SEO Insights: November 2024 Report

As if the search results in 2024 haven’t been turbulent enough this year, as expected, Google rolled out another Core Update in November. The previous one was in August.

During a Core Update, it’s normal to see a high level of volatility in the search results as the update normally takes around two weeks to completely roll out. However, following the completion of the August Core Update, the volatility continued, and didn’t really seem to settle.

We’ve often discussed in these reports the volatile nature of the search results, but it seems to be more pronounced than ever now…and we have a theory…

The AI Influence

When ChatGPT stormed into our lives in late 2022, it was the first taste that the general public had of a somewhat useful AI tool. But AI has been around for many years and Google was already extensively using it as a part of search, especially in terms of refining the search results.

You can think of it in terms of the main algorithm generating a set of search results for a search query, and then the AI refinement applied to improve the results based on several other factors, for example, a greater understanding of user intent, content quality, etc.

It was several years ago when a Google engineer reported that they couldn’t tell you why the algorithm decided which results to show, as AI was playing its part in determining the most relevant results to show…and no one really knows exactly how an AI makes its final decisions.

Roll on several years and AI has advanced considerably, as has its use in search. This isn’t necessarily a good thing.

The Benefits of AI

If you’ve spent time using generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, you’ll have seen how good it can be at some very boring tasks, such as creating summaries of documents and analysing data. It can also do these things very quickly…and there’s the key.

Whilst concerns remain regarding the accuracy and quality of the information generated by AI, its ability to quickly process information at scale is likely why we are seeing so much volatility in the search results.

Although we tend to discuss the main Google updates in these reports, Google actually updates its algorithms on a daily basis, with most of the updates being relatively small and generally may go unnoticed. These updates are based on experiments that they run, generally on a subset of users, and then apply them to the main algorithms if successful.

However, what if there were resources available to run a greater number of experiments across a greater number of users and be able to process and interpret the results at speed?

Well, those resources are available in the form of AI. I believe what we are currently witnessing is an AI focused approach to testing by Google which means that they are able to do this at scale, at a level not previously possible.

Moving Forward

We can expect Google’s level of experimentation with the search results to remain high going forward, and it will be normal to see search results change even on a daily basis.

Much of Google’s experimentation tends to focus on user interactions with the search results and engagement with pages, and in this regard, the activities that we focus on for our clients will stand them in good stead for the long term.

However, it’s normal to expect some up and down movement on a daily basis.