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Google IO + a Way Forward

Written by: Noah Learner Tags: critical thinking, future of seo

Published: May 26, 2025

I was lucky to attend Google IO this week and have some thoughts to share about what I witnessed.

Better understanding comes from gaining context through multiple points of view.

Surround Sound.

Michael King mentioned this over dinner as a strategy to be found in the future of search.

It resonated with me on two levels:

The first way is in the SEO way that he mentioned.

The second way is this: we all bring our own contexts to any one moment in time and will have very different takeaways from an experience.

I am sharing my takeaways with you, and have also been really struck with how different AND important the takeaways were from everyone else who was there.

By now you might have heard of an informal chat we had with some Google engineers at IO.

Folks with an M next to their name were present at the meeting. Follow these folks on LinkedIn to see what their takeaways were after getting to interact with a ton of Googlers: 

• Michael King - M
• Eli Schwartz - M
• Celeste Gonzalez - M
• Shawn Huber - M
• Jordan Koene - M
• Marie Haynes
• Connie Chen
• Anurag Singhal
• Jean-Christophe Chouinard - M
• Elias Dabbas - M
• Katie Stone - M
• Garrett French - M
• Olga Zarr - M
• Richard Bucich
• Stephen Burns - M
• Patrick Kajirian
• Kim Kuhlman - M
• Laura Beatty - M
• Abishek Rajendra
• Britney Muller - M
• Katlyn Edwards - M
• Rich Skrenta - M

Initial observations

Key Insight: Jean-Christophe Chouinard shared with me that he believes that Google measures successful search pages differently than we SEOs do.

In our chat with Google we told them that we were experiencing massive drops in clicks and CTR and they seemed surprised by that.

We care about Clicks and CTR for our websites for queries, and Google cares about performance for an entire set of results or search journey.

My wheels were turning.

I've often stated that we should care primarily about conversions, and whatever actions lead to a conversion.

Getting our content crawled, indexed, ranked, seen, and clicked all have to happen before a conversion.

(I have to add that this perspective entirely misses the boat for publishers that deal in impressions, and rely on traffic for survival.)

But what about from Google's perspective?

How would they Google view successful search?

This took me down a bit of a wormhole to explore this from Google's perspective.

I have to thank Cindy Krum for reminding me to look at things from Google's business goals in mind.

A quick note: I use We and Us in the following section as if I'm in Google's shoes.

If I worked at Google what KPIs would I look at?

• Revenue driving Clicks [AD clicks]/impressions
• Time on page - how long did user's interact with my product
• # of actions taken: scroll, button clicks, page stickiness
• Comparison of clicks vs what we expect by position - using this to determine reranking in future based on performance by location on page
• Daily Active Users
• Monthly Active Users
• Revenue / User
• Clicks / User
• Pogo sticking
• Cost to produce a SERP
• ROSP - Return on Search Page
• ROSPB - Return on Search Page Buckets

The last two bullet points are now living rent free in my head.

ROSP or Return on Search Page

Return on Search Page is: Revenue Driven / Cost to produce a Search Page.

I coudn't help but wonder if Google engineers tweak the results in order to achieve a specific multiple (like I used to target a 12:1 ROAS with bike shop ads) for ROSP.

And what is it that stops them from achieving a higher and higher ROSP?

Is it the infamous creepy line?

No, I think it would be a bucket of engagement metrics thout would each need to be in a specific section of a curve of values; each metric would need to be in a given range.

ROSP Framework

Goal: Keep targeted engagement metrics in specific ranges while accomplishing maximum ROSP.

What would Google's implementation strategy look like?

• Start with bare AIOs to establish a baseline for user metrics
• Layer in rich results + Ads
• Compare to what we know/expect from past experience with Ai Overviews and our historical knowledge of user engagements
• Rinse and repeat

Accomplishing ROSP means different conditions need to be met for different components:

For Users

• Users must trust answers
• Users must have a delightful search experience
• We must provide useful results
• We must provide fast results
• We must provide accurate results

Google infrastructure

• Reduce production costs of SERPs
• Reduce compute power needed
• Reduce storage costs
• Increase caching
• Increase % of queries that get mapped to cached results
• Increase insights - use Chrome data more, get more people using Gemini (and every other Search surface) to get more user Data
• Reduce LLM model training / production costs
• Reduce crawling costs

Content Producers

• Get Content Producers to engage with us, providing the inputs that feed our outputs
• Show producers they matter with:
  • Search Central events
  • Search Relations team helping on socials
  • Provide a Podcast to help website owners
  • Provide Videos to help website owners
  • Provide helpful docs to help web professionals + site owners
  • Seem devoted to helpful, unique content

UX Decisions

Increase screen size of features likely to increase exposure to revenue generation:

• Bigger taller ads
• Product grids (paid + organic)
• AI Overviews with tiny links
• AI Images + AI Overviews have links that trigger more searches

Enough of looking at this from Google's perspective, what about from a publisher perspective?

Michael King has been saying that this "is a wrap" for publishers.

And here are a few of the reasons:

• No talk of Discover at IO
• Docs discuss getting included in Search Experiences. In the latest doc released on May 21, Google used the word traffic exactly ZERO times
• Clicks - appears 4 times in the article and generally in the context of don't focus on them too much
• Google doesn't acknowledge that traffic and the ads impressions caused by that traffic are how publishers exist
• Guidance does not help publishers at all or even acknowledge their challenges. The only doc I could find was about article Schema

What's the way forward?

Let's start by acknowledging that we have more constraints and higher barriers to entry.

This means we'll have to focus more on each piece of content quality and forget about quantity (unless our scale allows us to deliver quality at scale).

We need to focus our data on what matters most to our business goals and optimize outward from that.

We need to think about strategy differently by starting with these questions: 

• What are our key buyer journeys that we want to win?
• What can we say that is unique about each facet in the journey?
• What graphs can we appear in: shopping, knowledge graph, Real World Maps + GBP, Web, Sport, Weather, Finance?
• What net-new can we offer for inclusion in AI Mode and other search surfaces.

Action items

• Think about building engagement in a surround sound way:
  • Create videos where your audience is: YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn
  • Engage on Reddit in an authentic way. Experiment.
• Keywords are dead: we need to experiment to appear for whole journeys
  • Experiment with page structure (huge page or hub spoke models)
  • Improve internal linking
• Build tooling to work with vector embeddings for our content to understand if we're meeting / exceeding the other sources we're competing with
• Measure and optimize based on findings

Gratitude

I owe big thanks to a few folks that greatly influenced this article:

• Rene Bigelow - to always think about the future of search as being about Buyer journeys
• Jean-Christophe Chouinourd and Cindy Krum for getting me to think about things from Google's perspective
• James Gibbons - for giving me the grit to be bold and to lay the vision out there.