Google Search Central Live Toronto Slides (April 2026)

April 21, 2026 was the first Google Search Central Live hosted in Canada with Annanya Raghavan, Daniel Waisberg, Danny Sullivan, Martin Splitt an Ryan Levering came to speak about news surrounding search and AI.

Here are the photos of the slides that I’ve taken during the event, missing almost none (they aren’t filtered because some might want to make sure not to miss anything)

My Personal Notes on What Was Shared

Overall, there weren’t that many new concepts that weren’t already publicly shared, but there were multiple slides shared by Danny that will help convincing C-Suite in the value of SEO in the AI search world. Here are a few comments I noted:

1. The Indexing & Quality Bar
   Selective Indexing: AI has lowered the barrier for content creation, forcing Google to raise the bar for what actually gets indexed.
2. Crawl vs. Index: “Crawled – Currently not indexed” is rarely a technical rendering issue; it’s usually a quality signal. Google may have tried the content and decided it “wasn’t good,” or it’s a canonical/duplicate issue. It could also sometimes be 404s, redirect issues or robots.txt issues
3. Scaled Content Abuse: This is an important algorithm that could explain AI-generated content traffic drops, rather than the use of AI itself. Google wasn’t against AI per-se, but there are safeguards against scaling content and safeguard against what they decide to index.
4. Upcoming Trends API Updates: These updates are going to be very useful for data analysis. You will be able to use the API on different search terms, with different time selected (daily, weekly, monthly) and results will be consistently scaled.
5. Trends vs. Keyword Planner: They are distinct tools with different ways of calculation. Trends is superior for cross-platform interest (YouTube + Search) and identifying “Breakout” queries. The data is lagged by 48 hours to prevent spammers.
6. AI Overview (AIO) & “Agentic” Search
   Reporting Gap: There wasn’t much new shared regarding AI Overview and AI Mode tracking; the team confirmed they are working on something but provided no timeline.
7. Gemini in AIO / AI Mode vs. Gemini in App. They both use the same model, but Google Search “shapes” Gemini differently in search than the standalone app. Results from AIO and AI Mode are expected to be different
8. Agentic Search: It is mainly available for e-commerce, there didn’t seem to be other opportunities for advanced “agentic” features beyond standard User Centric Productivity (UCP).
9. Google-Extended & Fanouts: Blocking does not negatively impact presence in AI Overviews and in AI Mode. Blocking the Google-Extended bot is less effective than people think. Because your site is already in the search index, Google can still use that data in “fanouts” to generate AI answers. Data nosnippet is still the only way to truly stop specific content from being used (Not related, but you can learn about data nosnippet). Blocking access only prevents your site from being used for grounding and linking. You lose the citation/link while Google still uses the information. [personal note: data nosnippet is a “double-edged sword” that could reduces traditional SEO benefits]
10. There is no benefit in converting your site to Markdown for LLM or SEO purposes.
11. There is no benefit to creating a llms.txt file for SEO
12. Rich Result Testing: I’ve learned that the rich results testing tool plugins into Google’s internal indexing stack, wheras the generic schema testing app doesn’t.
13. Definitely worth looking in the new use cases for Structured Data, especially in E-Commerce.

If you are looking for my coverage of the event on Linkedin here are the links, otherwise you can look at comments from the community.

• Daniel Waisberg pt1: https://lnkd.in/dKrhN3ZS
• Daniel Waisberg pt2: https://lnkd.in/dVkJTXuw
• Annanya Raghavan: https://lnkd.in/dJ_rshCW
• Matthew Rivard: https://lnkd.in/dn64Vrgd
• Martin Splitt: https://lnkd.in/dKAaZNAi
• Ryan Levering pt 1: https://lnkd.in/dE69vjW9
• Ryan Levering pt 2: https://lnkd.in/dSJZ–Hb
• Danny Sullivan pt 1: https://lnkd.in/dDepDxPj
• Danny Sullivan pt 2: https://lnkd.in/dVvBhkY5
• Recap: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jeanchristophechouinard_wow-it-was-fantastic-to-see-how-excited-activity-7453503348466700288-znmk

Martin Splitt – How Search Works

I make a parenthesis to include a slide by Gary Illyes that comes from Search Central Live in Asia in 2025 to show factors that are indexing signals (shared by VishNu ChaNdra)

The one below comes from seroundtable.

Again, one of Illyes slides in Asia.

Danny Sullivan – AI in Google Search

Annanya Raghavan – Telling Stories with Google Trends

Daniel Waisberg – New in Search Console and Trends

Ryan Levering – Structured Data, Quality & AI

Community Talk

There was a ton of chatter around this post, I thought I’d do a round up of what the industry is thinking about this.

Largely Information Gain

Gianluca Fiorelli raised the fact that Danny’s deck largely relates to information gain.

This is also an opinion supported by others in the community. Chris Long believes “Information Gain Score” will become a more heavily weighted ranking factor to filter out AI fluff.

Commodity Content

Indeed’s Gus Pelogia raises the fact that our opinions not so unique and that brands that build databases of unique data will have a greater opportunity to differentiate.

Mark Williams-Cook warns that any content that looks like the top 5 ranking results but rewritten is “commodity” and will be bitten by future updates.

Oliver Sissons questions if the “non-commodity” examples given by Google actually satisfy broad search intents like “best running shoes.”

Indexing Will Become Harder

Sawan Jha: “the indexing part really stands out, feels like the real filter has quietly moved from crawling to selection, which explains why so many pages just sit without impact.”

GEO VS SEO

Orit Mutznik argues that “GEO” is just an evolved form of SEO, and the divide between the terms is largely semantical.

Kristine Schachinger claims “GEO” is a marketing term invented by VCs (specifically Marc Andreessen) to disrupt the SEO tool industry.

A Note on RAG

Chris Zhao notes that because Google uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation), weights are highly personal and unpredictable.

Tracking SEO Changes

Artur Ferreira suggests the industry is shifting from tracking “positions” to understanding “presence”—visibility in AI is binary (you’re cited or you’re not).

Furkan ÖZKAYA emphasizes that AI content only works when heavily edited and fact-checked by humans (taking 2–3 hours per post).

Lopty Pascal thinks we are moving from optimizing pages to optimizing “entities” and brand identity.

Post Click Experience Matters

Solution Influencer argue that visibility in AI is useless without a strong post-click conversion experience.

Swarali Bhakre tell us we should focus on UX once we gained the click

Adriane Schwager believes “first-hand experience” is the only way to cut through the noise of easy, automated content.

Seppo Puusa points out the irony that commodity content still gets the most visibility because it’s what people actually search for.

Fernando Maciá Domene views the push for experiential content as a “double-edged sword” where Google takes our unique data in exchange for “crumbs of clicks.”

David Konitzny proved via WebSocket traffic that ChatGPT Deep Research follows internal link structures, making link graphs vital for AI discovery.

Adewumi Nurudeen highlighted that we must now track when we rank, not just what we rank for, due to high volatility.

Goran Majić compares Google’s appetite for more content “context” to Orwellian double-think, as it leads to more zero-click results.

Donald Pingaro asserts Google isn’t checking for AI watermarks but for “content value.”

Joshua Squires fears Google’s advice will lead to more “clickbait” titles and overly long-form content that users don’t actually want.

Dmitrij Żatuchin says “Position” is no longer a point estimate; it’s a distribution that changes by the hour.

Glenn Gabe confirms there is no SEO benefit to converting sites to Markdown.

Cyrus Shepard notes that proprietary data was a top correlated variable for success in recent updates.

Mohammad Junaid Baig reminds everyone that technical basics still matter, but content is usually the bottleneck.

Conflicting Opinions

• SEO vs. GEO: Some see GEO as a fundamental evolution requiring new tactics (Jean-Christophe Chouinard), while others view it as a fake rebranding by VCs to sell tools (Kristine Schachinger).
• User Intent: Google suggests people want “stories and experience,” but critics like Joshua Squires argue that users still just want “quick answers, not stories” when shopping.
• The Value Exchange: Google claims AIO helps users find better sites; SEOs like Fernando Maciá Domene argue Google is just harvesting original experience to keep users on-page forever.

Open Questions by the Community