Google's Gary Illyes Interviewed On AI Search, Content & SEO

Aug 11, 2025 - 7:21 am 0 by

Gary Illyes Kenichi Suzuki Rio Ichikawa

Kenichi Suzuki and Rio Ichikawa from Farber Company in Japan sat down with Gary Illyes of Google to interview him on AI Search, AI content, SEO and other topics. It is a good interview, it is in English, so I wanted to share it here.

Here are my bullet points, followed by the video:

  • AI Mode and AI Overviews uses a custom model of Gemini (we know that)
  • Gemini, AI Mode, AI Overviews all use the Google Search index for grounding
  • Disallow Google Extended, then Gemini will not ground for your site
  • Gemini does not do live fetches of the web, it uses the search index
  • Training AI on AI generated content might be an issue, it is not an issue for search
  • AI can generate high quality content but it needs to be reviewed, human curated, some editorial oversight over the content will be fine
  • Do you block AI or see where it goes because there is potential revenue opportunities
  • Ideas floating around with Internet Engineering Task Force working group about more crawling controls
  • 404s and crawl budget related questions
  • Images and SEO taking up resources
  • Google Search does not use social media shares and metrics
  • AI Mode ads question (yes, it is coming soon)
  • Gary on what he likes and dislikes with AI

Here is the video:

Gagan Ghorta did the work of transcribing it all, so if you want that, check it out over here.

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