What does Google I/O 2024 mean for SEOs?

Mordy Oberstein:

It is the new wave of SEO podcasting. Welcome to SERP's Up. Aloha, Mahalo for joining the SERP's Up Podcast. We're pushing out some groovy win insights around what's happening in SEO, and boy, if something's happening in SEO right now. I'm already overseeing the head SEO brand here at Wix, and I'm joined by she who is Google, Google, Google focused, our head of SEO communications here at Wix, Crystal Carter.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you for that fantastic, very enthusiastic introduction as we get into Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

In case you don't know, so welcome to the bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast, where each year we go through what Google announced at Google I/O, in this case Google I/O 2024. Just to remind you, by the way, the SERP's Up Podcast is brought to you by Wix, where you can only subscribe to our monthly newsletter Searchlight over at wix.com/SEO/learn/newsletter, but where you can also check out our brand new platform, Wix Studio, to help you manage your clients' projects and agency team members with far greater efficiency. Anyway, back to I/O.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

Back to I/O. In case you didn't watch it before the keynote actually started, there was an improvisational musician who I'm told is very famous and very good. I don't know who he is.

Crystal Carter:

Okay, yeah

Mordy Oberstein:

I wrote to you on WhatsApp, Crystal, he looked like Joseph and took his Technicolor Dreamcoat and was sleeping on a bench in Bryant Park and kicked out of the house and decided that during the daytime, he'll spend most of his time yelling some prophetic visions about big tech by screaming the words Google, Google, Google, all day long.

Crystal Carter:

I'm not sure. I think they were trying to make it fun. I did a predictions video and I thought, "Oh, maybe it'll be less fun because they're trying to focus on..." They got competitors. OpenAI did a big drop the day before, and so I thought this was going to be like, "We're very serious, boom, boom," but there was a lot of music in Google I/O, including that introduction, including it was we're in the studio, blah, blah, blah. And then there was a musical number about, am I doing the AI right, which I was very surprised to see. So, it was a lot to take in.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm just a boomer anyway, so don't listen to me, Google. Anyway, where do we even start? There was a lot. It was a two-hour keynote, which was very long.

Crystal Carter:

Very long.

Mordy Oberstein:

I guess for our podcast and purposes, the good news is that they didn't talk a lot about search, so not a lot to cover. We're starting off salty.

Crystal Carter:

They talked about Gemini a lot, and I think that the big takeaway that I got from it was essentially that Gemini is coming to everything. It's essentially powering everything all at once, and I don't think that we will see the end of that very, very soon. I think that they're just looking to build, and build, and build on that, and I think that that's very apparent that they're all on Gemini in all parts of the SERP.

Mordy Oberstein:

You know what? It made me kind of wonder, and this is maybe a hot take, I guess the show is all about hot takes to be honest with you, that they're realizing that the ecosystem where you're going to get information in the future is going to be less search and more closed AI systems like Gemini or OpenAI, ChatGPT, that kind of thing. And at minimum, they're seeing that their revenue possibilities are greater with those AI possibilities than it is with search itself, which is interesting to hear myself even say.

Crystal Carter:

Well, I think that they're noticing that this is where the market is going, that a lot of people are interested in having these kind of assistants and having these kind of assistants as part of their day to day, which I mentioned that musical number there was, "Am I doing AI right?" That sort of thing. It's like normal, everyday people. I think they were trying to go for that kind of vibe that Apple always has, which is like we have very sophisticated tech that's really, really easy for you to use. And I think that they were trying to go for that, and I think that in terms of search for SEO, I think there's a lot of implications here. And you said, "I can't believe you're saying that," and there's a lot of implications here, but it did not seem particularly search was at the forefront of their minds with this. So, they wanted to showcase how useful Gemini can be, how integrated it is to their system, how powerful it is, and how many different iterations they have across all of their systems.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, that's I think something to keep in mind with this kind of thing that a lot of it has to do with not where they're going to earn revenue in terms of adding AI capabilities to Gmail, which they talked about in the workspace. So, I think that kind of stuff, by the way, is really cool. I think it's really useful. I think it's one of the only real cases where the AI product is really useful and it gives them a leg up over OpenAI, because Google has a whole ecosystem where they can apply their AI technology directly, so Gmail, or whatever workspace you're using, or Google Docs, whatever it is, and OpenAI doesn't have that. You're stuck in just an OpenAI universe using it independently. So that's really an interesting, I guess, advantage that Google has.

Crystal Carter:

But I think they had lots of different iterations, so you mentioned the Gmail one, but they also talked about lots of personal assistance sort of things as well. So, they talked about you can train it on your needs, and I think that as you're saying, so OpenAI has standalone, and I think that when they launched New Bing and their Copilot tool, that's something they really struggled with. They were like, "You can only have Copilot, you can only have New Bing if you sign up to be on the Bing ecosystem." And I think what Google's trying to do is they're trying to double down on their user relationships, so that if you have an Android phone, you are also using Gemini, you are also relying on Google Photos, so you're searching your photos, you're searching with your videos, all of us, so that their attack is part of your day-to-day, so that you're essentially relying on it, which is a big shift. I think there's a shift. I think that's a big shift.

Mordy Oberstein:

There's that stuff, which I think is very practical and I think very useful and I think very direct, and then I think there's the other half of it, which is let's make sure we signal to the investors, so that our stock price is healthy, that we are competing with OpenAI and our technology is just as advanced, if not more advanced than theirs is. And I think a lot of what you saw yesterday or wherever you're listening to this at Google I/O was a lot about that. So for example, a lot of the things they did with DeepMind, I felt like, "That's cool. I'm not sure how practically valuable that is yet." I felt that way, by the way, with OpenAI's demo also, "Very, very cool, but I'm not sure what's the practical implication of that, so that it actually improves my workflow right now."

Crystal Carter:

My main takeaway from all of it was they kept saying, "You can upload this, you can have more tokens." They said you can upload like a -

Mordy Oberstein:

It’s like Chucky Cheese!

Crystal Carter:

They were saying something like you can upload... I can't remember what the number was, but it was huge, like a 1,500 slide PowerPoint... Or not PowerPoint, Google Slide deck or something like that. I was like, "Who is making this?"

Mordy Oberstein:

That's interesting, because I felt what they were trying to do with that kind of stuff was differentiate themselves from OpenAI. OpenAI is for everybody, for the lay person to use on their phone and whatever, and Gemini is for developers, and engineers, and it's very complicated and professional. That was a branding differentiation they were trying to do.

Crystal Carter:

But I think that the thing that occurred to me though is that when we think about SEO, they were saying, "You can upload all of this and we can search all of it, and you can upload all of that and we can search all of that." And they were talking about that from their tools point of view. Google very often... Google does not silo their tools. They will overlap the tools as we see with Gemini, you see with Google Lens, as we see with Google Translate, they pull all of these things together across the ecosystem through the efficiencies and it gives users to great benefit. So, what I think we should think about as an SEO, as somebody who's working with the website is, how is Google helping users manage data via their tools and how does that affect how the users are going to access data and expect to be able to access data on a website?

And I think that the shift to me that I got out of this was that users... Sorry, website managers, SEOs, marketing teams, whoever's managing the website should be thinking about their website as a data center and should be thinking about how accessible their data is, which ways their data is arranged, whether or not it's held in certain repositories, in like a PDF, or whether it's held in videos. They're talking about searching via video, which I think is a really interesting development. And I think that that opens up a lot of stuff, because that's almost certainly going to be something that's going to make YouTube videos more searchable, for instance. And I think that that's something that's interesting for people who were self-hosting on their websites. And also I think that's interesting for that data point I mean, we're going to be... I think that going forward it's going to be more updated to take advantage, and I think that'll be interesting.

Mordy Oberstein:

And I think it's the circle to search where we saw them, we covered that on the news on this podcast a while back when they tested it. That stuff is fascinating. It's super cool technology and it really doesn't make searching for things much easier, but I guess let's talk about the elephant in the room, which is the elephant. There's an elephant in the room and oh my God, we're talking about an elephant. No, no, we're talking about SGE.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

So, Google announced that they're going to be rolling out SGE outside of labs in the US and beyond. It's the end of all organic traffic ever, or not.

Crystal Carter:

Again, again.

Mordy Oberstein:

I was surprised by the way, so I was surprised that if you think about what they announced in terms of the classic SGE itself, and I know there's more capabilities which we'll get to about planning and organizing information, but the actual how many stars are in the universe and you get an SGE answer, nothing actually changed. They announced at Indutech and in DEV4, it's just the same thing. They're sufficiently rolling it out, and I think that's extremely telling about how they think about SGE, and part of me feels like they announced it, and this is a hot take, they announced it, because they had to announce that the rolling it out, because what are you going to do with the thing? You're not going to implement it, and there's a loss in having it there. You have to expand it anyway, so you could ignore it if you want to. So, let's roll it out. Again, it's good for perception, it's good for the health of the company and the perception of the company, but how impactful is the real question? Will SGE really be on the SERP?

Crystal Carter:

I think really interesting. So one of the things they said, they said that they're going to put it in a side panel, which I've been fascinated with. We've talked about Google copying Microsoft's homework, and the Copilot has been in the side panel on desktop for months. And basically if you go and you search up, I don't know, the best Yankee baseball player or something, then you'll get the-

Mordy Oberstein:

Yogi Berra.

Crystal Carter:

… Yogi Berra and then you'll have on the side it'll be like, "Blah, blah, blah, Yogi Berra..." And it'll write that and you may or may not pay attention to it, but that's already in the side panel on thing and it's user experience of people, what people are used to, and I think it's interesting that they were planning to do that as well. So, I think we should see some parity, and I think also it might be worth thinking about people are trying to prepare for this SGE universe looking at how their rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out, how their bidding rankings have been impacted since being rolled that out. I think that's particularly important for folks who are in EU, folks who are outside of the United States where they haven't had the SGE in any form. And so, we're not here on green fields. There is something that we can look at to compare data in terms of impact, and I think that that's worth having a look at.

Mordy Oberstein:

And that's interesting. I was talking to Garrett Sussman on X about this where SGE has been outside of labs in the US for a while already, and I personally haven't seen anybody, "Oh, the sky is falling," yet. And that's one thing that Google didn't say. They didn't say, "Oh, people find the SGE answers useful and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," which everyone's got to put that PR spin on it, but they didn't say how often people are actually expanding it and interacting with it, which if the numbers were high, I would imagine they would say, "Oh, 80% of our users when SGE has been offered are engaging with..." And they didn't. So, I do speculate about how much the SGE will actually be used by users, but let's assume for a minute, Crystal, that everyone 100% of the time engages the SGE. Does that mean is the end of content as we know it?

Crystal Carter:

Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was that they were talking about talk as much as you want, ask as long as you want, go as complex as you want in terms of your answers. So, I think the example that they showed was, "I want to find a yoga studio that's walking distance from this place in Boston, and has good entry offers," or something to the effect. And they were able to filter out this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and I think that this is the domain of the long-tail. This is something that for long-tail queries and also for understanding the element of that, what users are looking for, which combinations of information users are looking for is something that is interesting. So, I don't think it's necessarily the end of content, but I do think that we'll have to think about user expectations. Users will expect to be able to have more complex information available on the website, and I think also we will need to be able to organize that information more clearly in lots of different ways they're accessible to Google.

Mordy Oberstein:

I'm a little torn on this one because on the one hand it seems like, "All right, let's slow down here." On the other hand, the way that Google presented it in the video that they did, if you saw after the presentation itself, they did a whole, I don't know, a PR-ish kind of video. It very much looks like, or I took it and perceived it as they're basically saying SGE is going to replace top level information, which is, okay, let's deal with that as it is. At the same time, I feel like, yes, they did tell Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land that's going for complex queries where they can offer unique value, but if you look at the examples that people have been sharing, it's not for that. So for example, Christine Schacker shared an example with me where they're running it for... I had to deal with the kidney stone, something around that.

I'm like, "Okay, that's interesting, that's not very complex." If you Google that, you'll get your typical Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health rundown of symptoms and causes and treatment and whatever. And what I take this as is Google basically saying, "Hey, you know what? You all have done that 100 times over already, 1,000 times over, we don't need that anymore. So, we're just going to show that in the SGE, because SGE actually, and I do believe this, does it better if it's accurate, because it's much more as opposed to, let's say the Mayo Clinic, they have their article, and the Cleveland clinic has their article. If you sort of combine the best of those articles, that's better.

Crystal Carter:

Right.

Mordy Oberstein:

Or I think though that content's not dead is, for example, in this whole prolific they had about preventing or dealing with kidney stones, which is such a pleasant topic, they had a section on, for example, avoiding protein, because that will prevent having kidney stones for whatever reason. I'm totally botching what it wrote, because I know nothing about kidney stones. I'm not a doctor. “Damnit Jim, I'm not a doctor.” That's not how that goes, but anyway, so if I had kidney stones and I'm like, "Oh, wait a second, I can prevent this again by not eating whatever protein?" That summary's not enough. The second tier or second level or second depth content I'll call it, you still need to click, you still need to dive in.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

And what I think it means is that if a website... See, I was talking to someone, I talking to Mark Preston about this today actually, when we think about writing a content cluster, so we'll be like, "How to prevent kidney stones," and we'll talk about medicine on one page and we'll talk about diet on another page. We think it's very prolific, but when you think about it, it's still very top level. A real in-depth topic cluster would be a content cluster about protein, eating it, and the prevention of kidney stones. Like for example, one topic would be, what proteins do or don't?

Another page would be, for example, I'm off the cuff here, how do you now substitute your diet to get the protein you do need without eating protein to prevent kidney stones? There's a whole topic cluster about just that one slice of preventing kidney stones, which no one's doing, because that's way too in-depth kind of thing, but I feel like if you want to be the URL that shows up in the section of the SGE, that talks about preventing kidney stones with a protein-less diet, whatever it is, then you need to write that content cluster and be known as that entity that talks about what? Not kidney stones, not diet and kidney stones, preventing kidney stones with a less protein diet. So, I think content's alive, but I think it's a very different model than we currently look at it.

Crystal Carter:

And I think that it's going to shift the way that people think about content. And I've been here with content projects as well, where sometimes you're writing the content that is the primer, that is the, "What are kidney stones? What are the things..." You're writing that primer content, but you might not necessarily even expect that to rank particularly. You need to have that as part of your ecosystem, you need to have that in order to have content cluster salience, you need to have that in order to make sure that you can link to yourself instead link to someone else. And for people who are already on your website to understand that you know what that topic is and that sort of thing, you might not necessarily exactly trend. And I think that that will change the way people think about things. I think also where we are able to pull out those unique pieces of content from users that we are speaking with, that I think is a real content opportunity.

So, where we know there is a deep cut question that only we can answer, that's really important. So, I think that the tools that we use for keyword research are going to be really important as well, because Google knows which ones have the giant volume. And I've started using Bing a lot recently, and I use Copilot when I get stuck, but if I've been searching on Google, "How do I answer this question?" Searching on Bing, "How do I answer this question?" If I find that in between the two of them, I can't find anything, then it goes to one of the LLMs, I'll go to Bing Copilot, I'll go to ChatGPT, I'll go to something else because I'm like, "Clearly, I'm not getting what I need. Maybe you can point me in the right direction with either the right terminology or the right ideas, or maybe you can verify this confusing information that I have."

So I think that those, to use a phrase that Google uses very often, those needle and a haystack things, sometimes Google can point you in the right direction or sometimes an LLM can point you in the right direction of what you should be searching for, so that you can do a better search, so that's useful. I think also in terms of content opportunities in this sort of SGE everywhere world, I think that the new is your friend, because like you said, some of that well-worn territory of what is a key of kidney stone or what is a search engine or the kinds of things that they clearly have in the militrap. They've got it in the militrap, they know what it is. That sort of content, I think that that's right for Picket in terms of SGE. But new content and new information leads to insights on new things that are happening are going to be going to be a good place for websites to think that it may even be the reverse of journalism that websites are going to need to employ journalists for their sector, for their vertical.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's definitely a constriction of content, but it's not the elimination of content. So, I feel like content's been out of control. It's been in need of a correction for a long time, and this might be that. Is it going too far? I do have a feeling that Google might be going a little bit too far and the ecosystem, it won't be healthy enough and creating enough content, but that's a different question for a different time.

Crystal Carter:

I also want to talk about what they didn't talk about. So, they didn't talk about Reddit at all, which is very surprised about.

Mordy Oberstein:

They know that the Reddit thing is only a crutch. It's only there because they need to have the first-hand knowledge. No one really wants the Reddit there. They just have nothing else.

Crystal Carter:

I wasn’t surprised, but there wasn't a whole lot in terms of e-coms. Normally they're all in e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, e-com, shoppity, shop, shop, shop.

Mordy Oberstein:

Because Amazon's not the competitor anymore. OpenAI is the competitor.

Crystal Carter:

That's why they said AI over and over. It's super cut of them saying AI often though.

Mordy Oberstein:

Google, Google. The whole thing is interesting. I think the most interesting thing is the thematic trends throughout the whole thing, that being one of them, or the fact that everyone's saying, "Oh, SGE is going to be the end of content, blah, blah, blah," but look at the other thing. Google announced. And by the way, I just want to say predicted this in our talk with Danny Goodwin on a previous episode about Gemini, I said Google's going to take the custom answer formatting that Gemini produces and bringing that to the SERP. And lo and behold, Google said, "We're taking an AI approach to the SERP, the layout and presentation of the SERP results themselves, here you go. And that to me... So on the one hand you have, "Oh, SGE is going to answer everything," but if that's the case, then why is Google also investing in having the SERP being formatted by AI to make it easier for you to explore the topic? Because they know that people don't just want the answer. There still is an exploration element, so they're going to invest in both. Big thing for me.

Crystal Carter:

Also, Google needs to be able to send people's websites in order for their revenue. Their ad revenue is a strong tool for them, so they need to be able to make sure that that ecosystem doesn't fall apart.

Mordy Oberstein:

Totally. One last thing we didn't cover, which we need to cover, and that's the trip planning and the menu planning, all the organizational stuff, which is interesting. Now, Google... We covered this also on the Snappy news before, but Google has been testing the trip planner for a while. So you type in, "Plan my trip to Philadelphia," and it says, "Don't go there." I'm just kidding. It plans out you're five days in Philly for you. And then if you want to create a low-carb daily menu plan for me that focuses on chicken and whatever, whatever, it'll create a menu plan for you. Again, "Oh, it's the end of these websites. It's the end of all the websites." I don't know. I got feelings about this. I'll give you my example. I put this on X earlier today.

So, three years ago I got diagnosed. Is it a diagnosis? I don't know, with a fatty liver. I ate too much during COVID, I drank too much during COVID, and I watched too much Netflix during COVID. The Netflix part had less to do with the fatty liver part, and I completely changed my diet. I didn't go to Google. I didn't even think about going to Google and asking it, "Can you please plan a menu so I don't leave my children fatherless?" I went to a nutritionist and then when I had specific questions about what that nutritionist said, I started Googling, "Does this food..."

She said, "Here's the criteria, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." "Does this food meet that criteria?" And I did Google that, so I feel like a casual trip or a casual diet plan you might search for. I went to a conference, I got an extra day in Philly, what should I do today? If I'm spilling 10 grand to take my family to LA or to San Francisco or to Philly for that matter, I am not saying, "All right, plan my trip for me and see you later. I'll just do whatever the AI says."

Crystal Carter:

So, I think it's really interesting that they chose the trip thing again as well, because they talked about the trip or planning a trip for when they were talking about MUM, when they were like, "Oh, we're multi-modal with MUM." They talked about the trip when they were talking about the Google when they originally announced Gemini and AI and stuff. So, they've talked about planning a trip for a few times, and one of the times that they talked about planning a trip, they got things wrong. So, I think it's interesting that they went back to this as a trope and as a use case, because planning a trip is really complex, as you say. So, it's interesting to use it as an example.

Mordy Oberstein:

By the way, parenthetically, they announced this whole multi-step search result reason, multi-step reasoning, which you mentioned before. I kind of feel like old, not new?

Crystal Carter:

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff where I remember when they were like, "MUM is going to be the new thing," and MUM is now kind of in Gemini kind of.

Mordy Oberstein:

That's what MUM did. MUM did the multiple reasoning, parsing …

Crystal Carter:

But with AI.

Mordy Oberstein:

Oh, it's different, I forgot.

Crystal Carter:

Yes.

Mordy Oberstein:

With AI.

Crystal Carter:

I'm sure that MUM didn't have any AI to begin with. I'm sure that there wasn't.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, that's just machine learning, an inferior version of AI.

Crystal Carter:

Of course,. I think the next few months will be interesting. I think the international rollout of Gemini and all of the different elements that are associated with it will be really interesting, and I think it felt a little inconclusive overall. Overall, it felt a little bit work in progress rather than, "Here's the thing and here's exactly what we're doing." It felt a little bit work in progress and I was fascinated that there weren't as many hot takes as there normally are from Google I/O.

Mordy Oberstein:

No, I knew that.

Crystal Carter:

It kind feels a little work in progress, so we'll see.

Mordy Oberstein:

Interesting, all right. I guess we'll wait and see, and also the sky is not falling.

Crystal Carter:

No, not yet, but I do think if people want to do anything, then if you were to take any next steps out of this, I'd probably say shore up your knowledge panel.

Mordy Oberstein:

It's always a good idea anyway.

Crystal Carter:

True.

Mordy Oberstein:

I would say add a layer of topical depth to your website if you don't have it.

Crystal Carter:

Oh, that's good, so these are top tips.

Mordy Oberstein:

Two takeaways. All right, we did good. We have two takeaways for you. Two is better than one

Crystal Carter:

AI.

Mordy Oberstein:

Ai, Google. That'll do it for I/O, I guess. I/O you one for joining me today and spending your time with recording this, Crystal. I owe you one.

Crystal Carter:

Thank you very much.

Mordy Oberstein:

All right, well, thanks. Joining us on this special bonus episode of the SERP's Up Podcast. Are you going to miss us? You literally don't have to worry. We're back tomorrow with a new episode about SEO and accessibility. Look for wherever you consume your podcast or on the Wix SEO learning about wix.com/SEO/learn. Looking to learn more about SEO? Check out all the great content and webinars on Wix is SEO Learning Hub at, you guessed it, wix.com/SEO/learn. Don't forget to give us a review on iTunes or rate rating on Spotify, please. So until next time, which is tomorrow, peace, love, and SEO.