Search Engine Recap - Week 21 (2024)

This week brought new web crawlers, statements from Google’s CEO on AI in search, and the launch of a new visual search experience. Here's an overview.

Google Introduces Two New Web Crawlers

Google has unveiled two new web crawlers, GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, aimed at scraping image and video content for research and development purposes.

These crawlers are variations of the original GoogleOther crawler, launched in April 2023, designed to fetch publicly available content for internal use.

The new crawlers focus on non-text binary data and can be blocked using specific user agent tokens in the robots.txt file.

For SEO professionals, it’s crucial to understand these new crawlers to ensure they don’t overload servers or inadvertently access sensitive content. Implementing appropriate robots.txt rules can help manage their activity effectively.

Google's CEO Predicts More Clicks to Search Results with AI Previews

Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed concerns about AI's impact on organic traffic, stating that AI-generated answers in search results will enhance user engagement and lead to more clicks on links.

Pichai emphasized that AI is designed to meet user expectations while driving traffic to content. However, he acknowledged that some businesses might experience a decline in traffic, depending on the type of content and its optimization.

Pichai urged companies to monitor analytics to understand AI’s real impact. However, Google has refused to commit to providing detailed traffic data specifically for AI-generated search previews in Search Console.

This lack of transparency has raised concerns about its impact on click-through rates. Pichai pointed out that too much specific data could lead to system manipulation. Nonetheless, it’s expected that Google will provide insights through analytics tools, similar to how major SEO tools are now optimizing their products to display SGE.

Google Launches New Visual Search Experience

Google has launched a new visual search ad experience that integrates ads into several upcoming AI-driven search results.

Demonstrated at Google’s Marketing Live event, this approach uses Google Lens to provide users with shopping options directly from visual searches, such as searching by taking a photo.

Ads will then appear in the search results with AI-generated content. This experience aims to offer a more cohesive, interactive, and engaging way for users to discover and purchase products through search.

Takeaways and Recommendations

Google continues its development spree, particularly with a focus on AI. There’s no doubt this is already impacting search and will do so even more in the future.

While many businesses have been concerned, Google addresses these worries and highlights the potential for increased traffic. As our own tests at Bonzer have shown, the Search Generative Experience can indeed lead to more clicks than before- something Google’s CEO also mentions.

However, it’s crucial to be optimized and understand modern search intent, or significant traffic could be lost. Therefore, the best takeaway is to stay updated on Google’s guidelines and ensure they are reflected in your SEO strategy.

If you or your business need help understanding these guidelines and how to implement them in your strategy, feel free to reach out to us at Bonzer. As a specialized SEO agency, we focus solely on getting businesses to the top of Google’s search results.