How Search works and where's AI?

Links to other sessions 93

1. Stage D1-C296 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI

   A community speaker argued for adopting the GEO label as the industry's chance to leave behind the bad reputation SEO built, unlike Google's view earlier the same day that the new name is not needed.

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   Slide D1-C050 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   Google's answer to 'SEO is dead, long live GEO' is not to worry about the name: good SEO is good GEO and AEO.

2. 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'.

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   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.

3. Stage D1-C198 Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search

   Gary Illyes said SEO is not dead and that the new AI features only create more opportunities for site owners to take advantage of.

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   Slide D1-C050 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   Google's answer to 'SEO is dead, long live GEO' is not to worry about the name: good SEO is good GEO and AEO.

4. Stage D1-C325 Day 1 · How crawling works

   Googlebot is the crawler Google uses for web search, including Search's AI features.

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   Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

5. Stage D1-C335 Day 1 · How crawling works

   Crawling for Gemini may be set to care less about quality and more about the amount of content, because for large language models the number of tokens matters more than quality.

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   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.

6. Stage D1-C336 Day 1 · How crawling works

   Google finds what to crawl mainly by extracting URLs from previously crawled pages, and additionally from sitemaps.

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   Slide D1-C040 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   URL discovery works through links: a homepage links to section pages, which link to further pages.

7. Stage D1-C388 Day 1 · How Google thinks about crawl budget

   AI Mode is a feature that sits on top of Google's existing crawling infrastructure, so Google does not crawl a site more because of AI Mode.

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   Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

8. Stage D1-C412 Day 1 · Lightning session C: Crawling

   A community speaker described AI search as turning one query into many related searches, including searches in other languages, before the information is retrieved.

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   Docs D1-C053 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   Query fan-out means running several related searches at once to gather more results; a question about lawn weeds may also search herbicides and weed prevention.

9. Slide D2-C026 Day 2 · How is HTML interpreted

   A Google pipeline slide placed processing between the crawler and the index and listed six processing steps: HTML parsing, rendering, deduplication, feature extraction, signal extraction and index selection.

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   Slide D1-C036 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

   Search runs as three stages, crawling, indexing and serving, and the event covered one stage per day.

10. Stage D2-C038 Day 2 · How is HTML interpreted

    Google uses the links it extracts for three purposes: discovering new pages, determining a site's structure, and ranking.

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    Slide D1-C040 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    URL discovery works through links: a homepage links to section pages, which link to further pages.

11. Stage D2-C073 Day 2 · Controlling indexing

    John Mueller said Google uses the snippet as a way of building AI Overviews and AI Mode answers, so if a page forbids a snippet, Google cannot use that snippet for them.

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    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

12. Docs D2-C074 Day 2 · Controlling indexing

    Google's AI features guide says a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet to appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews or AI Mode, with no additional technical requirements.

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    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

13. Stage D2-C118 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    To train Gemini models, Google renders every page just as it does for Search, so a page that renders correctly for Search also works for Gemini training, provided the site allows its content to be used for training.

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    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.

14. Stage D2-C120 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    When a Gemini user asks about a specific web page (for example, whether it says anything about the ruby HTML tag), the page is read at that moment rather than during crawling and may be used to ground the answer, which takes extra time.

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    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.

15. Stage D2-C124 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    Google's simple solution for the extra time of live page reads is to make JavaScript-generated content render quickly and efficiently, or to use server-side rendering.

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    Slide D1-C056 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: your website is no longer relevant. Google's answer: keep content crawlable, well structured, fast and easy to read, for readers and for AI tools.

16. Stage D2-C134 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    Google urged sites to make sure their JavaScript content can be crawled, rendered and indexed, calling this important today and also tomorrow, as AI systems increasingly ground answers to user requests.

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    Slide D1-C056 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: your website is no longer relevant. Google's answer: keep content crawlable, well structured, fast and easy to read, for readers and for AI tools.

17. Stage D2-C139 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    A community speaker strongly advised putting everything you want cited into the raw, server-side rendered HTML, especially for AI systems that cannot render JavaScript yet.

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    Slide D1-C056 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: your website is no longer relevant. Google's answer: keep content crawlable, well structured, fast and easy to read, for readers and for AI tools.

18. Slide D2-C168 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    In Google's processing step, links are extracted from the HTML Google already has, before rendering, and the URLs found go back to the crawl queue.

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    Slide D1-C040 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    URL discovery works through links: a homepage links to section pages, which link to further pages.

19. Docs D2-C169 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    Google's JavaScript SEO basics guide says Googlebot extracts links twice, from the HTML response before rendering and again from the rendered HTML, so links injected with JavaScript can be found if they use crawlable <a href> markup.

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    Slide D1-C040 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    URL discovery works through links: a homepage links to section pages, which link to further pages.

20. Stage D2-C173 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    Google's renderer is a headless Chromium that runs the page's JavaScript.

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    Stage D1-C206 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google renders JavaScript-heavy pages from their HTML, CSS and JavaScript as a browser would, using the latest version of Chromium.

21. Stage D2-C287 Day 2 · What is Google friendly JavaScript

    A link that is an <a> element but does not point to a real URL gives Google something to look at, but Google will not know where the link goes.

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    Slide D1-C040 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    URL discovery works through links: a homepage links to section pages, which link to further pages.

22. Stage D2-C330 Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page

    Gary Illyes said the common SEO advice to chunk content for AI systems is misunderstood: chunking is real, but it matters at the level of an AI model's context window.

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    Slide D1-C054 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: optimise for AI over readers. Google's answer: optimise for people, with no need to obsess over precise keywords or AI phrasing, no need to chop content, and no need for llms.txt.

23. Stage D2-C332 Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page

    Gemini does not need content cut into small chunks of 100 or 200 words, Gary Illyes said, since a smaller book fits in its context window.

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    Slide D1-C054 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: optimise for AI over readers. Google's answer: optimise for people, with no need to obsess over precise keywords or AI phrasing, no need to chop content, and no need for llms.txt.

24. Stage D2-C338 Day 2 · Understanding what's on a page

    Google detects soft 404s with a language model, described as something like BERT, that is trained to understand the structure and layout of a page as well as its language, instead of reading the page as one flat wall of text.

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    Slide D1-C042 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    BERT is used in indexing to understand each word in the context of the whole sentence rather than one word at a time.

25. Stage D2-C344 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google deduplicates pages because many sites have very many pages and Google's index does not have room for everything.

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    Slide D1-C037 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    For classic Search, crawling means Googlebot, scheduling and robots.txt, with AI used in parts such as scheduling. Indexing is one big but not limitless index that calculates signals and understands more than words, with AI such as BERT. Serving uses hundreds of signals tailored to the moment, with AI such as RankBrain.

26. Slide D2-C345 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    Google's deduplication has three steps: identify and cluster duplicate web pages, pick representative URLs and index the unique pages, and forward signals to the representative URLs.

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    Stage D1-C207 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google clusters duplicate pages and selects one page per cluster as its representative, the canonical URL, so that users are not shown duplicates.

27. Stage D2-C346 Day 2 · Handling web duplication

    For deduplication, a cluster is a set of pages Google considers essentially equivalent: Google stores one of them in the index and keeps track of the other related URLs.

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    Stage D1-C207 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google clusters duplicate pages and selects one page per cluster as its representative, the canonical URL, so that users are not shown duplicates.

28. Stage D2-C476 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.

    The structured data Google processes is not fed very differently to AI Overviews and AI Mode: after cleaning and quality work, the same data goes to both the classic results page and the AI features.

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    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

29. Stage D2-C477 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.

    As far as the speaker knows, in most of Google's main AI uses a page's schema.org markup is not turned into text and put directly into the model's context; the data is first sorted out, checked for quality and indexed before it is passed on as grounding context.

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    Docs D1-C061 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's guide says new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup are not needed to appear in Search, and that such files neither harm nor help visibility because Google Search ignores them.

30. Docs D2-C480 Day 2 · What is Structured Data and why we need it on the internet.

    Google's guide to optimizing for generative AI features lists 'overfocusing on structured data' among the things site owners don't need to do: structured data is not required for generative AI search and no special schema.org markup is needed, though it remains worth using because it helps pages become eligible for rich results.

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    Docs D1-C061 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's guide says new machine-readable files, AI text files or special markup are not needed to appear in Search, and that such files neither harm nor help visibility because Google Search ignores them.

31. Stage D2-C603 Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation

    Users often assume AI is all-knowing and borderless, but AI is still language-dependent: if an AI answer is synthesized from the top results, a query in another language draws on a totally different set of data.

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    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

32. Analysis D2-C607 Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation

    Check AI Overviews and AI Mode with native-language queries in each target market, not with translated English keywords, and compare with the country breakdown of Search Console's generative AI performance report; topics where competitors are cited and you are not point to missing or weak local content.

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    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

33. Analysis D2-C612 Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation

    Treat machine translation as a first draft: have a native speaker review it and adapt dates, calendars and units before publishing, because unreviewed bulk translation that adds little value can also fall under Google's scaled content abuse policy.

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    Analysis D1-C048 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    The answer is not a claim that Google detects AI text. It says ranking favours text that reads as natural to people. The risk with AI content is scale without value, which falls under Google's scaled content abuse policy, not the tool itself.

34. Stage D2-C648 Day 2 · Calculating (some) signals

    Among the many signals Google calculates during indexing, the ones singled out as having large effects on search results were country, language, freshness, SafeSearch and spam.

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    Slide D1-C037 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    For classic Search, crawling means Googlebot, scheduling and robots.txt, with AI used in parts such as scheduling. Indexing is one big but not limitless index that calculates signals and understands more than words, with AI such as BERT. Serving uses hundreds of signals tailored to the moment, with AI such as RankBrain.

35. Stage D2-C656 Day 2 · Calculating (some) signals

    Freshness is a signal for queries that deserve fresh results ('query deserves freshness'): when a breaking event hits a city, such as possible closure of Barcelona's airport, users want really fresh results, not results from two weeks ago.

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    Slide D1-C045 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Ranking signals differ by result type: web pages (text, links, passages), images (resolution, colour, associated text), news (freshness, originality, diversity), local (location, type, rating, reviews, hours) and videos (language, text from speech).

36. Stage D2-C668 Day 2 · Calculating (some) signals

    Google uses more and more AI to detect spam, and Google's testing shows that this AI-based detection is highly accurate.

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    Slide D1-C041 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Statistical models have been used at Google for over 20 years, for catching spam and originally for the 'Did you mean' feature.

37. Stage D2-C669 Day 2 · Calculating (some) signals

    SpamBrain, Google's AI-based spam detection system, is nowadays built on Gemini and fine-tuned specifically for finding spam.

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    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.

38. Stage D2-C669 Day 2 · Calculating (some) signals

    SpamBrain, Google's AI-based spam detection system, is nowadays built on Gemini and fine-tuned specifically for finding spam.

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    Slide D1-C041 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Statistical models have been used at Google for over 20 years, for catching spam and originally for the 'Did you mean' feature.

39. Stage D2-C682 Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?

    Google's index selection system calculates thresholds and decides which documents are kept and which are thrown out; a URL that does not meet the thresholds is not indexed.

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    Stage D1-C211 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Index selection runs after signals are collected and duplicates are dropped, and decides what goes into Google's index, which is big but not limitless.

40. Stage D2-C684 Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?

    Index selection is a predictive AI system that relies heavily on machine learning.

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    Slide D1-C037 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    For classic Search, crawling means Googlebot, scheduling and robots.txt, with AI used in parts such as scheduling. Indexing is one big but not limitless index that calculates signals and understands more than words, with AI such as BERT. Serving uses hundreds of signals tailored to the moment, with AI such as RankBrain.

41. Stage D2-C687 Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?

    Index selection uses the signals calculated earlier in indexing for each document it has to select or discard.

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    Stage D1-C205 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Signals calculated for a page during indexing are stored in the index and used both to decide whether the page gets indexed and, later, for ranking.

42. Stage D2-C688 Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?

    Index selection is the last step before documents enter Google's index.

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    Stage D1-C211 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Index selection runs after signals are collected and duplicates are dropped, and decides what goes into Google's index, which is big but not limitless.

43. Stage D2-C722 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    Each document in Google's index has pretty much all the signals calculated for it attached, for example quality signals plus the page's country and language, according to an illustration the speaker called an approximation of the real structure.

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    Slide D1-C037 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    For classic Search, crawling means Googlebot, scheduling and robots.txt, with AI used in parts such as scheduling. Indexing is one big but not limitless index that calculates signals and understands more than words, with AI such as BERT. Serving uses hundreds of signals tailored to the moment, with AI such as RankBrain.

44. Stage D2-C726 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    AI Overviews and AI Mode use the same index structures and token-based snippets as classic web results, a point Google called important but not obvious.

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    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

45. Stage D2-C727 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    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).

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    Slide D1-C051 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Three reasons were given: generative AI features are built directly on the core ranking systems, query fan-out expands the original query to find related information, and generative AI features highlight content indexed by Google Search.

46. Stage D2-C727 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    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).

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    Docs D1-C053 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Query fan-out means running several related searches at once to gather more results; a question about lawn weeds may also search herbicides and weed prevention.

47. Docs D2-C729 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    Google says query fan-out in AI Overviews and AI Mode issues related searches across subtopics and several data sources, which for AI Mode include the Knowledge Graph and shopping data as well as web content (AI Mode launch post, March 2025).

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    Docs D1-C053 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Query fan-out means running several related searches at once to gather more results; a question about lawn weeds may also search herbicides and weed prevention.

48. Stage D2-C741 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    In embedding-based retrieval, the distance between the embeddings of documents and the embedding of the user's query decides which documents are returned.

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    Docs D1-C129 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's guide says creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, including fan-out queries, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates its scaled content abuse policy. It adds that its AI systems can understand a page's relevance even without an exact match to the query.

49. Slide D2-C820 Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!

    Google's Q&A slide advised large sites to rely on hub pages, such as category pages, that link out to their important pages, instead of on HTML sitemaps.

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    Slide D1-C040 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    URL discovery works through links: a homepage links to section pages, which link to further pages.

50. Slide D2-C820 Day 2 · Welcome to indexing day!

    Google's Q&A slide advised large sites to rely on hub pages, such as category pages, that link out to their important pages, instead of on HTML sitemaps.

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    Stage D1-C202 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google may visit hub pages, such as a homepage or category pages, more often than other pages, because they usually link out to new or updated pages.

51. Stage D3-C007 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    Query language detection works poorly when someone searches only for a brand name, such as Facebook or Google, because the query does not show which language the user wants results in.

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    Stage D1-C215 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Serving starts with interpreting the query, which includes cleaning it up, detecting its language and expanding it.

52. Slide D3-C057 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    Google's slide on how LLM features with grounding generally work showed a query going to both the search engine and an LLM, the search engine's results going to the LLM, the LLM generating fan-out queries that go back to the search engine, and the LLM returning answers with links.

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    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

53. Stage D3-C061 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    Google tries to make fan-out queries distinct from each other for better coverage, avoiding asking the same question several times, which would return the same answers.

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    Stage D1-C225 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google said query fan-out is nothing new: it fires, for example, ten different searches in the background, each a normal search on the same systems.

54. Stage D3-C063 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    Google said fan-out queries are not added to Search Console, because Google considers them part of its infrastructure.

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    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

55. Stage D3-C065 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    Because every system runs fan-out differently, Google advised understanding that fan-out happens but not overfocusing on individual fan-out queries or on how to rank for them.

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    Docs D1-C129 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's guide says creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, including fan-out queries, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates its scaled content abuse policy. It adds that its AI systems can understand a page's relevance even without an exact match to the query.

56. Analysis D3-C135 Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality

    The quality talk's slide listed MUM among Google's ranking systems, while Google's ranking systems guide says MUM is not currently used for general ranking in Search; read the slide as a list of systems Google runs, not as proof that each one ranks every query.

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    Docs D1-C130 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's ranking systems guide says MUM is not currently used for general ranking in Search, only for specific applications such as COVID-19 vaccine searches and featured snippet callouts.

57. Stage D3-C179 Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality

    Google's quality talk said non-commodity content offers a unique, experienced take, and advised writing content that readers will find very helpful and reliable.

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    Slide D1-C055 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: build content for every possible consumer need. Google's answer: prioritise unique perspectives, expertise and in-depth experience that go beyond common knowledge.

58. Stage D3-C212 Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality

    Google's quality talk said Google clarified that traditional spam techniques aimed at manipulating AI responses also violate its spam policies, and that Google can take action against them.

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    Docs D1-C129 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's guide says creating separate content for every variation of how people might search, including fan-out queries, primarily to manipulate rankings or AI responses violates its scaled content abuse policy. It adds that its AI systems can understand a page's relevance even without an exact match to the query.

59. Stage D3-C495 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    Nik Vujic said he hopes Search Console's generative AI report will get query data.

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    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

60. Analysis D3-C497 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    Pages that do better in AI answers than in classic results do not refute Google's line that optimising for people is optimising for generative AI Search, since the comparison mixed Google's AI features with third-party LLMs; measure each surface separately, per page, before deciding what to change.

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    Slide D1-C058 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Optimising for people is optimising for generative AI Search.

61. Stage D3-C518 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    A community speaker concluded that rankings and clicks no longer equal real business outcomes.

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    Slide D1-C057 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: the old metrics don't work in the AI era. Google's answer: measure success through metrics that matter to your business.

62. Docs D3-C535 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    Beyond Search Console, Google's AI features guide suggests tracking conversions and time spent on the site in tools such as Google Analytics to understand the value of traffic from AI features.

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    Docs D1-C062 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's guide for generative AI features recommends the Generative AI performance report in Search Console for measuring how content performs in generative AI features on Google Search and Discover.

63. Docs D3-C536 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    A May 2025 Search Central blog post advised site owners to look at the overall value of visits from Search rather than focusing too much on clicks, using indicators of conversion such as sales, sign-ups, a more engaged audience or information lookups about the business.

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    Slide D1-C057 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: the old metrics don't work in the AI era. Google's answer: measure success through metrics that matter to your business.

64. Analysis D3-C542 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    Google's own line on Day 1 was to measure success by metrics that matter to the business, and its Generative AI performance report shows impressions but no clicks; together with the community talk this argues for a report that puts organic next to direct, branded paid search, conversions and revenue.

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    Slide D1-C057 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: the old metrics don't work in the AI era. Google's answer: measure success through metrics that matter to your business.

65. Analysis D3-C542 Day 3 · Lightning session L: Understanding SERPs and your users

    Google's own line on Day 1 was to measure success by metrics that matter to the business, and its Generative AI performance report shows impressions but no clicks; together with the community talk this argues for a report that puts organic next to direct, branded paid search, conversions and revenue.

    extends
    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

66. Stage D3-C602 Day 3 · How long does it take to..?

    Google said it knows hundreds of trillions of URLs (as of October 2026).

    extends
    Stage D1-C201 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google said there are trillions of URLs on the internet, or even more, that even Google cannot tell how many exist, and that some may never be discovered.

67. Stage D3-C680 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.

    Gary Illyes said machine learning is about 50 years old and that Google has been using it for 'probably 30 years', starting with statistical models that made the 'Did you mean' feature possible.

    extends
    Slide D1-C041 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Statistical models have been used at Google for over 20 years, for catching spam and originally for the 'Did you mean' feature.

68. Stage D3-C684 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.

    Predictive language models have been used a lot in Search, and BERT is one: technically, in the purest sense, an LLM.

    extends
    Slide D1-C042 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    BERT is used in indexing to understand each word in the context of the whole sentence rather than one word at a time.

69. Slide D3-C701 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.

    Google's closing slide said AI on Google is just SEO: AI features on Google Search use exactly the same processes as traditional results, so no new acronym is needed, as none was for mobile-first indexing or structured data.

    extends
    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

70. Stage D1-C196 Day 1 · What's new in the world of Search

    Google said Search Console's generative AI reporting launched alongside the generative AI control, starting with impressions only, and may expand later.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

71. Stage D1-C207 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google clusters duplicate pages and selects one page per cluster as its representative, the canonical URL, so that users are not shown duplicates.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C128 Day 1 · session not recorded

    Google's canonicalization guide says some duplicate content on a site is normal and not a violation of its spam policies; Google clusters duplicate pages, picks the most representative one as canonical and crawls the duplicates less often.

72. Stage D1-C210 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google said it is not really trying to tell AI-written from human-written content, because it cares more about the quality of content than about how it was created.

    repeats
    Stage D1-C175 Day 1 · Welcome and opening keynotes

    Explaining the principle of incentivising high-quality content, Google said the content may be created by humans or by AI: what matters is that it is high quality and made for users, not for search.

73. Stage D1-C271 Day 1 · Lightning session A: Automation and AI

    A community speaker said llms.txt files are not necessary, citing a third-party study from summer 2026 (heard as Ahrefs') that looked at almost 40,000 sites over one month: 97% had no AI agent hits on the file, and those that had any got about two hits a month.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C054 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: optimise for AI over readers. Google's answer: optimise for people, with no need to obsess over precise keywords or AI phrasing, no need to chop content, and no need for llms.txt.

74. Stage D2-C116 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on top of Search results: they are a different experience of the same content Google already has.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.

75. Stage D2-C126 Day 2 · Lightning session D: Rendering and JavaScript

    Google renders pages with Chromium, the browser technology that also underlies Chrome, Edge and other Chromium-based browsers.

    repeats
    Stage D1-C206 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google renders JavaScript-heavy pages from their HTML, CSS and JavaScript as a browser would, using the latest version of Chromium.

76. Stage D2-C537 Day 2 · Using images to your advantage and Engaging Search users with videos

    The text around an image is critical: Google uses it as context to understand the image and to rank it, so an alt attribute alone is not enough.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C045 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Ranking signals differ by result type: web pages (text, links, passages), images (resolution, colour, associated text), news (freshness, originality, diversity), local (location, type, rating, reviews, hours) and videos (language, text from speech).

77. Stage D2-C601 Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation

    Sites need no extra work to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode: both work on top of the existing web results, so what works for web results also works for the AI features.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C050 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's answer to 'SEO is dead, long live GEO' is not to worry about the name: good SEO is good GEO and AEO.

78. Stage D2-C601 Day 2 · Focusing on Internationalisation and Localisation

    Sites need no extra work to appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode: both work on top of the existing web results, so what works for web results also works for the AI features.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C051 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Three reasons were given: generative AI features are built directly on the core ranking systems, query fan-out expands the original query to find related information, and generative AI features highlight content indexed by Google Search.

79. Stage D2-C680 Day 2 · Deciding what goes in the index?

    Google's index is immense but finite, so Google cannot index every URL it finds on a web with a practically infinite number of URLs.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C037 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    For classic Search, crawling means Googlebot, scheduling and robots.txt, with AI used in parts such as scheduling. Indexing is one big but not limitless index that calculates signals and understands more than words, with AI such as BERT. Serving uses hundreds of signals tailored to the moment, with AI such as RankBrain.

80. Stage D2-C719 Day 2 · How does the index look like?

    The speaker recapped Google's pipeline up to the index: Google crawls pages, processes the fetched documents and then stores them in its index.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C036 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Search runs as three stages, crawling, indexing and serving, and the event covered one stage per day.

81. Stage D3-C056 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    Google's generative AI features in Search build on the traditional ways of searching, so query understanding also flows into AI Overviews and AI Mode.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C051 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Three reasons were given: generative AI features are built directly on the core ranking systems, query fan-out expands the original query to find related information, and generative AI features highlight content indexed by Google Search.

82. Stage D3-C058 Day 3 · Making sense of users' queries

    In Google's AI features, the query and the search results are additionally sent to an LLM, which returns new queries for Google to run.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C053 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Query fan-out means running several related searches at once to gather more results; a question about lawn weeds may also search herbicides and weed prevention.

83. Stage D3-C116 Day 3 · Lightning session K: Facets of quality

    Google's long-standing advice to write for people and give them what they want has become true in practice because Googlebot has become more and more human, a community speaker argued.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C047 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's answer was that ML-based ranking systems are trained on content written by humans for humans, so they understand and promote natural content better.

84. Stage D3-C142 Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality

    Google's quality talk said ranking signals differ by result type: for web pages they include the text on the page, links and passages, while for news, probably, freshness, diversity and originality become more important.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C045 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Ranking signals differ by result type: web pages (text, links, passages), images (resolution, colour, associated text), news (freshness, originality, diversity), local (location, type, rating, reviews, hours) and videos (language, text from speech).

85. Stage D3-C190 Day 3 · How Google thinks about Quality

    Google's quality talk said quality problems should be treated as quality issues, not as AI versus human content, because a lot of good AI-assisted or AI-written content exists.

    repeats
    Stage D1-C210 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google said it is not really trying to tell AI-written from human-written content, because it cares more about the quality of content than about how it was created.

86. Stage D3-C311 Day 3 · How Search results are born

    Google handles an image used as a search query much like a text query interpreted as an embedding: the image is broken down into vectors (embeddings) that are then searched for in the index.

    repeats
    Stage D1-C224 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    For visual search, Google breaks an image down into vectors, sends the vectors to the index and returns results based on them.

87. Stage D3-C437 Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It

    Search Console added reporting of the impressions a site's content gets in the AI surfaces of Google Search, found in the left navigation nested under Search results.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

88. Stage D3-C439 Day 3 · Inside Search Console: What’s New & How to Use It

    Search Console's generative AI report shows impressions broken down by pages, countries and devices.

    repeats
    Docs D1-C124 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's launch post for the Generative AI performance reports in Search Console (3 June 2026; rolled out to all sites worldwide by 31 August 2026) lists impressions, pages, countries, devices (Search only) and dates, and no click or query metrics.

89. Slide D3-C586 Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle

    Google's marketing research talk reached the same advice as Search: optimise for people to win in generative AI search.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C058 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Optimising for people is optimising for generative AI Search.

90. Slide D3-C588 Day 3 · Mastering the messy middle

    Google's slide advised producing unique, helpful, human-centric content.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C055 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Myth: build content for every possible consumer need. Google's answer: prioritise unique perspectives, expertise and in-depth experience that go beyond common knowledge.

91. Stage D3-C680 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.

    Gary Illyes said machine learning is about 50 years old and that Google has been using it for 'probably 30 years', starting with statistical models that made the 'Did you mean' feature possible.

    repeats
    Stage D1-C209 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google launched the 'Did you mean' feature around 2001-2002 using a statistical model, which Gary Illyes counted as AI because it is a form of machine learning.

92. Slide D3-C701 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.

    Google's closing slide said AI on Google is just SEO: AI features on Google Search use exactly the same processes as traditional results, so no new acronym is needed, as none was for mobile-first indexing or structured data.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C050 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    Google's answer to 'SEO is dead, long live GEO' is not to worry about the name: good SEO is good GEO and AEO.

93. Stage D3-C702 Day 3 · Wrapping all up: AI, Search, and making sense of everything.

    AI Overviews and AI Mode are built on the Search infrastructure Google has used for 25 to 30 years and have very few processes of their own.

    repeats
    Slide D1-C038 Day 1 · How Search works and where's AI?

    AI Mode and AI Overviews use the same crawling and the same index as Search. At serving they add grounding on the Search index and query fan-out.