AI features in Search & your site, Search Console, SEO community insights (Q2 ‘25)

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JOHN MUELLER: Hello, everyone, and welcome
to today's Google Search News.
I hope life is treating you reasonably well,
wherever you are.
My name is John Mueller.
I'm your host today here from Google Switzerland.
Today, we have news about AI features
in Search, Search Console, the robots exclusion protocol,
and more.
I know.
There's so much about AI nowadays,
and that can be a bit overwhelming.
But this video is short, so please bear with me.
And now, let's dive right in.
First up, we have some new documentation
about AI features in Search.
To get it out of the way, your site
doesn't need to do anything special,
past being indexable to be eligible for AI features
like AI Overviews or the new AI Mode.
These features use a variety of techniques
to better understand the queries that users are asking
and to show a wide variety of links from the web.
AI Overviews have been sending users
to a greater diversity of websites for help
with more complex queries.
AI Mode is helpful for queries where
further exploration, reasoning, or complex comparisons
are needed.
Our existing SEO guidance also applies to these features.
There is no new structured data or special file for LLMs needed.
No need to revamp your content.
Most likely, if you're watching this, your site is already set.
The reason we're so explicit about this
is that we regularly get questions and see posts
about what you need to do for AI.
That's it.
One effect worth mentioning is that we've
seen that when people click to a website from search results
pages with AI Overviews, these clicks are
of higher quality, where users are more likely to spend
more time on the site.
In practice, some sites might see
users who are already more engaged when
they reach the site from Search, which
might be visible in conversions, which you can track in website
analytics tools.
For all of the details and a lot more
about AI in search and your website,
check out our blog post and the documentation
linked in the description.
Taking a step back, AI or not, it
continues to be important to build something
unique, compelling, and of high quality on your website
that users will find valuable.
Look at the search results relevant to your site
and consider where you can add unique value through features,
services, products, or content.
Give users a reason to visit your website,
satisfy their needs, and encourage
them to come back and recommend it to others.
Switching gears, let's move to Search Console,
the tool that site owners can use
to better understand how their website is performing in Search.
We've continued to add more recommendations
on the main dashboard.
For example, you might see them when
individual parts of the core web vitals
are found to be particularly bad.
These vitals are measured based on what
actual users saw when they interacted with your website.
Bad values on some of these vitals
can be very noticeable to users and discourage them
from spending time on a website, so we
want to let sites know when issues are found.
We've also been experimenting with letting
folks add annotations to the graphs shown in Search Console.
These experiments are important to help us work out
how or if a feature is useful.
If you see experiments like these in your account,
please give them a try and let us know how you find them.
And over to the robots exclusion protocol,
which includes robots.txt.
Sites use this to tell crawlers, like search engines and those
who crawl for AI training, which parts of a website
are allowed for crawling.
We recently published a blog post series
on the robots exclusion protocol,
showing how you can use these controls in granular ways.
These settings are not new.
But especially given AI crawling,
it makes sense to understand how they work
and how your site is using them.
Let's shift to interesting articles from the SEO community.
It's inspiring how vibrant, active, and sometimes
creative the community is.
I have two articles that I'd like to share with you.
First up is Sally Mills asking, "what are even log files
and bots?"
Understanding how crawlers interact with websites
is an SEO skill that won't go away
as long as there are websites.
Sally takes a look at crawlers and bots of various kinds
and shows how you can find them in your website's log files.
Her analysis is fascinating, so take a look.
Next, we have Aleyda Solis with a comprehensive state
of e-commerce SEO compilation.
If you're selling something online,
you'll find something insightful and actionable in this report.
Like log files, e-commerce is also
something that will remain relevant as long as people want
to buy or sell things online.
Check both of these out.
The links are below.
We're closing in on the end of this episode.
Hang tight for another few short mentions.
We launched many other AI features at Google I/O,
including Project Mariner, an agent that can work for you.
To me, AI agents are a fascinating look
into a potential future.
Will we see more of them?
Time will tell.
Since the last episode, we published YouTube videos
on using Google Analytics with Search Console data
and monitoring your site with Looker Studio.
There's even a template that you can reuse for your site's data.
And we've been visiting more places
to talk with more folks about Search.
It's been great meeting you all in countries like South Africa,
Spain, Brazil, even in New York City.
We have more events lined up, so stay tuned.
And finally, to get back to the topic of AI--
sorry-- there have been a lot of discussions
about what to call the new type of SEO in a world with AI.
Is it AI Optimization or AIO, Generative Engine Optimization,
or GEO, or I don't know, perhaps LLM answer optimization.
I'm in the camp of SEO remaining SEO, but I'd love your takes.
Drop a comment below.
This is your chance to be a thought leader on this channel.
And with that, this episode of Google Search News
is now complete.
Thank you for tuning in.
I hope this video was useful.
And please, add feedback and comments here.
We read them all.
If you subscribe to this channel,
we'll let you know when another episode is ready.
Bye.
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