No. 9SEO13 min read

How search actually works now

29 June 2026

Most SEO advice you'll find was written for a search engine that no longer exists. This is the current machine: how a page gets found, stored and ranked, what search intent actually means in practice, and how the answer layer above the results has changed which pages are worth the effort and which have quietly stopped being worth anything.

The short version

→Three stages, and a page can fail at any of them: crawl (can the bot fetch it), index (was it stored), rank (does it win the query). Diagnose in that order.
→Intent is the whole game. A page that answers a different intent than the query has will not rank no matter how good it is — Google already knows what the searcher wanted, because it watches what they click.
→AI Overviews and chat assistants have absorbed a large share of purely informational queries. Pages whose only job was to define a term are worth much less than they were in 2022.
→What survives: pages with commercial intent, pages with first-hand experience or original data, and pages that are a tool rather than describing one.
→Google folded the helpful-content system into core ranking in March 2024 and now treats scaled low-value content as a spam policy violation. 'Just publish more' stopped being a strategy and became a risk.

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