'd guess).

The Apple Siri-Gemini deal is also a significant way for Google to not get sidelined.

In the bigger picture, people were starting to catch on to the fact that Google's search product was becoming increasingly useless.

Around here we'd come to that conclusion at least a couple of years ago, due to abusive SEO and so forth. And that understanding was becoming even more widespread.

I don't know if Google's got the later parts of the game figured out yet, but I have to think that they'd realized that Search was dying. While there's still some value there, may as well use it as a hook to pull people into what they expect to be the next era.