Google is testing a homepage with no Search button. A small group of signed-out users see three AI shortcuts in its place, and the familiar layout returns the moment they log in.
Search Engine Watch spotted the change on Monday and reproduced it across Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Perplexity’s Comet browser. Three buttons sit under the search bar: Create images, Ask about files and Brainstorm.
The AI Mode button stays inside the search box itself. “I’m feeling lucky” survives, as it has survived every previous redesign.
The button that asks for a login
Two of the three shortcuts need no account at all. Ask about files takes an upload and answers questions about the document. Brainstorm opens a conversation with Gemini.
Create images does not. It stops at a sign-in wall, and it is the only one of the three that does.
Neither outlet says why, and Google has not explained the difference. The plain reading is cost. Reading a file the user supplies is cheap, and generating pictures with Nano Banana is not.
Search Engine Watch also found the reverse holds. The three shortcuts vanished on signing in, then came back on signing out again.
Nobody can say how wide this goes
Android Authority wrote the finding up and could not reproduce it. Taylor Kerns tried several browsers and several VPN locations, and saw the old homepage every time.
That is ordinary for an A/B test, and it is also the limit of what anyone knows. Location, browser and session all appear to matter. Google has confirmed nothing about the size of the test, or whether it ships.
Digital Trends picked the story up the same day. Shikhar Mehrotra repeated the same caveat: a select group of logged-out visitors, and not all of them.
Why the signed-out visitor is the one being tested
The choice of audience looks deliberate. A signed-out visitor is the person Google knows least about, and the one most likely to be trying something else.
Comet is one of the browsers the new layout turned up in. That browser sits at the centre of a shopping ruling Amazon lost, over agents acting for a user inside someone else’s storefront.
Search is under pressure from the same direction. Publishers have watched referral traffic fall as AI answers take the top of the page, and the open web has paid for it.
What a test does not prove
An A/B test is not a product decision. Google runs thousands of them, and most of what it tries never reaches a general release.
The company also has an obvious reason to leave the search box alone. Ten blue links still fund almost everything else, and analysts have spent two years asking whether that dominance is cracking.
Sign-in is its own thread here. Google has been pushing account verification harder across its products, including a selfie video check for people recovering an account.
The homepage is the most conservative surface Google owns, and it has changed very little in more than two decades. That is why taking one button off it is worth noticing, even when only a handful of people can see it. Whether those people keep it is the part nobody outside Google knows.
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