Google Search Central APAC 2025: Day 1 Highlights & Key Takeaways
▼ Summary
– Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia Pacific 2025 is a three-day event in Bangkok featuring expert speakers, networking, and insights on Google’s crawling, indexing, and serving processes.
– Google’s algorithms prioritize human-focused content, emphasizing natural writing, multimodal optimization (e.g., alt text, transcripts), and monitoring crawl budget for efficiency.
– AI, evolving user habits, and Gen Z’s preference for non-traditional search methods (e.g., voice, images) are reshaping search, making past success no guarantee of future performance.
– Gen Z is the fastest-growing search demographic, with 10% of their searches starting via AI-powered methods like Circle to Search, highlighting the need for image and voice optimization.
– Google Search is evolving to handle longer, conversational queries and multimodal responses (e.g., AI Overviews), while maintaining the same infrastructure for both traditional and AI-driven results.
The Google Search Central APAC 2025 conference kicked off with powerful insights into the future of search, emphasizing human-centered content, AI integration, and evolving user behaviors. Held in Bangkok, the event brought together industry leaders to discuss the latest trends shaping digital marketing across the Asia-Pacific region.
Day one focused on crawling and indexing, with Google experts sharing actionable advice for SEO professionals. Key takeaways included prioritizing human-first content, optimizing for multimodal search, and efficiently managing crawl budget. The message was clear: quality content remains king, even as AI transforms how users interact with search engines.
The Changing Landscape of Search
AI advancements rivaling the impact of mobile and social media.This trifecta signals that past SEO strategies won’t guarantee future success. As Google’s VP of Search Liz Reid noted, “Search is never a solved problem.”
Gen Z: Driving the Future of Search
Lens searches surged 65% year-over-year, with 1 in 5 carrying commercial intent.For marketers, this means optimizing for visual and voice search is no longer optional.
Why Human-Created Content Still Wins
Clear structure and relevant keywordsInterestingly, optimizing for traditional SEO naturally improves eligibility for AI Overviews and AI Mode features, no separate checklist required.
AI’s Role in Crawling & Indexing
AI-powered features increase crawl rates, but higher crawling doesn’t directly boost rankings.Cherry Prommawin explained that crawl budget depends on demand (how much Google wants to crawl) and rate limits (how fast it can crawl). Slow-loading pages or broken links can hinder efficiency.
The Dual Evolution of Search
Query Types – Searches are growing longer and more conversational, with multimodal inputs (voice, images, Circle to Search) gaining traction.DeepMind’s reasoning models now power richer, multi-modal responses, blending text, images, and actionable guidance.
Absolutely, Wajdi. Here’s a refreshed spin that preserves the original meaning but adds a touch of polish and flow:
LLMs.txt vs Robots.txt: Google’s Perspective
During a recent conversation, Gary Illyes and Amir Taboul shared insights into Google’s take on the evolving crawler landscape, specifically regarding the traditional robots.txt and the IETF’s proposed LLMs.txt format.
While LLMs.txt echoes outdated approaches like meta keywords, Google made it clear this is not a standard they endorse or plan to support. Instead, their stance reinforces that robots.txt continues to be the preferred and voluntary protocol for managing crawler access.
For those aiming to restrict AI-specific bots, directives can still be added to robots.txt. However, it’s worth noting that compliance isn’t guaranteed, some AI crawlers may ignore it entirely.
Search Console in the AI Era
Data latency: Final reports are typically two days old (Pacific Time).Understanding these nuances helps diagnose crawl issues and identify AI-driven opportunities.Stay tuned for more insights as the conference continues, with deeper dives into indexing and serving in the days ahead.
(Source: Search Engine Journal)
