I have one thing to say.

So what was my plan?

I had been staring at this data for such a long time, I’d already decided to take a break from it and let it defrag in my brain. During that time, my plan was to share what I had with Nik Ranger and the rest of my team as a starting point and then reach out to industry people I trust (Mike included) in hope we can form a think-tank and quietly extract value and circulate usable intel discretely to the rest of the community. Basically if we’ve had positive and meaningful interaction in the past you would have been included.

Our policy in respect to the leak

As an agency our internal policy is that the information gained from the leak is now compromised and not useful as actionable intel. We’re confident that Google’s busy preventing means of exploitation from the knowledge gained and will not be investing time and energy in analysis of these systems for the purpose of client work. There are a few aspects of it that we believe cannot be replaced as they are too ingrained into Google’s DNA and so we’ll run a few tests to explore that.

Google’s volatility score since the leak reaches an all time record. Source: https://algoroo.com/

Silver linings and the future of search

Yes, there are SEOs around thew world, right now, investing their time and energy into little schemes that will be rendered useless in a matter of weeks or months. And that sucks, but…

I do believe some good will come out of all this. Google may finally take the leap, abandon this incredibly messy and manual jumble of algorithms and metrics stacked and bolted onto each (H/T Marie Haynes) other and properly keep up with the new force in the industry.

I’m going to come back to something I’ve been saying a bunch in the past 8 weeks, which is I think we need to deconstruct the various reasons why we often prefer our own “artisinal” ranking systems over an essentially end-to-end deep system (like Ads has) and how we might bring those attributes to deep ML models instead of just thinking about how we bring the quality benefits of deep ML models into our current “understandable” models. 

Google’s using word “artisanal” for what I describe as  “incredibly messy and manual jumble of algorithms and metrics stacked and bolted onto each other” and I find that cute.

Search is not dead, but is changing in a major way, and as much as SEOs like to make fun of generative results, how we expect to retrieve information and interact with the source of information is starting to shift away from the traditional paradigm to new and better way.

A query with 20 open tabs and a confused user is not good user experience. A sythesised answer with references is. This is the way forward and will affect both organic and paid ecosystem, for better. Advertisers will love it, a customer just asked Google to plan a trip to Paris with a spouse and two kids and Google’s provided a paid link to a services to take care of their dog, buy the nasal spray for the kid with blocked sinuses and a rental car once in France.

That was paid ads, the organic links will be guides to special places to visit in line with this family’s interests and characteristics.

The only problem is that with the current trend of openAI making deals with major publishers, the death of the smallPersonalWebsite is imminent. Hoping Google changes that and keeps their sources diverse and useful.

My hope is that Google will become what I hoped it would a decade ago when I wrote Conversations with Google and get back on my predicted future timeline.

And that’s all I have to say about that.