Index
Things
90 things the event talked about, by kind: products, crawlers, reports, directives, status codes and more. 1300 claims name at least one. Each card gathers the claims, the documentation, the kit items and the things named with it.
How things are found
Each thing is a name the event used, with its other names. A claim names it when one of those names is written in the claim, word for word; a few are scoped to the topics where a common word means this thing. A card is a map, not a source: cite the claim IDs on it.
Open the Reef mapGraph: the things as a map of links, one neighbourhood at a time.
Products 11
ChromeGoogle Chrome
Google's web browser; Googlebot renders pages with an up-to-date version of the same Chromium engine, and Chrome's developer tools help debug rendering.
13 claims · 2 in the docs · 3 not in docs
DiscoverGoogle Discover
Google's personalised feed of articles and videos, shown without a query, with its own report in Search Console.
28 claims · 8 in the docs
GeminiGemini app, Gemini apps, Gemini models
Google's family of AI models and the assistant app built on them; Gemini models also power AI features in Search and Google Trends.
41 claims · 7 in the docs · 10 not in docs
Google's image search, which shows images from the web with a link to the page that hosts them.
8 claims · 2 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Google LensLens
Google's visual search: search with a photo or a part of the screen instead of typed words.
8 claims · 1 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Google ShoppingShopping tab
Google's shopping results and the Shopping tab, built from Merchant Center feeds and product markup.
18 claims · 4 in the docs · 5 not in docs
Google TrendsTrends
Google's free tool that shows how search interest in a term or topic changes over time and across places, as a share of all searches.
57 claims · 5 in the docs · 11 not in docs
Merchant CenterGoogle Merchant Center, GMC
Google's tool where retailers submit product data (feeds) that Google Shopping, free listings and AI shopping experiences use.
31 claims · 14 in the docs · 2 not in docs
Search ConsoleGoogle Search Console, GSC
Google's free tool that reports how a site does in Search: indexing, crawling, performance and enhancements.
135 claims · 19 in the docs · 12 not in docs
Google's AI-based spam-prevention system.
9 claims · 3 in the docs · 2 not in docs
Google's video platform; its videos appear in Search, and channels can be added to Search Console as platform properties.
18 claims · 1 in the docs · 4 not in docs
Features 9
Google Search's conversational AI mode for longer questions and follow-ups, answered with query fan-out and grounding on the Search index.
66 claims · 12 in the docs · 13 not in docs
AI OverviewsAI Overview, AIO
AI-generated summaries at the top of Google results, with links to the pages that support them.
49 claims · 9 in the docs · 8 not in docs
Platform propertiesplatform property
Search Console properties for a site's social and video platform channels, showing how that content performs in Google Search.
14 claims · 3 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Query groupsquery group
A Search Console Insights feature that groups similar queries together so their clicks can be read as one topic.
13 claims · 1 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Rich resultsrich result
Search results with extra visual features, such as ratings, prices or images, that structured data can make a page eligible for.
16 claims · 5 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Search generative AI controlgenerative AI control
A Search Console property setting (inherit, include or exclude) that controls whether a site appears in Google's generative AI features without changing its web rankings.
6 claims · 1 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Search profilesSearch profile
A profile in Google Search where publishers and creators show their work and channels in one place.
7 claims · 3 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Snippetstext snippet, text snippets, snippet
The text under a result's title link, which Google creates automatically from the page's content and which robots rules such as nosnippet and max-snippet can limit.
27 claims · 5 in the docs · 4 not in docs
The Google Trends page that lists searches rising fast right now, by country and category.
7 claims · 2 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Crawlers 5
A robots.txt control token, not a separate crawler, that decides whether crawled content may be used for Gemini models and grounding outside Search.
12 claims · 3 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Google Search's main crawler, which fetches pages for the index as a smartphone or desktop user agent.
68 claims · 13 in the docs · 5 not in docs
Special-case crawlersspecial-case crawler, contractual crawlers, contractual crawler
Google crawlers for specific products under an agreement with the site (such as AdsBot), which may ignore the global robots.txt user agent.
4 claims · 2 in the docs
Storebot-GoogleStorebot
Google's crawler for shopping pages, which checks product pages, prices and checkout for Google Shopping.
6 claims · 2 in the docs
User-triggered fetchersuser-triggered fetcher
Google fetchers that request a page because a user asked for it (for example a site verification), and that generally ignore robots.txt.
4 claims · 2 in the docs
Reports 6
Crawl statsCrawl stats report
The Search Console report on Google's crawling of a site: requests, response codes, file types, purpose and host status.
13 claims · 0 in the docs
Generative AI performance reportGenerative AI performance reports, Search generative AI performance report, Search generative AI performance reports, generative AI report, generative AI reports, generative AI reporting, generative AI view
Search Console reports that show impressions, pages, countries and dates for a site in Google's generative AI features, without clicks or queries.
14 claims · 3 in the docs
Page indexing reportPage indexing
The Search Console report that lists which URLs are indexed and why the others are not.
7 claims · 2 in the docs
Performance reportSearch Console Performance report
The Search Console report of clicks, impressions, click-through rate and position for a site's queries and pages.
17 claims · 3 in the docs
The Search Console report that shows the robots.txt files Google found for a site, when it fetched them and any parsing errors.
5 claims · 2 in the docs · 2 not in docs
URL InspectionURL Inspection tool, URL Inspection API
The Search Console tool that shows how Google sees one URL: index status, the chosen canonical, and a live test with the rendered HTML.
12 claims · 3 in the docs
Directives 13
The robots.txt rule that lets a crawler fetch a path inside a disallowed one; the most specific matching rule wins.
11 claims · 1 in the docs
An HTML attribute that keeps a marked part of a page out of Google's snippets.
7 claims · 1 in the docs
The robots.txt rule that tells a crawler not to fetch the URLs under a path.
18 claims · 4 in the docs · 3 not in docs
Annotations that tell Google which language or regional versions of a page exist, so it can show the right one to each user.
49 claims · 11 in the docs · 1 not in docs
A robots rule that sets the largest image preview Google may show for a page: none, standard or large.
7 claims · 0 in the docs
A robots rule that caps the length of a page's text snippet in Google results, in characters.
10 claims · 2 in the docs · 2 not in docs
nofollowrel=nofollow
A rule, on a whole page or on one link (rel=nofollow), that asks Google not to follow links; Google treats it as a hint.
10 claims · 2 in the docs · 1 not in docs
A robots meta tag or X-Robots-Tag rule that tells Google not to show a page in search results.
29 claims · 7 in the docs · 3 not in docs
A robots rule that stops Google from showing a text snippet or video preview for a page, also as input to AI Overviews and AI Mode.
9 claims · 2 in the docs
A meta tag value and HTML class that stops Google from offering a translation of a page or of part of it.
6 claims · 2 in the docs
rel=canonicalcanonical tag, canonical tags, rel="canonical", canonical link, canonical links, canonical link element
A link element that names the preferred URL among duplicates; one of several signals Google weighs when it picks the canonical.
41 claims · 7 in the docs · 5 not in docs
Robots meta tagrobots meta tags
A meta tag in a page's HTML that gives search engines page-level rules such as noindex, nofollow or nosnippet.
27 claims · 11 in the docs · 1 not in docs
An HTTP response header that carries robots rules such as noindex, so they also work for PDFs, images and other non-HTML files.
4 claims · 3 in the docs
Status codes 8
200200 OK, HTTP 200
The HTTP status code for success: the server returns the page, and its content can be considered for indexing.
23 claims · 3 in the docs
403403 Forbidden
The HTTP status code for a forbidden request; to Googlebot it is a client error and does not slow crawling the way 429 does.
4 claims · 0 in the docs · 1 not in docs
404404 Not Found
The HTTP status code for a page that does not exist; Google drops such URLs from the index and crawls them less often.
24 claims · 7 in the docs
410410 Gone
The HTTP status code for a page that is gone for good; Google treats it much like a 404.
7 claims · 3 in the docs
429429 Too Many Requests
The HTTP status code for too many requests; Google treats it like a server error and slows crawling.
10 claims · 3 in the docs
4xx4xx errors, client errors
The class of HTTP status codes for client errors; apart from 429 they do not slow Google's crawling.
8 claims · 1 in the docs
503503 Service Unavailable
The HTTP status code for a temporarily unavailable server, the right answer for planned maintenance and short outages.
7 claims · 2 in the docs
5xx5xx errors, server errors, server error
The class of HTTP status codes for server errors; Google slows crawling when it sees them and drops URLs that keep returning them.
12 claims · 4 in the docs
Standards 7
The web's scripting language; Google renders JavaScript before indexing, but content and links that need it are at risk.
89 claims · 15 in the docs · 21 not in docs
The JSON-based format for structured data that Google recommends.
12 claims · 0 in the docs · 2 not in docs
A proposed text file that lists a site's content for AI systems; Google Search does not use it.
14 claims · 1 in the docs
robots.txtRobots Exclusion Protocol, RFC 9309, REP
The text file at the root of a host that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch, standardised by the IETF in 2022 as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (RFC 9309).
113 claims · 17 in the docs · 16 not in docs
The shared vocabulary of types and properties that structured data uses, launched by the major search engines in 2011.
30 claims · 4 in the docs · 11 not in docs
Sitemapssitemap, XML sitemap, XML sitemaps
Files that list a site's URLs (with optional last-modified dates) so search engines can discover them.
41 claims · 7 in the docs · 3 not in docs
A proposed web standard that lets a page expose its actions as tools that AI agents in the browser can call.
6 claims · 1 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Metrics 5
The number of URLs Google can and wants to crawl on a site, set by its crawl capacity limit and crawl demand.
39 claims · 4 in the docs
Crawl capacity limitcrawl capacity, crawl rate limit, hostload
How much Google can crawl a site without overloading its servers (once called crawl rate limit, internally hostload).
18 claims · 1 in the docs · 2 not in docs
How much Google wants to crawl a site's URLs, driven by their popularity and how often they change.
15 claims · 1 in the docs · 2 not in docs
PageRankBackRub
Google's original link-based ranking algorithm, from the BackRub research project at Stanford.
8 claims · 2 in the docs · 2 not in docs
Google Trends' measure: searches for a term as a share of all searches at a time and place, scaled 0 to 100.
27 claims · 1 in the docs · 11 not in docs
Concepts 21
Canonicalizationcanonicalisation, canonical URL, canonical URLs, canonical
How Google picks one representative URL (the canonical) from a cluster of duplicate pages and indexes that one.
69 claims · 15 in the docs · 8 not in docs
CDNCDNs, content delivery network, content delivery networks
A content delivery network: servers in front of a site that cache and deliver its pages and files, whose bot protection, firewall rules or throttling can block or slow Google's crawlers.
18 claims · 2 in the docs · 2 not in docs
Duplicate contentduplicate cluster, duplicate clusters, deduplication, deduplicates, deduping
The same or nearly the same content at several URLs, which Google deduplicates: it clusters the URLs and serves one canonical; not a penalty.
28 claims · 4 in the docs · 5 not in docs
E-E-A-TEEAT
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness: the qualities Google's rater guidelines ask raters to judge content by.
5 claims · 0 in the docs
GEOAEO, generative engine optimisation, generative engine optimization
Generative engine optimisation (and its twin AEO): labels for optimising for AI answers, which Google says good SEO already covers.
7 claims · 0 in the docs
Giving an AI model content from the Search index at answer time, so that its answer rests on that content.
11 claims · 2 in the docs · 3 not in docs
Google's decision whether a crawled and processed page is worth keeping in the index.
30 claims · 0 in the docs · 13 not in docs
Lazy loadinglazy-loading, lazy-loaded
Loading images or content only when they come into view; Google sees it only if it works without scrolling or clicks.
6 claims · 1 in the docs
Main contentcenterpiece
The part of a page that serves its purpose, which Google identifies and weighs more than boilerplate such as navigation.
35 claims · 5 in the docs · 5 not in docs
Query fan-outfan-out, fan-out queries
Running several related searches at once to gather material for an AI answer, as AI Mode and AI Overviews do.
29 claims · 4 in the docs · 4 not in docs
How Google interprets a query (spelling, synonyms, language, intent) before it retrieves results.
17 claims · 0 in the docs · 4 not in docs
Redirectsredirect, redirected, redirecting, permanent redirect, permanent redirects, temporary redirect, temporary redirects, 3xx, 301, 302, 307, 308
Answers that send crawlers and users from one URL to another, server-side (permanent 301 and 308, temporary 302 and 307) or with JavaScript; a strong canonical signal and the core of a site move.
61 claims · 10 in the docs · 7 not in docs
RenderingWeb Rendering Service
Running a page's JavaScript in a headless Chrome so Google sees the content as a browser shows it.
79 claims · 13 in the docs · 12 not in docs
The spam policy against producing many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, whether by AI, people or both.
10 claims · 2 in the docs · 1 not in docs
Search quality ratersquality raters, quality rater, rater guidelines, Search Quality Rater Guidelines
People who rate the quality of Google's results against published guidelines; their ratings test changes and do not rank pages.
25 claims · 8 in the docs · 2 not in docs
Single-page appsingle-page apps, single-page application, single-page applications, SPA, SPAs
A website that loads one page and swaps content with JavaScript, which needs real URLs and status codes to be indexed well.
12 claims · 2 in the docs
Site movesite moves
Moving a site to new URLs or a new domain, with redirects and Search Console's Change of Address tool.
11 claims · 4 in the docs
Soft 404soft 404s
A page that tells users it does not exist (or is empty) but answers with 200; Google treats it as an error and drops it.
34 claims · 5 in the docs · 7 not in docs
Machine-readable markup, usually Schema.org in JSON-LD, that describes a page's content and can make it eligible for rich results.
77 claims · 15 in the docs · 13 not in docs
Tokenizationtokenisation
Splitting text into tokens (words or word parts) for the index or for an AI model.
9 claims · 0 in the docs · 5 not in docs
Updates 2
Core updatescore update
Broad changes to Google's ranking systems, announced several times a year, that reassess content quality across the web.
28 claims · 6 in the docs · 4 not in docs
Spam updatesspam update
Updates to Google's spam-detection systems, announced on the Search Status Dashboard.
18 claims · 6 in the docs
Tools 3
Google's tool that tests a page or code snippet for structured data that can produce rich results.
10 claims · 2 in the docs · 1 not in docs
The programming interface for reading Search Console data, such as performance and URL inspection, outside the web interface.
8 claims · 2 in the docs
Trends ExploreGoogle Trends Explore, Explore page
The Google Trends page for comparing search terms and topics over time, by region and with related queries.
14 claims · 0 in the docs · 5 not in docs