Google CEO Describes A 2025 Beyond A Search Box via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s Sundar Pichai outlined the 2025 strategy, emphasizing consumer-focused AI, rapid development of agentic apps, a Chrome AI prototype called Project Mariner, and upgrades to Gemini and Project Astra, signaling a shift toward AI apps as the user interface for search.

Although Pichai did not say Google is de-emphasizing the Google Search box, he did emphasize that 2025 will increase the focus on AI apps as the main point of contact between users and how they interact with Google.

For example, Project Mariner is a Chrome AI extension that can do things like take a top ten restaurants list from TripAdvisor and drop it into Google Maps.

This focus on AI shows that Google is in transition toward an AI-based user experiences that represent a larger interpretation of what Search means, a search experience that goes far beyond textual question and answering.

Google’s Future Hinges On AI

Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, outlined a vision for 2025 that emphasizes an urgency to go back to its roots as a company that innovates quickly, what Pichai referred to as being “scrappy” which means being tough and resourceful, able to accomplish a lot in a quick amount of time (and fewer resources). Most importantly he emphasized solving real-world problems.

He also prioritizes “building big, new business” which could mean creating new business opportunities with AI, reflecting a strong focus on AI as the engine for innovation in 2025.

Gemini App

Pichai also cited Gemini App as a central focus for 2025, commenting that they’re experiencing growth with Gemini and that scaling broader adoption of Gemini will be a focus in 2025. This aligns with the observation that Google is increasingly focusing on a Search-adjacent approach to consumer focused AI products and services.

What this means for SEO is that we really need to start thinking in terms of a bigger picture of what Search means. Perhaps 2025 will be, after over 15 years of Google’s departure from the ten blue links paradigm, that the SEO community thinks deeper about what search means when it’s multimodal.

Pichai was quoted as saying:

“With the Gemini app, there is strong momentum, particularly over the last few months… But we have some work to do in 2025 to close the gap and establish a leadership position there as well. …Scaling Gemini on the consumer side will be our biggest focus next year.”

AI Products Will “Evolve Massively”

The co-founder of Google Deep Mind was quoted as saying that Google was going to “turbo charge” the Gemini app, saying that:

“…the products themselves are going to evolve massively over the next year or two.”

That means that the Gemini app is going to gain more functionalities in a bid to make it more ubiquitous as the interface between potential website visitors and Google Search, a significant departure from interfacing with the search box.

This is something that publishers and SEOs need to think really hard about as we enter 2025. Google is focusing on increasing user adoption of the Gemini app. If that happens then that will mean more people interfacing with that instead of the Google Search box.

Universal Assistant (Project Astra)

Another thing that the SEO industry seriously needs to consider is Google’s universal assistant that’s code-named Project Astra. The Deep Mind co-founder is reported to have discussed their Universal Assistant, which what Project Astra is referred as.

He’s quoted as saying that it can:

“…seamlessly operate over any domain, any modality or any device.”

What that word “domain” means is that it can function across any subject, like answering questions about healthcare, directions, entertainment, over any topic. The part about modality is a reference to text, voice, images, and video.

This is a serious situation for SEO. Google’s new Deep Research agentic search is an example of a disruptive technology that may have a negative impact on the web ecosystem.

One of the Google Deep Mind researchers cited as working on Project Astra is also listed as a co-inventor on a patent about controlling interactive AI agents through multi-modal inputs.

The patent is titled, Controlling Interactive Agents Using Multi-Modal Inputs. The description of the invention is:

“Methods, systems, and apparatus, including computer programs encoded on a computer storage medium, for controlling agents. In particular, an interactive agent can be controlled based on multi-modal inputs that include both an observation image and a natural language text sequence.”

That’s just one of dozens of researchers cited as having worked on Project Astra. Astra is another one of the projects that Google is working on that replaces the traditional search box as people’s point of contact for interacting with web data.

Takeaway About Google’s Plans For 2025

The takeaway from all this is that publishers and SEOs need to take a break from focusing solely on the search box and give some time to considering what’s going on in multimodal AI.  In 2025, AI is not just AI Overviews. AI is Gemini, it’s new features coming to Gemini and possibly the release of features developed from Project Astra, a multimodal universal agent. Agentic Search is already here in the form of Gemini Deep Research. All of these are a departure from the traditional search box as the point of contact between users, Google and websites.

Read the report on CNBC

Google CEO Pichai tells employees to gear up for big 2025: ‘The stakes are high’

Google Gemini Deep Research May Erode Website Earnings via @sejournal, @martinibuster

There’s a compelling theory floating around that Google’s AI agent, called Deep Research, could negatively impact affiliate sites. If true, not only would this impact affiliate site earnings, it could also decrease ad revenues and web traffic and to informational sites, including to the “lucky” sites that are linked to by Google’s AI research assistant.

Gemini Deep Research

Gemini Deep Research is a new tool available to premium subscribers to Gemini Advanced. Deep Research takes a user’s queries and researches an answer on the web then generates a report. The research can be further refined to produce increasingly precise results.

Google rolled out Deep Research on December 11th. It describes it as a time-saver that creates a research plan and once approved will carry out the research.

Google explains:

“Deep Research uses AI to explore complex topics on your behalf and provide you with findings in a comprehensive, easy-to-read report, and is a first look at how Gemini is getting even better at tackling complex tasks to save you time.

Under your supervision, Deep Research does the hard work for you. After you enter your question, it creates a multi-step research plan for you to either revise or approve. Once you approve, it begins deeply analyzing relevant information from across the web on your behalf.”

Deep Research presents a report that features a summary and recommendations. If searching for a product it will summarize the pros and cons with enough data that a user won’t need to click a link to visit a site, they can just go directly to a retailer and purchase the product, thereby eliminating the possibility of a site visitor clicking an affiliate link from a review website and depriving that informational site of revenue.

According to an article by Marie Haynes on YouKnowAI, the thoroughness of the summary generated by Gemini Deep Research negates the need to visit a websites, thereby depriving the site of affiliate link revenue.

YouKnowAI explains:

“…perhaps sites like foodnetwork.com will get clicks and subsequent affiliate sales. I’ve found in my own research so far that I’m not clicking on sites as I get what I need to know from the research and then go to official sites or perhaps Amazon, or stores near me to purchase.

…The obvious question here is what happens when sites like foodnetwork.com and seriouseats.com see a reduction in traffic? “

If it’s true that Gemini Deep Research users won’t need to visit sites to make up their minds then it’s possible that this new tool will also negatively affect web traffic and advertising revenue.

Is Google Out Of Touch With The Web Ecosystem?

In a recent interview, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, insisted that Google cares about the web ecosystem. When asked how Google supports the web ecosystem he struggled to articulate an answer. After a long series of uhms and false starts he started talking about how Google’s own YouTube platform enables multinational media corporations to monetize their intellectual properties on YouTube.

“He avoids mentioning websites, speaking in the abstract about the “ecosystem” and then when he runs out of things to say changes course and begins speaking about how Google compensates copyright holders who sign up for YouTube’s Content ID program.

He answered:

‘Look I… uh… It’s a… very important question… uhm… look I… I… think… I think more than any other company… look you know… we for a long time through… you know… be it in search making sure… while it’s often debated, we spend a lot of time thinking about the traffic we send to the ecosystem.

Even through the moment through the transition over the past couple of years. It’s an important priority for us.’”

This Is Why Google CEO’s Explanation Falls Short

1. YouTube is not the web ecosystem, it’s Google’s own platform.

2. Multinational mega corporations are not web creators.

Pichai’s answer sent the unintended message that Google is completely out of touch with web creators and if the author of the article about Google Gemini’s Deep Research tool is correct, this is further proof that Google continues to focus on providing information to users at the expense of creators.

Is Gemini Deep Research Harvesting Data Without Giving Back?

There’s an old television episode of The Twilight Zone called To Serve Man that relates the story of a benevolent race of aliens who bring advanced technologies that allow humans to live in peace, with food security and prosperity for everyone. As evidence of their good intentions they give the world a book written in an alien language that’s titled To Serve Man. The episode ends when government cryptographers translate the book and discover that it’s a cookbook and that the aliens true intentions are to farm humans as a food source.

Google’s mission statement promising “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” also seems like proof of their good intentions. However, the mission statement doesn’t explicitly say that Google will refer users to the sources of information. It only promises to organize and provide the information itself in a way that’s accessible and useful. While referring users to the creators of the information could be a part of making information accessible and useful, it’s not explicitly stated; it’s not even implied in the mission statement.

Is Google Gemini Deep Research further proof that Google is harvesting websites as an information source?

If you’re a creator, does it make you feel farmed?

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Nomad_Soul

Google Explains How CDNs Impact Crawling & SEO via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google published an explainer that discusses how Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) influence search crawling and improve SEO but also how they can sometimes cause problems.

What Is A CDN?

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a service that caches a web page and displays it from a data center that’s closest to the browser requesting that web page. Caching a web page means that the CDN creates a copy of a web page and stores it. This speeds up web page delivery because now it’s served from a server that’s closer to the site visitor, requiring less “hops” across the Internet from the origin server to the destination (the site visitor’s browser).

CDNs Unlock More Crawling

One of the benefits of using a CDN is that Google automatically increases the crawl rate when it detects that web pages are being served from a CDN. This makes using a CDN attractive to SEOs and publishers who are concerned about increasing the amount of pages that are crawled by Googlebot.

Normally Googlebot will reduce the amount of crawling from a server if it detects that it’s reaching a certain threshold that’s causing the server to slow down. Googlebot slows the amount of crawling, which is called throttling. That threshold for “throttling” is higher when a CDN is detected, resulting in more pages crawled.

Something to understand about serving pages from a CDN is that the first time pages are served they must be served directly from your server. Google uses an example of a site with over a million web pages:

“However, on the first access of a URL the CDN’s cache is “cold”, meaning that since no one has requested that URL yet, its contents weren’t cached by the CDN yet, so your origin server will still need serve that URL at least once to “warm up” the CDN’s cache. This is very similar to how HTTP caching works, too.

In short, even if your webshop is backed by a CDN, your server will need to serve those 1,000,007 URLs at least once. Only after that initial serve can your CDN help you with its caches. That’s a significant burden on your “crawl budget” and the crawl rate will likely be high for a few days; keep that in mind if you’re planning to launch many URLs at once.”

When Using CDNs Backfire For Crawling

Google advises that there are times when a CDN may put Googlebot on a blacklist and subsequently block crawling. This effect is described as two kinds of blocks:

1. Hard blocks

2. Soft blocks

Hard blocks happen when a CDN responds that there’s a server error. A bad server error response can be a 500 (internal server error) which signals a major problem is happening with the server. Another bad server error response is the 502 (bad gateway). Both of these server error responses will trigger Googlebot to slow down the crawl rate. Indexed URLs are saved internally at Google but continued 500/502 responses can cause Google to eventually drop the URLs from the search index.

The preferred response is a 503 (service unavailable), which indicates a temporary error.

Another hard block to watch out for are what Google calls “random errors” which is when a server sends a 200 response code, which means that the response was good (even though it’s serving an error page with that 200 response). Google will interpret those error pages as duplicates and drop them from the search index. This is a big problem because it can take time to recover from this kind of error.

A soft block can happen if the CDN shows one of those “Are you human?” pop-ups (bot interstitials) to Googlebot. Bot interstitials should send a 503 server response so that Google knows that this is a temporary issue.

Google’s new documentation explains:

“…when the interstitial shows up, that’s all they see, not your awesome site. In case of these bot-verification interstitials, we strongly recommend sending a clear signal in the form of a 503 HTTP status code to automated clients like crawlers that the content is temporarily unavailable. This will ensure that the content is not removed from Google’s index automatically.”

Debug Issues With URL Inspection Tool And WAF Controls

Google recommends using the URL Inspection Tool in the Search Console to see how the CDN is serving your web pages. If the CDN firewall, called a Web Application Firewall (WAF), is blocking Googlebot by IP address you should be able to check for the blocked IP addresses and compare them to Google’s official list of IPs to see if one of them are on the list.

Google offers the following CDN-level debugging advice:

“If you need your site to show up in search engines, we strongly recommend checking whether the crawlers you care about can access your site. Remember that the IPs may end up on a blocklist automatically, without you knowing, so checking in on the blocklists every now and then is a good idea for your site’s success in search and beyond. If the blocklist is very long (not unlike this blog post), try to look for just the first few segments of the IP ranges, for example, instead of looking for 192.168.0.101 you can just look for 192.168.”

Read Google’s documentation for more information:

Crawling December: CDNs and crawling

Featured Image by Shutterstock/JHVEPhoto

Google Says Temporal Anomalies Affect Googlebot Crawl via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google’s John Mueller answered a question on Reddit about Googlebot crawling and the completeness of the snapshot. The person asking the question received a response that touched on edge cases and temporal anomalies in crawling.

A Googlebot “screenshot” refers to a representation of what a web page looks like to Googlebot.

What a web page looks like depends on how it renders the page after executing JavaScript, loading CSS and downloading necessary images.

Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool gives an idea of what a web page looks like to Google. This tool helps publishers and SEOs understand how Google “sees” a web page.

Question About Knowing What Googlebot “Sees”

The person asking the question was talking about Googlebot screenshots. What they apparently meant was the rendered page as Googlebot itself sees it.

This is the question the Redditor asked:

“Is the Googlebot screenshot a complete picture of what Google can see?”

They later clarified with the following answers to questions:

“How can I know what google see in my article? …I want to know what Googlebot see in my website.”

Is Googlebot Screenshot A Complete Picture?

Returning to the original question of whether the “Googlebot screenshot a complete picture of what Google can see,” Google’s John Mueller offered the following answer.

“For the most part, yes. But there are some edge cases and temporal anomalies. Tell us more about what you’re trying to check.”

Mueller’s response acknowledges that the Googlebot screenshot represents what Google sees when it crawls a page.

Temporal Anomalies In Googlebot Screenshot

The person asking the question referred to a Googlebot screenshot as what Googlebot “sees” when it visits a web page. That also seems to be the context of Mueller’s answer.

Mueller’s answer referred to temporal anomalies which could be a reference to temporary issues at the time the web page was crawled that could have effected what resources were downloaded and consequently affected how the web page looked to Googlebot in that moment.

Google Search Console’s URL Inspection Tool also provides a snapshot that shows a live preview of how a web page appears to Google. It’s a good way to check if everything is rendered by Google the way it’s supposed to look.

Read the discussion on Reddit:

Is the Googlebot screenshot a complete picture of what Google can see?

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Sammby

Google’s December 2024 Updates: Final Results via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Google launched two updates in December that rolled out in succession like waves carrying happy surfers to the beach and a tsunami to the unlucky few. Many SEOs who braced for SERP drama were met with a surprising impact.

Facebook Groups: The Update Was Good!

A common theme in Facebook and forum posts is that the Google Update had a positive effect that resulted in many sites hit by previous sites were returning to life all by themselves. One person reported that a number of their dormant affiliate sites suddenly awakened and were attracting traffic. Then there were some random SEOs taking credit for de-ranked client sites returning to the SERPs, leading me to wonder if they also take credit for their clients losing rankings in the first place…

Black Hat Response To Google’s Update

The forums on Black Hat World (BHW) generally provide an indicator of how much hurt Google’s updates are handing out. Some members of BHW forum were posting about how their sites were coming back.

One member posted:

“This new update is the first update in past years for my websites to grow 🙂 For now, traffic has increased 100%+ and keeps going up…”

Another one echoed that post:

“For me it is going good for 2 days. Hope not to be bad…”

A third member shared:

“My website ranking returned today after 9 months from March update. So seams the keywords and links showing again for first time since. I was affected by the march and thought it wouldn’t recover ever again hopefully this December update once finished rolling out my site won’t be removed again”

And yet another one shared a similar experience:

“My dead website is starting to pick up keywords on ahrefs, increasing impressions on search console, but still no major change regarding traffic.”

There was one outlier who shared that their financial site lost rankings likely due to having been built on expired domains (though it’s easy to imagine other reasons).

Among the celebratory sharing was this outlier post from someone whose glass is half empty:

“Lots of sites got tanked including 3 of mine.”

Overall there was a positive tone to the black hat forum members sharing their actual experiences with Google’s December updates. That fits the pattern of what was being shared in Facebook groups, that the December updates were bringing some sites back from whatever algorithm hits they suffered in previous updates.

Then There Is The X Response.

On X, every Google update announcement is met by a large amount of comments about how big brands are the winners, spam sites are dominating the SERPs (which contradicts the first complaint), and that Google is destroying small businesses. These kinds of commments have been around for decades, from before X/Twitter. The defining characteristic of these kinds of remarks are that they are general in nature and don’t reflect anything specific about the update, they’re just venting about Google.

The response to Google’s update announcement on X was predictably negative. I’m not being snarky when I say the responses are predictably negative, that’s literally the consistent tone for every update announcement that Google makes on X.

Representative posts:

Google is destroying small businesses:

“…How is it possible every update since September 23 has destroyed the traffic of small/medium publishers while boosting corp websites that put out top 10s trash content.”

Google updates consistently benefit Reddit:

“Just call it what it is: The Gift More Traffic to Reddit Update #94”

And the Google destroyed my business post:

“I used to work independently, writing blogs and earning a decent income. I even believed I would never need a traditional job in my life. But thanks to Google, which wiped out my websites one after another, I’m now left with no income, no motivation and no job. Thank you Google”

Again, I am not minimizing the experiences of the people making those posts. I am just pointing out that none of those posts reflect experiences specific to the December Google updates. They are general statements about Google’s algorithms.

There are some outliers who were posting that the update was big but the same people say that for every update. Although 2024 was a year of massive change, those outlier posts have been consistent from well before 2024. I don’t know what’s going on there.

Google’s Core Algorithm Update: What Happened?

It feels clear that Google dialed back something in the algorithm that was suppressing the rankings of many websites. It’s been my opinion that Google’s algorithms that determine if a site is “made for search engines” has been overly hard on expert sites by people whose poor understanding of SEO resulted in otherwise high quality sites laden with high traffic keywords, sometimes showing exact matches to keywords shown in People Also Asked. That, in my opinion results in a “made for search engines” kind of look. Could it be that Google tweaked that algorithm to be a little more forgiving of content spam just as it’s forgiving for link spam?

Something to consider is that this update was followed by an anti-spam update, which could be an improved classifier to catch the spam sites that may have been set loose by the core algorithm update, while leaving the expert sites in the search results.

What About 2025?

Google’s CEO recently stated that 2025 would be a year of major changes. If the two December updates are representative of what’s coming in the future it could be that the heralded changes may not be as harsh as the series of updates in 2024. We can hope, right?