Google Quietly Kills Its ‘What People Suggest’ Feature — Here’s What It Means for Search

Google has pulled the plug on “What People Suggest,” a search feature that surfaced crowd-sourced recommendations directly in results. The feature, which appeared as colorful suggestion chips beneath certain queries, is now gone — confirmed by Google itself in a quiet update to its search elements documentation.

No fanfare. No blog post. Just a removal.

According to Android Authority, the feature has been discontinued as of mid-2025, with Google updating its official support pages to reflect the change. The “What People Suggest” boxes had shown up primarily for subjective queries — things like “best coffee shops in Austin” or “good beginner cameras” — pulling in suggestions that other users had contributed through Google’s own tools.

What the Feature Actually Did

If you never noticed it, you’re not alone. “What People Suggest” was one of Google’s more experimental search elements, designed to inject a layer of human opinion into results that algorithms alone couldn’t easily rank. When you searched for something opinion-based, Google would display a panel of short recommendations drawn from user submissions. Think of it as a hybrid between Google Reviews and Reddit threads, distilled into bite-sized chips.

The feature launched without much publicity and lived a relatively obscure life. It appeared inconsistently, often only for specific categories of queries and in limited regions. For the users who did encounter it, the value proposition was straightforward: real people recommending real things, surfaced at the moment of search intent. But adoption was modest, and Google apparently decided the feature wasn’t pulling its weight.

Google hasn’t offered a detailed explanation for the discontinuation. The company simply removed it from its search elements support page, which catalogs all active features that can appear in results. That’s become Google’s standard playbook for sunsetting minor features — update the docs, move on.

And this matters more than it might seem at first glance.

The Bigger Picture: Google’s Search Identity Crisis

This removal comes at a time when Google is aggressively reshaping how search results look and function. AI Overviews now dominate the top of many results pages. Featured snippets, knowledge panels, and generative summaries are all competing for the same screen real estate. Something had to give.

“What People Suggest” represented a fundamentally different philosophy — one that trusted crowd wisdom over algorithmic synthesis. Its removal signals that Google is doubling down on AI-generated answers rather than human-curated ones. That’s a meaningful strategic choice. It suggests Google believes its large language models can approximate the kind of subjective, opinion-based guidance that the feature was designed to provide.

Whether that bet pays off is another question entirely.

The timing also coincides with Google’s broader push to integrate Gemini across its products. As Google’s own blog has documented extensively, the company is funneling enormous resources into making AI the primary interface for information retrieval. Features that rely on manual user input — like “What People Suggest” — start to look like relics in that context.

But there’s a tension here. Users have been flocking to platforms like Reddit precisely because they want unfiltered human opinions, not machine-generated summaries. Google’s own deal with Reddit, reportedly worth $60 million annually for training data access as reported by Reuters, underscores how valuable authentic human discourse remains. Killing a feature that provided exactly that kind of input feels contradictory.

So what should industry professionals take from this?

First, if you’re in SEO or content strategy, the removal is another data point confirming Google’s direction. Opinion-based queries are increasingly going to be answered by AI Overviews, not by discrete features pulling from user submissions. Your optimization strategies should account for that shift.

Second, for product teams building on Google’s search infrastructure, this is a reminder that any feature not explicitly tied to Google’s AI roadmap is expendable. Google’s track record of killing products is legendary — the Killed by Google tracker lists hundreds of discontinued services — and search features are no exception.

Third, there’s a user experience angle. Every feature Google removes from search results is one less way for smaller voices to surface organically. “What People Suggest” gave individual users a direct pipeline into search results without needing a website, a review profile, or an SEO strategy. That’s gone now.

The feature’s death is small in isolation. But it fits a clear pattern: Google is consolidating its search results around AI-driven outputs, trimming the edges of anything that doesn’t align with that vision. For professionals watching the search space closely, the message is unambiguous.

Adapt accordingly.