Claims that say they are uncertain 35
Their text states the uncertainty: an unclear recording, an uncertain word, a best reading. Keep the hedge in your wording or leave the point out (media kit wording rule 10).
Day 1 11
The keynote added that people who also use a standalone LLM keep certain types of use anchored on Google (the example given is unclear in both recordings).
Lino Cattaruzzi · Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes
A community demo showed a script that opens Chrome with a saved session, pastes a URL into Google's Rich Results Test, waits about 15 seconds, then screenshots and saves the result and retries on failure (the demo's recording is largely unintelligible; the tool name is a best reading).
Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
A community speaker advised against publishing markdown copies of HTML pages for AI agents: the copy is a duplicate (which the speaker also called a possible source of cloaking, an uncertain word in the recordings), and the models are trained to read HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
Carlos Ortega · Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
A community demo's script used both input modes of Google's Rich Results Test: the URL mode for public pages, which Google fetches itself, and the code mode, into which the script pasted the page's HTML, for private pages and pages Google cannot fetch (best reading of a largely unintelligible recording; the second kind of page was heard as 'dead', possibly 'dev').
Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
In a community demo, the structured-data problems Google's Rich Results Test reported on the test page included an empty name, a breadcrumb problem and a price of zero, with errors shown in pink and warnings in orange (best readings of a largely unintelligible recording; each item is heard in only one of the two recordings).
Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI
The real trouble is an unknown line placed between two user-agent lines: while writing RFC 9309, Google asked people whether the first crawler should then inherit the rules that follow, and opinions split roughly 50-50 (how the talk said the question was settled is unclear in the recording).
Day 1 · How Google interprets robots.txt
A community speaker cited more than 900 million weekly active ChatGPT users and 2.5 billion monthly users of a Google AI feature (the recording is unclear which), adding that these are not comparable market-share figures.
Jovana Avramovic · Day 1 · Lightning session C: Crawling
A Google panelist said they were working on a set of crawler best practices and offering research, malware-scanning and privacy crawlers an exemption from following them, apparently because such crawlers sometimes need to ignore robots.txt or probe URLs that other crawlers would not touch (the reason is a best reading: the audio has 'don't need', which would not explain an exemption).
Day 1 · Q&A
A Google panelist said useless plugin-generated parameter URLs can be handled at the web server, for example with a rule or a custom module in Apache, which saves crawl budget so that Google may pick up the URLs that matter instead (the exact mechanism is not clear in the recording).
Day 1 · Q&A
Gary Illyes said that if the time from publishing to Googlebot's first crawl starts rising, how much it rises matters: for the crawling of fresh stories, something like two hours is probably not great (a smaller example figure is unclear in the recording).
Gary Illyes · Day 1 · Q&A
A Google panelist illustrated a crawl capacity limit drop as a step down in the site's hostload, for example from 10 to 5, which the panelist said means Googlebot then makes up to five requests per second (the recording adds 'per connection', which is unclear).
Day 1 · Q&A
Day 2 13
The speaker said Google sometimes also extracts URLs that are typed out as plain text on a page without being hyperlinked; the remarks around this point were unclear in the recording.
Day 2 · How is HTML interpreted
Google documents Gemini grounding only as content from the Search index at prompt time; the live read of a specific page at a user's request, described on stage, is not documented, so it is unclear whether it works like a user-triggered fetcher, which generally ignores robots.txt, or follows Google-Extended.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
On a retail brand's page, the rendered version promised a bigger discount for a newsletter sign-up than the non-rendered version that was served, a mismatch that can hurt customer satisfaction; the two recordings disagree on the figure the rendered page promised.
Sören Bendig · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
If a page keeps loading content indefinitely, not all of that content will be indexed, because Google's rendering does not go on forever (this passage of the recording is partly unclear).
Rebecca Yu · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
If the cause of missing JavaScript content is still unclear after checking the network requests, search the source code for a string related to the missing content.
Rebecca Yu · Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript
rel=canonical is probably the most common way site owners signal duplicates, but it is very often wrong, for example a tag whose value reads 'canonical target' instead of a real URL (the example is partly unclear in the recording), so Google can only sometimes trust it.
Day 2 · Handling web duplication
In a community case study, an old URL got a 301 redirect only when a new page served the same intent; URLs with no same-intent match were removed with an error status instead of being redirected (the exact code is unclear in the recording).
Martyna Ağanoğlu · Day 2 · Lightning session E: Managing Duplicates and Site Moves
Videos can appear in the main search results, in video-specific result tabs and in Discover (the tab names are unclear in the recording).
Gary Illyes · Day 2 · Using images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videos
Server location is not really a reliable country-targeting signal nowadays, so Google does not use it much; the recording is unclear on the word 'server'.
Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation
The presenter of the non-Latin-script talk recalled that Google officially treats buying links for ranking as spam (the year of the announcement was not clear in the recording).
Day 2 · Lightning session G: Internationalisation
Under-served languages were presented as an opportunity: where Google's index holds a lot of spam in a language such as Basque, a site that starts publishing in that language can very likely replace that spam with its own content and rank for those keywords (one clause of the reasoning was inaudible).
Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?
Index selection applies the negative signals that immediately block indexing: noindex (the likely reading of one unclear word), expired unavailable_after dates, soft 404s, non-canonical duplicates, spam signals and other policies.
Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?
Google said that when AI Overviews or AI Mode run a query fan-out, the generated queries are sent to Google's Search index and documents come back with their snippets, which then feed the AI-generated answer (part of this passage is unclear in the recording).
Day 2 · How does the index look like?
Day 3 11
Google suggested a test: a search that lists a term's synonyms joined with OR will probably return results very similar to the plain query, because Google adds the synonyms itself (part of the sentence is unclear in the recording).
John Mueller · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
Google learns synonyms and siblings from search behaviour: words people search with in the same way become synonyms, while frequent comparison queries mark words as not interchangeable (the end of the sentence is unclear in the recording).
John Mueller · Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries
A community speaker said the loss of clicks on informational queries to AI summaries probably happened for a good reason, with benefits for the user journey (the word 'benefits' is an uncertain reading of the recording).
Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
A community speaker said brand familiarity should be built through AI-driven services and earned media as a whole, by improving content and visibility across services ('earned media' is an uncertain reading of the recording).
Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
For the brand in a community speaker's controlled test, organic sessions in GA4 roughly halved while direct sessions stayed fairly stable (an uncertain reading; a change of about 2% was mentioned, direction unclear in the recording).
Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users
Assistance also includes showing consumers what people in similar situations chose, because people are social and want that reassurance (the wording of this passage is partly uncertain in the recording).
Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
AI users sometimes take even longer purchase journeys, but they perceive their journeys as shorter, a perception the data does not always support (part of this passage is uncertain in the recording).
Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
Consumers boosted by AI in their purchase decisions were still a small group in October 2026, but the group is growing as more people start using AI (the word 'boosted' is an uncertain reading at this point of the recording).
Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle
An audience member reported recrawl intervals on one very large, popular client site: the homepage about 5 times a day, first-level pages about every 1.5 days (uncertain reading), and pages clustered as soft 404s every 160 to 190 days, adding that other sites will differ.
From the audience · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Gary Illyes said a site move can take up to about a year in the worst case, because Google's slowest signal is recalculated only about once a year (some words of this passage are uncertain readings).
Gary Illyes · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?
Keep migration redirects in place for at least a year and judge a site move after one to three months, not days: Google's speaker said its slowest signal needs about a year to be recalculated (a partly uncertain passage of the recording), and Google's site move guide says to keep redirects generally at least one year.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 3 · How long does it take to..?