Tag Archive for: Google

Google Ads Exec Talks AI and Major Developments Coming in 2025

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According to Brendon Kraham, the vice president of global search ads and commerce, Google Ads is gearing up for an AI-led “seismic shift” in how people use the internet. 

In an interview with MediaPost, Kraham recently discussed Google Ads’ plans for 2025 including how it plans to adapt to the growing integration of AI in nearly every facet of technology. 

Why AI Is The Focus In 2025

Kraham says we are in the middle of a transformation in discovering information and interacting with businesses that is even bigger than the mobile revolution. 

As he said:

“We’re in the midst of a massive shift toward AI, and frankly, it’s even bigger than the mobile revolution was. It’s about using AI to fundamentally improve how people search for information and connect with businesses.”

Google has to adapt to this on multiple fronts.

“For users, this means getting better answers to their questions, whether they’re simple or complex. From a business perspective, this AI-powered approach is going to drive a significantly better ROI for advertisers.”

How Kraham Sees 2025

When asked about his predictions for the new year, Kraham lays out three main areas that Google is focused on moving forward.

The evolution of search behavior beyond traditional keywords

“This means moving beyond simple keywords and embracing a multimodal search landscape where visuals, context, and even our surroundings play a crucial role in how we find what we need. For marketers, this means adapting to a more nuanced understanding of consumer behavior, where capturing attention and fostering genuine engagement will be paramount.”

The development of AI-powered creative tools for marketers

“This new era of search and ads means we will witness a surge in marketers embracing AI-powered tools — not to replace their creative spark, but to amplify it. Imagine personalized creative solutions that scale effortlessly, unlocking new avenues for expression and delivering measurable results.”

Integrating enhanced measurement capabilities across all digital channels

“Third, in 2025, measurement will be everything. Marketers will need to get laser-focused on their data, figuring out how to connect the dots as users move between searching, streaming, scrolling, and all those different ways of interacting online.”

Google has already been aggressively pursuing the development of AI tools in every area of its platform. Kraham indicates this is only going to accelerate further in the coming year, with new AI developments coming for Performance Max ads, Demand Gen ads, and Google Search products.

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Google’s CEO Gives Wide-Ranging Interview On The Future of Google and Search

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In a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he expects that search will “change profoundly” in 2025 led by advancements in AI and increasing competition from AI search, social media, and hardware advancements. 

Below, we’ve collected highlights from the interview that may give us a peak at Google’s plans for 2025 and beyond.

Google Aims To Be a Leader With AI Development

When asked about where Google is today in comparison to the rest of the market, Pichai emphasized that the company is in the early stages of developing radically powerful new AI tools. Additionally, he emphasized that AI developments that may not seem connected to the company are largely built on the back of research and development made possible with Google’s open-sourced technologies. 

“Look, it’s a such a dynamic moment in the industry. When I look at what’s coming ahead, we are in the earliest stages of a profound shift. We have taken such a deep full stack approach to AI.

…we do world class research. We are the most cited, when you look at gen AI, the most cited… institution in the world, foundational research, we build AI infrastructure and when I’m saying AI infrastructure all the way from silicon, we are in our sixth generation of tensor processing units. You mentioned our product reach, we have 15 products at half a billion users, we are building foundational models, and we use it internally, we provide it to over three million developers and it’s a deep full stack investment.

We are getting ready for our next generation of models, I just think there’s so much innovation ahead, we are committed to being at the state of the art in this field and I think we are. Just coming today, we announced groundbreaking research on a text and image prompt creating a 3D scene. And so the frontier is moving pretty fast, so looking forward to 2025.”

Using AI To Enhance Search Instead of Replace It

Increasingly, AI is viewed by many as a competitor to traditional search, leading the interviewer to ask what Google is doing to protect the “blue link economy” in order to not “hurt or cannibalize” its search engine and the market around it. 

In response, Pichai discussed how AI has been a major part of Google’s development for longer than most people realize. Going back as far as 2012, AI has been part of Deep Neural Networks used to identify speech and images. Since then, artificial intelligence has been a core part of the search engine’s development. 

“The area where we applied AI the most aggressively, if anything in the company was in search, the gaps in search quality was all based on Transformers internally. We call it BERT and MUM and you know, we made search multimodal, the search quality improvements, we were improving the language understanding of search. That’s why we built Transformers in the company.

So and if you look at the last couple of years, we have with AI overviews, Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone.”

Where Is Search Going In 2025?

Looking forward, Pichai says he believes Search will be radically changing – and soon. While he says that advancement is becoming more difficult because the easiest innovations have already been done, he still believes that people will be surprised at how much is coming in just the first part of 2025.

“And I just feel like we are getting started. Search itself will continue to change profoundly in 2025. I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. You know, I think we’ll be surprised even early in 2025, the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today… 

I think the progress is going to get harder when I look at 2025, the low hanging fruit is gone.

But I think where the breakthroughs need to come from where the differentiation needs to come from is is your ability to achieve technical breakthroughs, algorithmic breakthroughs, how do you make the systems work, you know, from a planning standpoint or from a reasoning standpoint, how do you make these systems better? Those are the technical breakthroughs ahead.”

Will AI Replace Traditional Search?

As increasing numbers of people seem to be relying on AI tools to get quick answers instead of using traditional search tools, some have suggested that AI could eventually replace search as we know it. At the same time, there are concerns that AI may be delivering less reliable or accurate answers, which Pichai believes will ensure that Google’s search tools remain relevant if not more valuable. 

“In a world in which you’re flooded with like lot of content …if anything, something like search becomes more valuable. In a world in which you’re inundated with content, you’re trying to find trustworthy content, content that makes sense to you in a way reliably you can use it, I think it becomes more valuable.

To your previous part about there’s a lot of information out there, people are getting it in many different ways. Look, information is the essence of humanity. We’ve been on a curve on information… when Facebook came around, people had an entirely new way of getting information, YouTube, Facebook, Tik… I can keep going on and on.

…I think the problem with a lot of those constructs is they are zero sum in their inherent outlook. They just feel like people are consuming information in a certain limited way and people are all dividing that up. But that’s not the reality of what people are doing. “

The full interview touches on several other questions including potential upcoming regulations, how the search engine views its responsibility towards creators, and other Google platforms like YouTube’s future direction. You can watch it here or below:

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Google Now Supports The AVIF File Format Making It The Best Format For SEO

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This week Google announced that it now supports the AVIF file format, making the format eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images. Now that the search engine can index and display the popular file format, it will likely become the standard for lightweight high-quality images online quickly. 

What Is The AVIF File Format?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a relatively new open-source file format used for images, that can deliver the same quality images as JPEGs or PNGs in remarkably smaller file formats (up to 50% smaller than a comparable JPEG). 

Notably, the format seems to combine all the most notable features of other popular image formats. AVIF supports the use of transparency like PNG and even has a higher dynamic range level, allowing for deeper blacks in images. Like GIFs, also allows for the creation of animated images.

What About WebP?

Another newly popular image file format, WebP, might seem like a competitor to AVIF but both formats offer their unique benefits which make them suited for specific needs. 

WebP is an ideal format for lossless images – typically used when an image must be of the absolute highest quality possible. On the other hand, WebP is not nearly as small as AVIF, so it is not ideal for those focused on maintaining fast loading speeds. 

Why The AVIF File Format May Help SEO

Over the last few years, Google has increasingly emphasized website speed as a major factor it considers when ranking websites.

The search engine has begun using a selection of metrics that measure different aspects of site speed, known as Core Web Vitals. 

Because the AVIF file format allows for smaller image sizes, it can help reduce loading speeds on web pages and potentially improve your online rankings. 

In an environment where any edge against the competition can be the difference to help you get the top spot, sites will quickly be moving to adopt the format now that Google supports it.

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Google To Replace a Core Web Vital Ranking Signal In March

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Google is making a big change to its Core Web Vitals ranking signals soon, as the company announced that the new Interaction to Next Paint (INP) signal will replace the First Input Delay (FID) on March 12.

The new INP metric measures the amount of time between when a user interacts with a web page (for example, by clicking a button) to when a browser begins rendering pixels on the screen.

Though FID measured a similar time between user input and browser rendering, Google says INP captures interactivity in ways that were not possible previously.

The History Behind FID and INP Metrics

FID has been a metric used by Google to rank sites since the debut of Google’s Core Web Vitals in 2018. However, Google quickly began to see that this metric didn’t fully capture user interactions as they had hoped. 

This led to Google introducing INP as an experimental or “pending” metric in 2022. Now, almost 2 years later, Google has decided to fully replace FID with the INP metric in March.

What You Should Do

Before March, it is recommended that website managers ensure their site is meeting the threshold for a “good” INP performance. 

If you do not meet this mark, Google suggests optimizing your site with these strategies:

  • Evaluate your site’s performance using tools such as PageSpeed Insights or the Google Chrome User Experience Report.
  • Identify issues that may be slowing down INP, like extended JavaScript tasks, excessive main thread activity, or a large DOM. 
  • Optimize issues based on Google’s optimization guides for the specific issue.

As Google’s ranking algorithms evolve, this and other ranking signals will likely be updated or replaced. This emphasizes how important it is to use the latest optimization standards and to ensure a smooth user experience if you want your business to be easily found online.

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What’s Changing The Updated SEO Starter Guide From Google?

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The Google SEO Starter Guide is designed to help individuals and organizations quickly learn the most important steps necessary for getting their websites ranking within Google Search. 

While the guide reportedly maintains a 91% approval rating, it has largely gone without updates for several years but that will be changing soon.

In a recent episode of Google’s “Search Off The Record” podcast, the company’s Search Relations team discussed plans to update the SEO Starter Guide, including talking about what would and would not be included in the revised document. 

Discussions like this are great for seeing how SEO is talked about within the search engine and learning what the company prioritizes when ranking sites along with identifying SEO myths that might lead you astray when optimizing your own site. 

So, what’s changing in the revised SEO Starter Guide?

HTML Structure

One topic the group discussed was the importance (or lack thereof) of HTML structure when it comes to online rankings.

While the team agreed that using proper HTML structure can help with online rankings, they indicated the guide will clarify that these are not all that important in the grand scheme.

As Google’s Gary Ilyes said:

“Using headings and a good title element and having paragraphs, yeah, sure. It’s all great, but other than that it’s pretty futile to think about how the page… or the HTML is structured.”

Branded Domain Names vs Keyword Rich Domain Names

SEO experts have been increasingly debating whether it is better to focus on your existing branding when establishing a domain name, or if domains perform better when including specific keywords.

According to the Google team, the new guide will clarify this by indicating that brands should focus on including branding in their domains over using keywords. The thought process shared by those in the discussion was that establishing a memorable brand will have a more long-term impact than trying to optimize your domain specifically for search engines. 

Debunking SEO Myths

Lastly, the group said one thing they want to improve in the document was how it addressed widespread SEO myths and misconceptions. 

For example, everyone agreed that the SEO Starter Guide should specifically debunk the idea that using Google products while creating or optimizing your site will improve search rankings. 

They indicated they would address this myth and several others to prevent people from optimizing their site based on misinformation found elsewhere online. 

For more from the discussion, listen to the entire episode of “Search Off The Record” here.

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Google’s Danny Sullivan Responds To Claims That Rich Results Steal Content

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A lead Google spokesperson gave a surprising response to claims that the search engine stole content from a publisher without providing any benefit to the publisher’s website. 

Google’s rich search results have been controversial since their launch, as some feel that these results simply copy information from other websites instead of sending users to that content where it was originally posted. 

The search engine has largely ignored these criticisms by saying that rich results improve the search experience and include links to the original content. 

That’s what makes it so surprising that Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan recently publicly responded to one publisher’s complaints directly.

The Original Complaint

In several recent tweets, a representative for travel brand Travel Lemming posted:

“Google is now stealing Travel Lemming’s own brand searches (even via site search).

They take our list — INCLUDING MY ORIGINAL PHOTOS 📸 — and present it in a rich result so people don’t click through.

I am literally IN that Red Rocks photo!…”

They are doing this across all travel searches – unbranded and branded alike.

Example: “Mexico Travel Tips” – they have an AI answer & also a rich result that basically just re-creates an entire blog post, including our stolen photos.

Again, I am IN that Mexico packing photo!

Like how is it legal for Google to just essentially create entire blog posts from creators’ content and images?

I literally have a law degree from the top law school in the world, and even I can’t figure it out!

Fair use does NOT apply if you’re using the content to compete directly against the creator, which they clearly are.

I can’t sit outside a movie theatre, project the movie on a wall, earn money from it, and claim fair use.

I spent SO much time taking those photos in Denver.

It was 10+ full days worth of work for me and partner Clara, going around the city to photograph everything. $100s of money spent in attraction admission fees, gas, parking.

Now Google just gets to extract all that value?

How much does Google get to take before creators say “enough is enough”?

How hard does the water have to boil before the frog jumps?

The comments show it is a prisoner’s dilemma as long as Google has a monopoly on search …”

Google’s Response

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, provided a lengthy response that delves specifically into what is happening, why, and ways they are hoping to improve the situation. 

Not only does Sullivan give insight into the company’s perspective, but also their own opinions about the function. Importantly, Sullivan doesn’t disregard Travel Lemming’s complaints and is sympathetic to how rich search results impact publishers:

“Hey Nate, this got flagged to my attention. I’ll pass along the feedback to the team. Pretty sure this isn’t a new feature. Elsewhere in the thread, you talk about it being an AI answer, and I’m pretty sure that’s not the case, either. It’s a way to refine an initial query and browse into more results.

With the example you point out, when you expand the listing, your image is there with a credit. If you click, a preview with a larger view comes up, and that lets people visit the site. Personally, I’m not a fan of the preview-to-click.

I think it should click directly to the site (feedback I’ve shared internally before, and I’ll do this again). But it’s making use of how Google Images operates, where there’s a larger preview that helps people decide if an image is relevant to their search query. Your site is also listed there, too. Click on that, people get to your site.”

If you don’t want your images to appear in Google Search, this explains how to block them:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/prevent-images-on-your-page

I suspect you’d prefer an option to not have them appear as thumbnails in particular features. We don’t have that type of granular control, but I’ll also pass the feedback on. 

I appreciate your thoughts and concerns. I do. The intention overall is to make search better, which includes ensuring people do indeed continue to the open web — because we know for us to thrive, the open web needs to thrive.

But I can also appreciate that this might not seem obvious from how some of the features display.

I’m going to be sharing these concerns with the search team, because they’re important.

You and other creators that are producing good content (and when you’re ranking in the top results, that’s us saying it’s good content) should feel we are supporting you.

We need to look at how what we say and how our features operate ensure you feel that way.

I’ll be including your response as part of this.”

I doubt Sullivan is going to change many minds about Google’s rich search results, but this rare interaction is revealing to how Google sees the situation and is trying to walk a tightrope between providing a seamless search experience while sustaining the sites it relies on.

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Google’s John Mueller Answers Some ‘Dumb’ SEO Questions

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One of Google’s most visible spokespeople, John Mueller, made a rare appearance on Reddit to answer a series of “dumb” SEO questions covering everything from geotagging images to how often you should blog.

In a thread on the r/BigSEO subreddit called “incoming dumb question barrage”, a user asked a series of five questions:

  1. Should we be geotagging images. Does Google even care?
  2. Blogging. If we do it, is it everyday or once a week with some seriously solid stuff?
  3. Google Business Profile posting: Everyday, once a week, or why bother?
  4. Since stuff like Senuke died 10 years ago, is it all about networking with webmasters of similar and same niche sites for links?
  5. Piggybacking off #4, what about PBNs? Are they back? If so, does it have to be a group of completely legit looking websites vs some cobbled together WP blogs?

Mueller provided a series of candid answers which we will get into below:

Geotagging Images

Here Mueller kept it short and sweet: “No need to geotag images for SEO.”

How Often Should You Blog?

As always, Google won’t provide a specific post frequency that is “best” for SEO blog content. Rather, Mueller says to post “as often as you have something unique & compelling to say.”

However, the Google Search Advocate admits that more frequent posting can more traffic if you are able to maintain the quality of your content. 

“The problem with trying to keep a frequency up is that it’s easy to end up with mediocre, fluffy content, which search engine quality algorithms might pick up on.”

Additionally, he indicates that those who are using AI to create a lot of content quickly are unlikely to be rewarded.

Google Business Profile Posting Frequency

Unfortunately, this is not Mueller’s area of knowledge. His answer was a simple “no idea.”

Outdated Linkbuilding Strategies

The last two questions are devoted to asking if older methods for link building were still relevant at all. Clearly, this tickled Mueller as he largely dismissed either approach. 

“SENuke, hah, that’s a name I haven’t heard in ages, lol. Sorry. Giggle. I have thoughts on links, but people love to take things out of context to promote their link efforts / tools, so perhaps someone else will say something reasonable, or not.

“OMG, PBNs too. What is this thread even. Now I won’t say anything without a lawyer present.”

No Shortcuts To Online Riches

Of course, there is an underlying current connecting all of these questions. Mueller takes note of this as well, saying:

“Reading between the lines, it seems you want to find a short-cut to making money online.”

The truth is, there are no real shortcuts to online success these days. However, there are a lot of questionable people willing to take your money to provide tools and courses that often get you nowhere. 

“Unfortunately, there’s a long line of people trying to do the same, and some have a lot of practice. Some will even sell you tools and courses on how to make money online (and *they* will be the ones making the money, fwiw, since people pay them for the tools and courses). The good tools cost good money, and they’re not marketed towards people who just want to make money online — they’re targeted at companies who need to manage their online presence and report on progress to their leadership chain.”

At the same time, Mueller encourages individuals such as the person who started to thread to keep learning and practicing SEO:

“… learn HTML, learn a bit of programming, and go for it. 90% of the random tricks you run across won’t work, 9% of the remaining ones will burn your sites to the ground, but if you’re lucky & persistent (is that the same?), you’ll run across some things that work for you.

“If you want to go this route, accept that most – or all – of the things you build will eventually blow up, but perhaps you’ll run into some along the way that make it worthwhile.”If you want to go this route, accept that most – or all – of the things you build will eventually blow up, but perhaps you’ll run into some along the way that make it worthwhile.

“And … after some time, you might notice that actually building something of lasting value can also be intriguiing [sic], and you’ll start working on a side-project that does things in the right way, where you can put your experience to good use and avoid doing all of the slash & burn site/spam-building.”

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Explaining The 3 Types of Crawlers Google Uses To Understand The Web

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To understand and rank websites in search results, Google is constantly using tools called crawlers to find and analyze new or recently updated web pages. What may surprise you is that the search engine actually uses three different types of crawlers depending on the situation with web pages. In fact, some of these crawlers may ignore the rules used to control how these crawlers interact with your site.

In the past week, those in the SEO world were surprised by the reveal that the search engine had begun using a new crawler called the GoogleOther crawler to relieve the strain on its main crawlers. Amidst this, I noticed some asking “Google has three different crawlers? I thought it was just Googlebot (the most well-known crawler which has been used by the search engine for over a decade).”  

In reality, the company uses quite a few more than just one crawler and it would take a while to go into exactly what each one does as you can see from the list of them (from Search Engine Roundtable) below: 

However, Google recently updated a help document called “Verifying Googlebot and other Google crawlers” that breaks all these crawlers into three specific groups. 

The Three Types of Google Web Crawlers

Googlebot: The first type of crawler is easily the most well-known and recognized. Googlebots are the tools used to index pages for the company’s main search results. This always observes the rules set out in robots.txt files.

Special-case Crawlers: In some cases, Google will create crawlers for very specific functions, such as AdsBot which assesses web page quality for those running ads on the platform. Depending on the situation, this may include ignoring the rules dictated in a robots.txt file. 

User-triggered Fetchers: When a user does something that requires for the search engine to then verify information (when the Google Site Verifier is triggered by the site owner, for example), Google will use special robots dedicated to these tasks. Because this is initiated by the user to complete a specific process, these crawlers ignore robots.txt rules entirely. 

Why This Matters

Understanding how Google analyzes and processes the web can allow you to optimize your site for the best performance better. Additionally, it is important to identify the crawlers used by Google and ensure they are blocked in analytics tools or they can appear as false visits or impressions.

For more, read the full help article here.

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Google’s Gary Illyes Explains Why Your Site May Stop Ranking For a Keyword

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Typically when a site starts ranking worse for one keyword, the effect is also seen for several of the other keywords it ranks for. So what does it mean when a website only loses rankings for one keyword? According to Google’s Gary Illyes, there are a few reasons a site might experience this rare problem. 

In a recent Google SEO Office Hours episode, Illyes addressed the issue while answering a question from a site owner who had effectively disappeared from the search results for a specific keyword – despite ranking at the top of results consistently in the past. 

The Most Likely Culprit

Unfortunately, the most common cause of an issue like this is simply that competitors have outranked your website, according to Illyes:

“It’s really uncommon that you would completely lose rankings for just one keyword. Usually, you just get out-ranked by someone else in search results instead if you did indeed disappear for this one particular keyword.”

Other Potential Causes

If you believe the drop in rankings for a specific keyword is the result of something other than increased competition, Illyes recommends investigating if the issue is isolated to a specific area or part of a larger ongoing global problem. 

“First, I would check if that’s the case globally. Ask some remote friends to search for that keyword and report back. If they do see your site, then it’s just a ‘glitch in the matrix.’”

Those without friends around the globe can effectively accomplish the same thing by using a VPN to change their search location.

On the other hand, if your site is absent from results around the globe, it may be indicative of a bigger issue – potentially the result of changes to your website:

“If they don’t [find your website], then next I would go over my past actions to see if I did anything that might have caused it.”

Lastly, Gary Illyes offers a few other potential causes of a sudden ranking drop.

Technical issues such as problems with crawling or indexing can prevent your website from appearing in search results. 

Sudden changes to your backlink profile – either through mass disavowing links or through the use of low-quality or spammy links can also trigger issues with Google. If you are hit with a manual penalty for low-quality links, it is highly likely your site will stop ranking for at least one keyword (if not several).

To hear the full discussion, check out the video below:

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Google Blocked Over 5.2 Billion Ads In 2022 According To Annual Ads Safety Report

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Google released its annual Ads Safety Report this week, highlighting the company’s efforts to guarantee advertising on its platforms is safe and trusted.

Along with suspending more than 6.7 million spammy ad accounts over the last year, the report details how Google is fighting fraud, preventing potentially harmful ads from running, and protecting user privacy.

Using machine learning algorithms, Google is able to identify suspicious activity and patterns faster than ever and quickly remove fraudulent or harmful ads.

This has contributed to a huge improvement in Google’s abilities to detect spam and harmful activity at scale, leading to over 2 billion more ads being blocked in 2022 compared to the previous year. 

At the same time Google released the report, the company also announced it is launching an Ads Transparency Center to help users better understand the ads they are seeing and who is paying to display them. 

Highlights From The 2022 Google Ads Safety Report

The full Ads Safety Report includes a lot of details about how Google detects and removes malicious or spammy ads, but these were the details we think are most important for you to know:

  • Google blocked over 5.2 billion ads for policy violations
  • Ad restrictions were down by over a billion annually in 2022
  • Over 6.7 million advertiser accounts were suspended for “egregious” policy violations
  • The number of ads removed from web pages stayed largely stable compared to the previous year

What Is The Ads Transparency Center?

In response to the leap in blocked ads and suspended ad accounts, Google decided to create the Ads Transparency Center – a central knowledge hub containing information about verified advertisers and ads. 

Here you’ll be able to find detailed information about the ads a specific advertiser has run, what ads are being shown in a specific area, and more about ads appearing on the platform. 

Users can also access My Ad Center here, which gives them the ability to like, block, or report potentially problematic ads. 

For more about Google’s attempts to keep the ads on its platform safe for users, check out the full 2022 Ads Safety Report here or the Ads Transparency Center announcement here.

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