Search has always been a thing you do. Google is now shipping a version of it that keeps going after you close the tab. Information Agents, first shown at Google I/O 2026 in May and now rolling out inside AI Mode, take a standing instruction — “keep me updated on the Dhaka metro rail extension”, “alert me when the Pixel 11 price is announced” — and monitor the web on your behalf, sending a short summary each time something new turns up.
How it works
You phrase the request in AI Mode using wording like keep me updated on or alert me when. The agent then takes responsibility for the topic: Google says it can gather and analyse information from news sites, blogs, social media, shopping platforms and sports sources, detect new material that matches your instruction, and present it in condensed form. The point is to remove the habit of re-running the same search every morning to see whether anything changed.
What it costs
For now, a great deal. Information Agents are limited to Google AI Ultra subscribers, whose plans cost $99.99 to $199.99 a month depending on tier. The feature is being enabled in every language and region where AI Mode is available, so Bangladeshi Ultra subscribers should see it; whether anyone here pays Tk 12,000-plus a month for it is another matter. Google’s pattern with AI features is to debut them at the top tier and push them down over time, and there is no reason to expect otherwise here.
Why this is a bigger deal than it sounds
Standing search is not new — Google Alerts has emailed keyword matches since 2003. The difference is judgement. Alerts fires on any page containing the words; an agent is meant to understand what you are actually tracking, ignore the repetition and the noise, and tell you what changed in a paragraph. If it works, it replaces a category of tools that professionals pay for: media-monitoring services, price trackers, competitor watch dashboards. If it half-works, it is a firehose of confident summaries you have to double-check, which is the failure mode of every AI feature so far.
The questions worth asking
- Who gets watched? A tool that monitors “everything about X” is also a tool for monitoring people; Google will need visible limits.
- What happens to publishers? An agent that summarises new articles as they appear is one more layer between readers and the sites doing the reporting.
- Does it know Bangla? AI Mode’s language support is broad, but the quality of monitoring Bangla-language news, blogs and Facebook — where much of Bangladesh’s information lives — is untested.
