At the recent Search Central Live conference, Google search experts Gary Illyes and Cherry Sireetorn Prommawin detailed how artificial intelligence (AI) affects Google Search and emphasized that the fundamental rules of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) remain effective. Their views were shared on LinkedIn by Google product expert Kenichi Suzuki, pointing out that new AI features such as AI overviews and AI patterns are built upon the traditional infrastructure of Google Search.

Search

Illyes and Prommawin stated that core systems such as Googlebot, the search index, and ranking algorithms continue to drive AI search results. Therefore, existing SEO principles still apply, and there is no need to rethink your strategy or develop a separate "AI SEO" strategy. As long as websites follow Google's quality guidelines, nothing will change.

Illyes also emphasized that Google does not try to distinguish between human-generated content and AI-generated content. The key is whether the content is high-quality, useful, and trustworthy. If AI-generated material meets these standards, there is no problem.

With the development of AI technology, AI models now participate in every aspect of Google Search. In the crawling phase, AI helps decide when to crawl websites; in the indexing phase, the BERT language model analyzes text to understand its meaning and filter out pages considered low-value by Google. At the same time, SpamBrain is used to detect spam, and RankBrain is used to understand new and unusual search queries, helping provide relevant results, even for questions Google has never seen before. The Multitask Unified Model (MUM) integrates information in different formats, including text, images, and videos.

The AI overview differs in the final stage of the search process. Google breaks down user queries into multiple focused sub-queries ("query distribution") and sends them in parallel to explore different angles. The generated summary is then verified against the index through a "basic validation" process to reduce the occurrence of incorrect information.

Although the technical rules of SEO have not changed, their impact is diminishing. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, when AI summaries appear in search results, the click-through rate of regular results drops to 8%, compared to 15% without AI overviews. The proportion of users clicking on source links within the overview is only 1%. Other studies have shown the same trend: the technical details of SEO have not changed, but as users increasingly rely on AI-generated answers, the demand for visiting external websites is decreasing, and the visibility and exposure of traditional websites are also declining.

For publishers, retailers, and content creators, this means that even if you can influence chatbot links to your website, the value of the return is questionable due to the sharp decline in click-through rates.

Key points:

🌐 Google states that AI-generated content will not affect the ranking of search results as long as it meets quality standards.  

📉 Recent studies show that the click-through rate of regular search results has significantly decreased after AI summaries appear.  

📰 The visibility and exposure of traditional websites are decreasing as users rely more on AI answers.