My Trip To Google Search Central Live Zurich 2024

I nearly spat the tea out of my mouth when I saw an email saying that I had secured a ticket to the Google Search Central Live Event in Zurich. Every other time I have applied for one, I have been unsuccessful, and I thought this year would be the same. Well, what a nice surprise. After some last-minute rescheduling and childcare arrangements (in exchange for Swiss chocolate), I was on my way to Zurich!

I haven’t been to any of the Google offices before, so it’s quite the milestone for me to be invited into ‘the Dragon’s Lair’ (if we listen to the general rhetoric across social media). Google is arguably going through one of its biggest ever crises as it navigates the “ever-changing” 😆 landscape brought about by the advancement of AI technologies. Google’s reputation has never been under so much scrutiny and to top it all off with an ongoing DOJ civil antitrust case, exposing Google as a monopoly, I simply didn’t know what to expect.

My first impression upon walking into the building was actually how well my own imagination had pictured the Google offices: modern tech, on-brand interior design, multiple selections of drinks and snacks, everything is just cool in a hip millennial kind of way – it was just like that in reality, but it felt more welcoming than I had anticipated, and I certainly didn’t see any Dragon’s…yet.

The event was hosted by Martin Splitt who led the day’s proceedings. He introduced some ground rules for the day and quickly got underway with introducing the speakers and their talks. One of the ground rules from the Search Central team was not to share who said what, so I’m going to respect that wish in this instance and try to keep it anonymous, I think genuinely, the amount of questioning, rudeness and abuse these people get on a daily basis needs to be highlighted, especially in the last 18 months or so, it’s no wonder that certain Google employees and representatives participate less in public discourse on social media. I can understand their attempt to keep any messages they get in response to an event like this to a minimum. So let’s jump into the highlights….

Key highlights from Google Search Central Live 2024

The talks shared common themes from previous conference talks and presentations throughout 2024, But the main points to highlight were:

Google is always updating
They were keen to start off by making the point that Google is always updating outside of the core updates. They are constantly testing and launching things and wanted to remind us all that updating is a part of what Google has to do, and we might have forgotten that. Or at least that’s how I understand it. I believe the search central team are simply trying to highlight that although core updates, of course, often show the most noticeable change in rankings, sometimes they are not necessarily the sole reason for a change in your site’s performance in the SERPs. They also used this opportunity to share the Google Search Status Dashboard and mentioned that they have been working on improving this and how we should all use it to our advantage with tracking different types of updates.

More Google Core Updates, More Often.
One of the points that has been most shared since the event is the news that we can expect to see more Google core updates and they’ll come more often. Not much context was provided here as to why, but I think we can all safely assume it’s so that Google Search can more readily keep up with AI advancements and help to deal with the ever-growing amount of pages in its index. Or they need to introduce more frequent core updates to fix some of the damage caused by the more controversial updates in 2023 and 2024 (Helpful content update), but little evidence is available to indicate the recovery of sites that were wrongly affected by this. Whatever the reason, we can expect to be kept on our toes in 2025!


Don’t over-focus on Core Web Vitals
A point that isn’t that much of a surprise to anyone who has been working in SEO or keeping up to date with recent SEO news. We’ve even had this come up a few times in our podcast SEOs Getting Coffee. The search central team have essentially said that CWV isn’t a major ranking factor and not to spend huge amounts of time trying to get perfect scores. In general, if your website is slow, make it faster. Think of a customer on your website; do you want them to have a bad experience? Of course not, so don’t let them wait around for your site to load. 


AI is here to stay…
An underwhelming and obvious point. However, the search central team felt as if they needed to say it 🤷‍♂️.

Get used to RAG
SEOs and those in the digital marketing industries need to get used to hearing the term RAG more often. RAG stands for Retrieval-Augmented Generation and is basically an AI framework that combines information retrieval systems (like search) with generative large language models (LLMs). It’s basically how something like AI Overviews works, so of course, the search central team were keen to highlight that we’ll be hearing a lot more about RAG in 2025.

 

Get back to schema.org and prepare for enhanced structured data
Structured data is going to become even more important in 2025. Like googlebot, the AI bots love structured data because it allows them to understand the information on your webpage more easily. If they understand your page and information, then it’s more likely you’ll be selected for things like AI Overviews. We also have new options for structured data markup, which may have bypassed some people. But it’s there, and it’s got lots of nice and new shiny options for us to put to the test.

AI Overviews data not likely to be available in GSC in 2025
Very disappointing news to all in the search central auditorium, but we can safely say that we should not expect to see any kind of data reported in Google Search Console for AI Overviews any time soon. It will definitely not be in 2025, maybe in 2026, but it depends on a lot of external factors. Essentially, AI Overviews need to be rolled out in Google Search across most countries before the team responsible would consider bringing it into GSC.


Google Trends in Google Search Console
One interesting thing that was teased was the idea that they may be working on bringing Google Trends data into Google Search Console. No idea how that would look or what kind of functionality it would have, but I can see the thinking behind it. I can see it being most valuable in the performance report in GSC, but not sure how it would be possible. Maybe it would be on a query level, but either way, it sounds like something that could be useful.

My thoughts: Riddle me this...

The Google Search Central team did a great job of presenting the information that they could, but once again, it was through that filter of what they were allowed to say. One of the most frustrating things about receiving direct Google information, no matter who it’s from, is that it always feels like you’re having a conversation with The Riddler. At some point, you have to realise that it’s not a constructive way to communicate for both parties. But the Google Search team deserves recognition for trying to keep the dialogue going by hosting these events and my impression was that they are also frustrated. Who knows what about specifically, but they alluded to slow processes behind the scenes and siloed teams. So we are quick to forget that Google is just like any other company in the common problems that companies face, especially when they grow, and let’s face it, Google is the biggest of them all. 


Now, don’t misunderstand me here; this is not an attempt to drum up sympathy for Google. I’m just pointing out that despite Google being the dragon that it is, with tremendous power, ready to set fire to something (whether intentionally or unintentionally), it shares the same internal frustrations that many companies face, and we digital marketers and SEOs who largely work in-house, agency side or freelance should understand this the most, because we work with companies day in-day out. We see the same problems at every company, so I think we do need to be a bit more respectful to the people who are seemingly genuinely trying to help us do our jobs better…BUT….

Sing-along with Google

The same old mantras are still being recited by the Google Search Central team. “Just make great content”, “We’re looking to make the best possible search experience for the user”, “Write for humans, not search engines”, and every time I hear this coming out of a Google representative’s mouth, it feels like my head’s going to fall off. Surely, they are aware of how out of touch these statements are these days. It’s simply not the truth. With everything in the last 18 months, they could at least put a couple of caveats in there, maybe a disclaimer, even a slight acknowledgement that it’s not really the case that Google Search is performing the best it has ever performed, but no, they recite these sentences as if they were religious scripture. But to give some credit here, they did mention that they were working on how they could better position the “write for humans, not search engines” one, as “it doesn’t really reflect how search works” or something along those lines.

People don’t trust AI….yet

This brings me to the point that seemed glaringly obvious to me but was seemingly misinterpreted when I had the opportunity for my question to be asked. There was a large promotion of Google’s new AI innovations, from AI overviews, Project Mariner and Gemini 2.0 (along with other bits and pieces). Combined with the message that structured data will be becoming even more important, I started to see where this is all leading for the Google Search experience. At one point, they mentioned that AI Overviews has started including links because people are still wary of AI. People still want to see the source of the information. Well, my thought straight away was: what happens when people trust AI, will you remove the links to websites? Of course, this is hypothetical and AI Overviews is still being tested, but I think all SEOs have the right to be cynical in times when we’re seeing our traffic decline.

The AI future of search

I think search as we knew it is gone, and AI-assisted search will quickly become the reality. When seeing demos of Gemini 2.0, Project Mariner and AI Overviews, you are seeing clues as to what Google wants to achieve with Search. 

Let’s take online shopping. Let’s pretend you want a new pair of lightweight running shoes because you’ve taken up trail running. Usually, you would start searching and visiting a variety of websites, maybe a couple of YouTube videos, maybe a few review sites and eventually, you’ll have a shortlist of two or three items that you’ll eventually make a decision on for purchase. Well, with AI, that whole process will be a thing of the past. You’ll simply no longer have to spend hours of your time researching and finding the best lightweight training shoes. AI will do it for you. On top of that, it will become personal to you based on what Google knows about you. For example, if it knows that you are usually the person who is happy to pay a little bit more for a more prestigious or specialist brand, it will likely select this option for you. If you’re a bit of a bargain hunter, then it will likely suggest something that’s on a budget but has a tremendous reputation that far exceeds its price range. 

People won’t be researching on web pages or reading your content as much because the AI will do it for you. Therefore, the content that we produce will be for the AI bots, not really for people to read. My question to the Google Search Central team was “Are we heading towards AI-first content production?” Considering the response, they might have misunderstood the question. The answer was “content should be people-first, for humans-first” which is a sentiment that most SEOs have agreed with but not necessarily something which will remain true as we head into the future.

Next up...