There’s a good chance that if you want to find information about something, chances are you’ll Google it. Alphabet’s proprietary search engine is by far the most widely used of its kind; one report suggests so more than 90% market share by 2023. And for anyone looking to publish content on the Internet, writing and formatting your content to rank high in Google Search results is a must.
This practice, known as search engine optimization or SEO, has become a standard practice for websites. According to Mia Sato at The Verge, the face of the internet has changed. Does a blog post have a bunch of questions as titles? This is SEO at work. How about a bio with a picture next to the post? Also SEO.
“Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Sato about his reports on Google Search, as well as what the future of Google Search might hold with artificial intelligence moderating the results. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: SEO isn’t new, but it’s still somewhat mysterious, which we’ll talk about in a bit. Give us the layman’s definition of “what is SEO”, will you?
Mia Sato: For sure. When we search for something, there are millions, billions of results. And Google, if we’re talking about Google, has to sort them out somehow. To do that, it reads all kinds of things on the web page, the words on the web page, the photos on there, to try to figure out what’s on that page and is relevant to what we’re looking for. So SEO is the practice of trying to optimize your content for search engines. Usually the goal is, you know, to be one of those first results.
Ryssdal: We have to say we’re talking about Google here, right? I mean, they control, like, 90% of the search market.
Sato: Yeah yeah.
Ryssdal: All right. So the gist of this piece is that SEO and the way it has now monopolized, and I use that word advisedly, how we design for the web is changing the Internet itself, right?
Sato: Yes. And it is something that has been happening for a long time. The web is on the precipice of change. Google has said that artificial intelligence will be part of the search experience, and now we’re looking back at what the last 25 years of Google’s dominance have brought us when everyone is doing things to try to game Google’s results.
Ryssdal: And the point, really, is that a lot of what’s out there is similar, because now we’ve fallen into this “template-ization” that Google forces people into?
Sato: Yes, you might not realize this is like a Google and SEO thing, but you’ll know what we’re talking about. An example is if you’ve ever googled “How to change a tire” you click on an article and there are five different sections. Each one has a little subhead at the top that says, “What is a tire?” “Why should I change the tire?” You know, all these things, these are questions that you might be searching on Google in the first place, is trying to get Google to notice the page.
Ryssdal: Okay, so look, this is a little existential, I guess, but you’re the expert in this conversation. What does all this mean, that we are doing all this for Google and we are adjusting our behavior in this huge part of all our lives?
Sato: One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot while working on the story is what happens to human creativity when there’s a company that’s practically dictating how we find things on the Internet? In the piece, I talk to humans trying to create jobs for the Internet. They write travel guides, they write, you know, recipe blogs, and there’s this tension between what we all want to do on the Internet and what makes sense, because if Google can’t see our work, there’s really no point in doing it. – it So what really cool things are being done that we’ll never see because they can’t be found in SEO the way Google wants them to?
Ryssdal: Yes, no, totally. That’s a bit of false romanticism, but it kind of takes that serendipity and charm out of things, doesn’t it?
Sato: When you look at a million websites that all look the same, the paragraph length is the same. This is a really weird thing as a writer, it was like, some SEO experts:
Ryssdal: It’s right? Paragraph length. It’s crazy.
Sato: Yes, some SEO experts recommend that paragraphs be no longer than, like, I don’t know, six sentences, or that sentences be no longer than a certain number of words.
Ryssdal: It’s like I was in AP Lit in high school and had to write the formula essay. Wow!
Sato: Yes. I did a test for this piece where I put a previous story I’d written through one of those SEO writing graders, and my grader bot didn’t like my prose. I failed
Ryssdal: So the SEO writer has failed SEO. That’s what I heard you say, right?
Sato: Yes, exactly. exactly I don’t think I have a future there.
Ryssdal: Fair. So let me ask you to take a crystal ball, and as you mentioned a minute ago, Google is moving into AI, and AI is becoming a bigger part of our lives and experiences, especially online: how do you see SEO in an AI world?
Sato: Oh my god, well that’s the million dollar question. Right now, if you’ve played around with Google’s generative search experience, what I’m interested in is the AI bot, which comes before any other link. If this stays there, why is anyone scrolling down? Some SEO people have tried to think, “Okay, well, how can we re-optimize our content now for this new thing?” If this is the way we go down this road, we will see these same problems in a few years. I think this goal of beating the robot is a fool’s errand.
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