Q&A with Google SVP Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs Search, Assistant, Ads, Commerce, and Payments, on cookie tracking, Google's culture shift, AI ethics, and more
In his first interview since taking a top job, Raghavan gets into the future of search, misinformation, employee ferment, and robots making phone calls. Tweets: @stevenlevy Tweets: Steven Levy / @stevenlevy : The guy who's been running Google search, ads, commerce, maps and assistant since June hasn't given an interview. Until now. Some surprises in here. https://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Prabhakar Raghavan's first interview since taking over Search, Assistant, Ads, Commerce, and Payments puts one executive in front of Google's entire ad-funded query business — and Steven Levy's questions go straight at the friction points: cookie tracking, employee ferment, AI ethics, misinformation, and robots making phone calls. It is the earliest entry in what has become a recurring genre of Google leadership interviews on search's direction.
Read alongside the later entries in that series — Sundar Pichai's I/O interview on AI Overviews' clickthrough rates and his 2025 remarks on overall query growth and AI agents — this 2021 conversation marks the starting frame: privacy and culture questions, before the agenda shifted to AI answers and agents.
First-order effects
- Google's advertising and publishing partners get a direct read on the company's cookie-tracking stance from the executive who owns both Search and Ads, rather than separate product-line messaging.
- Raghavan answering for Search, Assistant, Commerce, and Payments in one sitting signals Google is treating conversational interfaces, shopping, and payments as a single commercial stack, not siloed products.
Second-order effects
- His remarks on robots making phone calls and Assistant land differently because he also controls Commerce and Payments — voice and agent interfaces are positioned as transaction surfaces, raising the stakes for any merchant or advertiser betting on that channel.
- Public engagement on misinformation and AI ethics from search's leadership sets the reference point competitors and regulators will measure their own AI-answer policies against.
Third-order effects
- The interview arc this opens — Raghavan on cookies and culture in 2021, Pichai on AI Overviews, query growth, and AI agents by 2024-2026 — traces Google's search narrative migrating from ads-privacy defense to AI-mediated answers, with the annual leadership Q&A becoming the running record of that transition.
The trend: Google's search leadership interviews are becoming the recurring public ledger of the shift from link-based, ad-funded search toward AI answers and agents, with privacy and publisher-economics questions persisting underneath.