Gary Illyes

★★★ How Can You Tell a Good Crawler from a Bad One and Why Does It Matter for Your SEO?

Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes recently highlighted the essential attributes of a good crawler: Attributes of a good crawler according to Martin Splitt Support HTTP/2 for better performance and efficie...

Aug 26, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Why Does Google Ignore Social Signals and Other External Metrics in Its Rankings?

Gary Illyes explains that the search engine excludes external signals such as shares or views on social media from its ranking criteria, as it has no control over their reliability or validity. Accord...

Aug 19, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do AI-Generated Images Hurt Your SEO Rankings?

Gary Illyes also clarified that using images generated by artificial intelligence does not result in any penalty or direct negative impact on natural search rankings. According to him, integrating thi...

Aug 19, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does AI-generated content really need human review to rank on Google?

Google, through Gary Illyes, has clarified that AI-generated content is accepted by the search engine as long as it meets strict criteria for quality, originality, and factual accuracy. Illyes emphasi...

Aug 19, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Adapt Your SEO Strategy to Google's MUVERA Algorithm?

Google has not confirmed using MUVERA (Multi-Vector Retrieval via Fixed Dimensional Encodings), despite certain rumors circulating in the SEO community. Gary Illyes clarified on LinkedIn that he never...

Aug 12, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Is Google Really Using MUVERA to Revolutionize Its Search System?

During an exchange at Search Central Live, Gary Illyes confirmed that Google uses a method similar to MUVERA, an innovative multi-vector search technique compressed into fixed vectors, which enables f...

Aug 05, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should You Use LLMS.txt to Optimize Your SEO for AI?

Gary Illyes recently stated on Bluesky that the LLMS.txt file, designed to "control" LLMs' access to web content, strongly resembles the meta keywords tag from the 1990s, which quickly became obsolete...

Aug 05, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do You Really Need a New 'GEO' Strategy to Show Up in Google's AI Overviews?

Google confirms that no particular optimization is necessary for AI Overviews and AI Mode. Gary Illyes has clearly established that traditional SEO practices are more than sufficient to rank in the ne...

Jul 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Do You Really Need to Know How to Code to Become a Great SEO in 2024?

In the latest episode of the Search Off the Record podcast, Google's Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes addressed the question of the technical level required to work as an SEO professional. Their message ...

Jun 24, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is your crawl budget being wasted on plugin-generated URLs you don't need?

Installing plugins like calendars can sometimes generate 100 million new URLs on a site. Googlebot will then begin crawling these URLs, which can create crawl budget problems. The responsibility lies ...

Jun 12, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Has Googlebot Really Evolved Technically Without Changing Its Core Crawling Principles?

Gary Illyes discussed the evolution of Googlebot in the Search Off the Record podcast. While the basic principles of crawling have changed little, notable technical improvements have taken place, such...

Jun 03, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ How Can You Protect Your Site from AI Agent Saturation?

Gary Illyes warns about the massive influx of AI-powered bots, which threatens to saturate the web. According to him, it's not the crawling that consumes the most resources, but the processing and sto...

Jun 03, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why does Googlebot's server load impact vary so dramatically based on your technical architecture?

The load that crawling places on a server depends heavily on how the site is built. Expensive operations such as complex database queries generate significantly more load than a simple HTML site....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Should you really worry about crawl budget before hitting 1 million pages?

For an individual website, a threshold of around 1 million pages is the point where site owners should start concerning themselves with crawl budget. Below that, it's generally not a problem....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★★ Does Google's crawling really consume the most server resources?

Contrary to popular belief, it's not crawling that consumes the most resources at Google, but indexation and processing of the data retrieved that are truly resource-intensive....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Is Google Really Crawling Less of the Web, and Should You Worry About It?

Last year, Google actively worked to reduce its footprint on the internet by optimizing its crawling requests to save resources....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Googlebot really support HTTP/3 for crawling your website?

Googlebot currently supports HTTP/2 for more efficient crawling using streamed connections. HTTP/3 is not yet supported but could be in the future....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google's Live Test Tool Actually Crawl Your Site in Real Time?

The Live Test tool in Search Console uses a high-priority real crawler, while property verification of the site is user-triggered and works almost instantly without any crawl delay....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Does Google really ignore robots.txt when users take action?

When an action is initiated directly by a user (such as manually submitting a URL for inspection), it may be appropriate to ignore robots.txt because it's not truly a robot but a specific user action....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available

★★ Why has Google multiplied its crawlers since the arrival of Mediapartners-Google?

In 2006, Google AdSense introduced its own distinct user agent separate from Googlebot. From this period onwards, Google began to have increasingly more separate crawlers with their own identifiers....

May 29, 2025 ⚡ Analysis available