Tuesday, December 31, 2024

It might happen that by the end of this post you’re going to try to decide who wrote this blog
post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you’d be right to ponder that and delve into the
intricacies of the language used that gives away LLMs, for this is the time of the year when we
can get away with publishing a blog post with barely any review (future Gary will deal with the
potential, nay, likely fallout I guess). As we often do in the last post of a year, we’re looking
at what happened on Google Search Central in 2024 according to an LLM (or Gary), and maybe hinting
at what might be coming in 2025 (but maybe this is just a hook to keep you reading…).

We went to places again

As usual, we had a series of
Search Central Live (SCL)
events this year, going to 3 continents and a bunch of places that I’m too lazy to try to
recollect (ed. Lizzi says 10 on the dot). We talked about lots of things at these events,
but the topics that resonated most with the audience were:

• How Search Works
• Shopping-related topics
• AI and Search

A large part of the SCL events is, unsurprisingly, networking. Forming connections with your
fellow marketers, site owners, and SEO practitioners is the best way to grow in your field. In
countries where locals organize meetups and talks, we see that the local internet is more mature
and users are more likely to find what they need on sites. If you want to improve your local
internet and you have the means, this is your chance.

Technically technical

We’ve spent a large chunk of our time in 2024 trying to figure out what we can do to improve how
our crawlers, well, crawl. Listening to publishers, partly through the documentation feedback but
also at the
IAB AI Control workshop,
we extended our documentation about our crawlers and published a few guides and blog posts about
crawling:

Especially if your site is big, we recommend reviewing these posts and see if you can improve
something on your end when it comes to how your site is crawled: why throw resources at the
problem if you can just tinker with the server a bit to improve the situation?

Finally, we’d like to happily let you know that next year, 2025, is 45 to the power of two
(45^2 = 2025; very demure). If that excites you as much as it excites us, follow us on the
LinkedIn and the other places where we hang out sometimes. Thank you for sticking with us in
2024 and here’s to a great 45^2.

Posted by Gary Illyes on behalf of the Search
Relations team (who may or may have not reviewed this post)

Ok, time to cast your vote. Who wrote this blog post?