Search Central Live · Barcelona

Deep Dive Europe 2026

30 September 2026 to 2 October 2026 · 3 days

The knowledge base, web edition: every public claim from the event, labelled by who said it and checked against Google’s own documentation.

Version v2.13.0 · data through 2 October 2026

Claims: 2228
Sessions: 53
Topics: 96
Sources: 242
Days covered: 3/3

Watch the 1-minute tour

The Diver bot swims through the knowledge base: how every point is labelled and checked against Google’s documentation, the field guides, this web edition, the Reef map and the kits.

About a minute, with sound; it plays only when you press play. Download the video (MP4, 7.4 MB).

Start here

How to read
Labels and grades
Every claim carries a label for who is speaking and a grade for how it stands against Google’s documentation. Two minutes here makes the rest easy.
Fragile and valuable
433 claims not in the docs
What was said or shown at the event, by Google or a community speaker, that Google’s documentation does not say. Quote these as said at Search Central Live.
Find anything
Search the knowledge base
Search every thing, claim, topic, session, kit item and glossary term as you type, typos and abbreviations included. Works offline, straight from this folder.

Put it to work

Developer kit
For developers
138 requirements by area, with why, how, test and code, a pre-launch checklist and 35 snippets, for sites Google can crawl, render, index and show well.
Content kit
For content teams
A glossary of 125 terms in plain English, open to everyone, and a small taste of the media kit for posts, articles and newsletters.

The three days

Day 1 · Wednesday 30 September 2026
Crawling
13 sessions · 545 claims
Slide 67 Stage 376 Docs 57 Press 2 Analysis 43
Day 2 · Thursday 1 October 2026
Indexing
23 sessions · 970 claims
Slide 142 Stage 588 Docs 111 Press 2 Analysis 127
Day 3 · Friday 2 October 2026
Serving: Ranking, Search Console, and Performance
17 sessions · 713 claims
Slide 82 Stage 445 Docs 101 Press 1 Analysis 84

What’s new across days

Newest: Day 3, Serving: Ranking, Search Console, and Performance, with 713 claims.

Contradicts 2 Extends 235 Repeats 49

Stage D2-C325 Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page
Tokenization for AI models such as Gemini, in training and in inference, differs from tokenization for Search, although Gary Illyes qualified this with 'or mostly'.
contradicts
Slide D1-C039 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?
Gemini is not part of Search, but it uses crawlers for data, shares some technologies such as tokenization and deduping, and grounds on the Search index.
Stage D2-C393 Day 2 · Handling web duplication
Google's speaker said that pointing rel=canonical from the pages of a paginated set to the first page can sometimes make sense depending on the goal, for example to make a category page more visible, but that it affects canonicalization and deduplication.
contradicts
Docs D1-C115 Day 1 · session not recorded
Google's crawlers do not click buttons. Each page in a series needs its own URL and an <a href> link to the next page, should not use page 1 as its canonical, and rel=next and rel=prev are no longer used.
Slide D2-C017 Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!
Google answered on a Q&A slide that a sitemap listed in the robots.txt file can be picked up by any crawler, not only by Google's.
extends
Slide D1-C079 Day 1 · How Google interprets robots.txt
The robots.txt session worked through an example file with three groups: a default group that disallows everything except the bare homepage, a shared bingbot and googlebot group that also allows /politics/ and /*/live/, and a google-extended group that disallows /subscriptions/.
Slide D2-C017 Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!
Google answered on a Q&A slide that a sitemap listed in the robots.txt file can be picked up by any crawler, not only by Google's.
extends
Docs D1-C084 Day 1 · How Google interprets robots.txt
Google supports only the user-agent, allow, disallow and sitemap fields in robots.txt. Other fields such as crawl-delay are not supported.

All 286 links between days

In version v2.13.0

Wider pages. The page frame grows from 76rem to 92rem (about 1,470 px on a large screen), the single-column pages from 52rem to 68rem and the side column from 17.5rem to 19rem, and the main column no longer stops at 48rem. A claim's text now runs up to 84 characters a line (was 70), requirements and facts up to 72 (were 60 and 62), and introductions and prose up to 76 (were 66 and 68). The widths are four values at the top of _system/site/site.css (--wrap-max, --wrap-narrow, --side-w and --measure), and the reef art and the diver bot in the page heads and the footer move out with the frame.
No style switch. The web edition, the mindmap and the Reef map show Deep Dive only: light water, or night water when the computer is set to dark. The style switch is gone from the masthead, the phone menu and the headers of both maps, and the browser no longer keeps a style choice: a reader who had picked Art Deco gets Deep Dive, and the old choice is cleared. The tab icon is the Diver bot's head. Art Deco stays available for a whole rebuild: set default: art-deco in _system/theme.yaml and rebuild, and every page, the mindmap and the Reef map (then called the Graph again) are in Art Deco, with the matching tab icon.
Gentle motion. The Deep Dive pages come alive, quietly and only as decoration, all of it behind the text:
Unchanged. The claims, the 90 things and their mentions (the precision review of the sample still stands at 0 wrong in 100), the kits, the agent pack apart from its version, the Reef map's data and layout, the Art Deco look itself, and all PDFs and brand files (byte-identical to v2.12.0). Two rebuilds give identical files.

Raised most often

Topics the event returned to in the most sessions.

Content for people17 sessions
SEO vs GEO16 sessions
AI systems already inside Search14 sessions
robots.txt rules13 sessions
AI crawlers and agents on your site13 sessions
How Search is evolving13 sessions
Measuring success in the AI era12 sessions
Duplicate content12 sessions

All topics

Areas

7 topics · 185 claims
The state of Search
What Google says is changing in how people search, and what it promises the web.
7 topics · 125 claims
Publisher controls
Settings, meta tags and features site owners can use to shape how they appear in AI and classic Search.
12 topics · 521 claims
AI and Search
How the AI features relate to classic Search, which AI systems already run inside it, how Gemini and AI agents use web content, and what that means for optimisation.
3 topics · 64 claims
How Search works
The pipeline every page goes through, from the crawl queue through processing and the index to serving.
18 topics · 420 claims
Crawling
How Google discovers and fetches URLs, and what gets in the way.
5 topics · 219 claims
Rendering and JavaScript
How Google renders JavaScript pages, what keeps content out of the rendered HTML, how to debug it, and how embedded apps fit in.
8 topics · 282 claims
Indexing
How Google processes a crawled page: parsing and extraction, main content, tokens, duplicates, canonicals, redirects and site moves.
5 topics · 164 claims
The index and its signals
The signals Google calculates while indexing, how it decides what enters the index, what the index looks like, and how Search Console reports it.
8 topics · 318 claims
Structured data and media
What Google extracts from a page beyond its text: structured data and the schema.org vocabulary, product markup, images and video, plus accessible markup.
5 topics · 170 claims
International and multilingual sites
Language versions, hreflang, country targeting and localisation, including languages written in non-Latin scripts.
9 topics · 294 claims
Serving and ranking
How Google understands queries, retrieves and ranks results, tests and updates its systems, fights spam, and builds the results page, Discover and its features.
2 topics · 115 claims
Search Console
What Search Console launched in 2025 and 2026, and how practitioners work with its data.
3 topics · 79 claims
Search trends and Google Trends
What Google Trends data shows, the tools around it, and how to use search interest for content and SEO.
4 topics · 62 claims
Working with Google
How the Search team says it works with the community, what SEO covers, and how to take part in the web standards Search builds on.

Every topic on one page