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What a great event!

I had the pleasure be attending last week’s Google search central live event in Toronto, I have been looking forward to this, we don’t have a lot of SEO events in Canada so I was super happy that Google finally decided to bestow an event upon us!

The event covered a lot of topics, from AI in search, to Google trends, schema, SEO myths, and of course how search works.

And yes, I had my notebook in hand, so enough chitchat… let’s get to the good part!

Key takeaways

1# Search is evolving beyond information to intelligence.

The ultimate goal is for search to understand exactly what you mean and give you exactly what you’re looking for. But then, there’s the trade-off between the cost to compute vs intelligence level of a model. This is where the The Pareto frontier concept comes in. This is the set of results that are optimal for at least one combination of tradeoffs. I really think this is a very great hint, to understanding how Google and LLMs may potentially be selecting sources to rank/cite. I found this AMAZING resource on the topic.

2# The life of a URL

A URL goes through multiple phases before it finally becomes eligible to appear in search. Note how I said “eligible” because ranking is not just about technical SEO, quality signals of course matter and sometimes, your URL is not getting indexed or fell off search results because users did not find it useful and Google picked up on that.

A lot of cool nuggets and random notes from this session:

If there are issues on your sitemap, Google can access it less often. So if Google finds broken URLs, redirected URLs, non-canonical URLs in the sitemap, that can be an issue if you’re a large website, or a news website for example.
Factors that can impact your rankings include the type of search, is it coming from desktop or mobile, is it geo-sensitive search, is it a voice search (yes that matters), is it a photo search?

We operate in an echo system where change is the only constant, user behavior changes, web changes, expectations changes and more. Search is a never solved problem.

3# Google Trends

First, there’s a Google trends API from Google that is in Alpha right now, and being closed tested by a select group of companies. Great news right?

My main takeaway is that, we are underutilizing this tool in SEO. So I’m bringing it to my day to day as much as possible. Do we ever check Google trends when we do keyword research? We should!

Narratives beat keywords (we’re better off focusing on topics/problems vs specific keywords).

Also and I’m quoting jean-christophe-chouinard here who was also present in the event:

“Trends vs. Keyword Planner: They are distinct tools with different ways of calculation. Trends is superior for cross-platform interest (YouTube + Search) and identifying “Breakout” queries. The data is lagged by 48 hours to prevent spammers.”

4# Good SEO is Good GEO

I really am not getting into the debate of terminology, but Danny Sullivan’s session was all about AI in search and Myths busting.

An important note from the session is “Make use of structured data”.

Schema has been under scrutiny and constant attack in the SEO industry, with many people calling it useless… it’s not.

And of course the popular slide from Danny that has been making rounds. Screenshot from jean-christophe-chouinard:

Commodity content is basic, simple, and very generic. People may not relate too, you are talking AT people. Non-commodity content is talking about a problem, sharing personal experiences and real-life scenarios.

5# Structured data, quality and AI

If you’re wondering what is the relation between structured data, quality and AI, well that was the title of the talk by Ryan Levering, a Google search engineer.

Here are my notes:

Schema is used as context served to models when doing fanouts.

Be more precise with schema, spamming won’t help.
Something that’s being considered is publishing Google’s validation rules in standards and client-friendly formats, so SEOs can build their own schema validation tools instead of relying solely on the structured data and rich snippets tools (that go down sometimes because they get overwhelmed 😁)
Google is also considered providing data on which schemas are more popular!
Additionally Google is reinvigorating their investment in schema.org this year. After all how do you think the two newly Google agentic standards the UCP and WebMCP are going to communicate? (personal note: schema is a good candidate for this)
Personal note: with so many voices in the industry saying schema is useless because they cannot measure it’s impact… well we have solid proof today that it is useful somehow, we just do not understand how.

6# Some good news to news😁

The highlight of the event for me is I got to ask Daniel Waisberg, Google search advocate the one question that was very important for me given that I work for a major news house! Will AIO come to top stories, and I got a clear “no”… yaaaay!

So for now… all is good for news publishers.

And That’s a Wrap (Almost 😄)

I loved every bit of this event. I will definitely do my best to attend ANY upcoming Google events like this.

We can disagree with Google reps all the time, but there’s no denial that they do an awesome work, go above and beyond and deliver great value.

My biggest regret coming out of this event is…. I only had one falfel wrap, should’ve grabbed two 😄

That’s that for today folks and see you next newsletter!

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Disclaimer: LLMs were used to assist in wording and phrasing this blog.

SEO Riddler by Sara Taher

Google Search Central Toronto: Highlights …