I had the excellent opportunity to attend the Google Search Central Live in Madrid yesterday (April 9, 2025) where the Google Search relations team, search console, product and Spain team -including John Mueller, Daniel Weisberg, Moshe Samet, Eric Barbera- presented about the state and future of Google search, went through the latest releases and updates, how features in the Google Search Console are built, how to use the data, the latest trends in Google news and answered questions from the audience.
Although I already shared over LinkedIn and X some of the key top topics covered, it was particularly interesting (although not a surprise), to see how a lot of the different topics and questions had an AI angle, so I want to highlight here the top AI and “state and future of search” insights, answers and tips provided by Google through the sessions. Let’s go through them…
1. Google goal, mission and focus doesn’t change
- Google highlighted well how their mission is to focus on what is best for the user, and how although other things might change its mission does not, so it is essential to take it into account despite any other shifts or trends.
- It was also stated how search is not a solved problem: new platforms, new user preferences, new technologies are arising.
- Google has provided and will continue to provide value through search to the web: value to the web users and the web ecosystem (via traffic and tools like GSC, GA, etc).
2. Google treatment of AI content
- Google is now asking to quality raters to assess if the main content of a page is auto or AI generated, and if so, this is lowest rated. See how this was highlighted in the slide shown in the image below.
- Someone asked if AI will be incorporated in Google Discover and Google said that AIOs wouldn’t make sense because is not a query focused experience but could be used for features, but there’s nothing to announce though in that regards right now.
3. How AI Search and AI Overviews work and how to optimize for them
- John Mueller explained how they integrate LLMs with search with RAG and how grounding that is used for AI overviews works.
- He also explained how you can opt out from AI Overviews using the robots nosnippet configurations since Google consider them to be a search feature.
- It was also clarified that no particular optimization action is necessary for Google AI features : they’re too new, user behavior is changing a lot.
- Google still recommends to use structured data in an AI search world since it’s efficient, precise and easy to read, and to focus on those supported elements that are actually visible in SERPs
- When asked about LLMs.txt, John shared how it only makes sense if the system doesn’t know about your site, so in the short term it might make sense but doesn’t expect that is something that Google will take into account since Google has already a lot of data, the actual content of sites. At the moment he’s not aware that any of the AI systems actually use it.
- It was also explained how Google extended in robots.txt allows you to control your content for training for Gemini and Vertex AI. It was clarified is not a crawler but a user-agent token that has no effect on search indexing or rankings.
4. Monitoring and Tracking AIO’s and Gemini searches
- One of the questions asked was if we will be able to track AI Overviews via Google Search Console. But Googlers explained how right now they’re already taken into account in Google Search Console Performance report but not broken out. At this point due to how volatile they are, they consider that this will cause to more confusion than help.
- I asked Google if there will be a way to obtain data from Gemini usage and search behavior to help inform about its impact and overlap with traditional search, especially with the integration of AI mode: I was answered that this is not planned yet because of implications regarding privacy among other criteria. Maybe in the future if they see is a different behavior and broader topics. Not now though.
5. The future of SEO with LLMs
- SEO will still be relevant, the foundational work, such as crawling, indexing is not going away.
- AI is not replacing digital marketing, AI adds more to what already exists.
- We have the opportunity to apply our SEO experience to new AI technologies.
Wrapping Up
My interpretation of yesterday’s sessions, in particular the highlight on AI related topics, is that Google knows that there’s a very important shift happening, and there are concerns regarding the state and future of search and the role of Google and SEO in it, and they took the opportunity to highlight how their focus is on helping users while driving value to the web and this won’t change, even if the way they present their information evolves, taking the chance to clarify concerns from SEOs wondering if we will still have a seat on the “AI Search” table and how it would look like.
Although it has been certainly helpful and I also really appreciate the effort, it would be also amazing to have those additional data sources allowing us to better understand the impact of AIO’s visibility and traffic impact, as well as Gemini search behavior to help us better navigate concerns from decision makers and move forward accordingly. I hope this happens sooner than latter, even if they don’t seem ready to give that information yet.
PS: If you want to measure the impact of AI Overviews, you might find this video I did a few weeks back helpful: How to Measure The Impact of AI Overviews on Organic Search Traffic [How To Video].
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