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Google IO + a Way Forward

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

Published: May 26, 2025  |  Last Updated: Oct 20, 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 increasing conversions, by improving 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 Google view successful search?

This took me down a bit of a wormhole to explore this from Google's perspective. If I put myself in a Google engineer's shoes, I'd likely care most about revenue-driving clicks and where those come from, plus the revenue-per-click of each page in the results. 

Read my full guide on unpacking Return-on-search-page and how Google measures success. 

The 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 aren't the whole story anymore: 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.