🔎 has Google peaked?

SEO isn’t dead after all.

After I wrote SEO’s premature obituary a few weeks ago, this week offered a twist!

Instead of going all-in on AI, Google instead chose to scale down SGE’s prominence in search. Instead it would use SGE “more broadly” per an announcement on their official website (see below).

It’s being debated if this means SGE is dead for good or if it will simply appear at a more opportune time (when Google isn’t hurting).

Then, in M. Night Shyamalan-fashion, there was another twist!

Google was also terminating their partnership with Appen.

Appen was tasked to evaluate search quality using user feedback. In short, did the search results pass the eye-test to actual, living, breathing humans?

By removing them as partners, Google is essentially saying, “we’ve got this.”

If you’ve looked at search results lately, this is definitely a head-scratcher.

Spam in search has gotten bad lately, and just last week, I saw a Google Sheet ranking #1 for the search term ‘automakers’. I’m all for this, but it doesn’t exactly scream “quality”.

Not to mention every other search I make just gives me Reddit threads…

So if the “human element” of evaluating search isn’t necessary…why then would Google also be putting their AI search/SGE on pause?

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty mixed signals here…

What are we Google? Let’s have the DTR talk.

Google wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want the search results to promote quality and trust from their users, but they also seemingly don’t want their feedback.

They want to jump in on the AI craze, but they don’t want to kill the publishers who populate the search results currently.

They want people to pay for more Google Ads, but they don’t want to support it properly (see below).

Their track record tells us to trust them. My gut tells me they’ve lost control of the wheel a bit here. They are operating like that guy who peaked in high school.

They still think they are hot stuff.

However, that beer belly has started to show and the hairs are falling off at an alarming rate.

What can save Google?

I have a tinfoil hat theory is that Google is prepping for a monster update. That all of this might make some sense in a few months when they roll out a Mobilegedeon update for the AI-age.

That would certainly help explain all the changes and experiments they’ve been making lately.

They’re actually just getting the necessary data they need to then completely change the search landscape. It would shake the snow globe and hopefully inject some quality back into the search results.

As an SEO, I can only hope my crackpot theories are correct.

That’s because, right now, it makes no sense optimizing for Google…as it’s unclear if even they know what they want to reward in search.

What do you think of all these moves from Google lately? I would love to hear from you!