Google is the world's most used search engine and, for most companies, the most important place to be found. Roughly nine out of ten searches worldwide run through Google, which makes it the axis of all SEO work, from keywords and content to technical health and backlinks.
Google won the market on one simple idea: links between pages count as votes, so the most referenced and most trusted pages sit at the top. The result page has since moved far past ten blue links. Users meet ads, featured snippets, local map results and People Also Ask boxes, often before they reach the organic results at all.
Over the past few years Google has added an AI layer on top. AI Overviews place a generated answer above many queries, and AI Mode turns the search into a conversation. Both draw on Google's ordinary index and cite their sources, so a strong page can rank in the classic sense and be quoted in the AI answer.
Google and search are no longer synonyms, though the practical difference is smaller than it sounds. ChatGPT and Perplexity take up more of the conversation every year, while Google remains where most customer journeys start and has itself become an AI search engine. Classic search and AI search converge here: technical health, authority and precise content drive visibility on both. The AI layer has mechanics of its own, unpacked in the guide to AI Overviews.