Keynote: The Future is WHAT? (Bastian Grimm)
Posted: Sun Apr 20, 2025 7:03 am
In this year's keynote, Bastian Grimm began by addressing the many events in the SEO world in 2024. These include the Google Leaks, the change in Google Search's top management, the US Department of Justice hearing, and the associated consideration of breaking up Google. Naturally, there have also been some adjustments in the AI world. In his presentation, Grimm emphasized how search engines and SERPs are being transformed by AI and personalized content. Google is increasingly relying on interactive features such as paraguay phone number data AI-powered shopping transformations, content interaction (e.g., Google Learn About or NotebookLM), and Agentic AI to compete against competitors like Amazon. The role of product pages will therefore increase enormously, while product lists (or category pages) will increasingly decline in importance – their role will be taken over by Google. At the same time, brand presence remains essential, as brand awareness not only significantly increases conversion rates (by 2.9 times) but also influences rankings. SEO and branding must therefore be more closely linked in the future. In addition, an omni-channel strategy should be developed, especially in the e-commerce sector, as search is no longer linear. In addition to Google, social media platforms like TikTok play a particularly important role here. Companies must therefore ensure that they are found and present both in Google search and on social media. Incidentally, one of Google's fastest-growing segments is YouTube – which illustrates how important videos are and will become.
At the end of his talk, Bastian puts forward 10 provocative theses about the future of technology, privacy, and search engines, with trust, diversity, and smart content strategies being crucial. His conclusion: The future lies in the combination of branding and AI – "The future is BrAInd."
Along the Google process chain to better analyses and strategies (Johan von Hülsen)
In his talk, Johan presents Google's complex process chain in a creative and understandable way using a fairytale story. The main character, Doki, a document elf, illustrates how a document finds its way into the Google index and ranking.
The process begins with two fundamental questions:
Can Google crawl our content?
Does Google even want to crawl our content?
Johan recommends checking URLs that have been crawled but not indexed. Especially if this affects more than 10% of URLs, it's worth taking a closer look and taking action. To check crawlability, he recommends analyzing GSC crawl requests.
Rendering follows, where issues such as empty category pages or misleading headings can lead to soft 404 errors. To ensure the content is correctly recognized, you should compare the HTML code (with JavaScript disabled) with the browser display.
The further process includes:
Indexing by the “Doc-Joiner Directors”
Inverted Index: Decomposition of the content into individual tokens
Johan recommends the Ascorer hack to optimize individual rankings and finally mentions the role of the “Twiddler” in the process.
At the end of his talk, Bastian puts forward 10 provocative theses about the future of technology, privacy, and search engines, with trust, diversity, and smart content strategies being crucial. His conclusion: The future lies in the combination of branding and AI – "The future is BrAInd."
Along the Google process chain to better analyses and strategies (Johan von Hülsen)
In his talk, Johan presents Google's complex process chain in a creative and understandable way using a fairytale story. The main character, Doki, a document elf, illustrates how a document finds its way into the Google index and ranking.
The process begins with two fundamental questions:
Can Google crawl our content?
Does Google even want to crawl our content?
Johan recommends checking URLs that have been crawled but not indexed. Especially if this affects more than 10% of URLs, it's worth taking a closer look and taking action. To check crawlability, he recommends analyzing GSC crawl requests.
Rendering follows, where issues such as empty category pages or misleading headings can lead to soft 404 errors. To ensure the content is correctly recognized, you should compare the HTML code (with JavaScript disabled) with the browser display.
The further process includes:
Indexing by the “Doc-Joiner Directors”
Inverted Index: Decomposition of the content into individual tokens
Johan recommends the Ascorer hack to optimize individual rankings and finally mentions the role of the “Twiddler” in the process.