Search pros from across Asia Pacific gathered in Bangkok this week for three packed days of insights, connections, and practical tips at Search Central Live Deep Dive 2025. Held at the Carlton Hotel Sukhumvit, the event brought together familiar faces and fresh voices from across the SEO world.
Each day of the conference is focused on one key part of Google Search: crawling, indexing, and serving. Day one kicked off with a deep dive into crawling, and some standout guidance for site owners and SEOs alike.
Key Takeaways from Day One:
1. Content Still Reigns — But It Has to Be Human
Google made it clear: the content that performs best is written by people, for people. Natural, well-researched writing that demonstrates real expertise continues to get rewarded.
AI-generated text? It’s being indexed, but it’s not what the ranking algorithms are trained on. As Gary Illyes put it, Google’s models learn from the best content in the index — and that means human-created.
2. Don’t Forget About Images, Video, and Voice
Search is more than just words on a page. To stand out in today’s search landscape, you need to optimize across formats:
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Use alt text for images
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Include transcripts for video and audio
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Make sure your language is conversational enough to support voice search
3. Watch Your Crawl Budget
If your site has a lot of 5XX errors or slow-loading pages, it can slow Googlebot down. Cherry Prommawin broke it down: crawl budget = crawl rate limit × crawl demand. If your site’s underperforming, that budget shrinks.
Keep your structure clean. Fix server errors fast. And if you’re wondering whether 404s (4XX) eat up crawl budget — they don’t, but they can mess with how Google prioritizes your site.
4. Search Console is Your Friend
Daniel Waisberg reminded everyone that Search Console is where Google’s infrastructure meets your website. From crawl diagnostics to performance tracking, it’s your window into what’s really going on.
Bonus tip: The new Recommendations feature is designed for non-technical users. It provides actionable suggestions — no data degree required.
A Turning Point for Search
Mike Jittivanich (Marketing Director, South and Southeast Asia) opened the event by saying what many SEOs have been feeling: we’re in the middle of a major shift. He pointed to three big forces behind this change:
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AI innovation that rivals the impact of mobile and social
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Changing user behavior and rising expectations for instant, conversational results
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A new generation of searchers (hello, Gen Z) who interact with search very differently than their parents
Google VP Liz Reid’s words echoed through the day:
“Search is never a solved problem.”
Gen Z Is Changing the Game
A standout stat: Gen Z (ages 18–24) is now the fastest-growing demographic in search. And they’re not using it the same way.
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Lens usage jumped 65% year-over-year, with over 100 billion searches already in 2025 — and 1 in 5 of those has commercial intent.
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About 10% of Gen Z searches don’t start in the search box — they begin with tools like Circle to Search or voice commands.
For SEOs, this means visual and voice optimization are no longer optional.
Crawling & Indexing in the AI Era
There were also some big updates about how AI is reshaping the back-end of search:
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Googlebot’s crawling more than ever, adapting to new AI-powered features. But more crawling doesn’t automatically mean higher rankings.
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AI features like AI Mode and AI Overviews still use the same crawling/indexing system we’ve always worked with. Think of them as new front-end layers built on the existing Search infrastructure.
Pages still go through HTML parsing, rendering, deduplication, and ranking via BERT, RankBrain, and other machine-learning models. SEO basics still matter.
What About Robots.txt and LLMs.txt?
There was some chatter about the proposed LLMs.txt standard. But don’t expect Google to adopt it. As Gary Illyes and Amir Taboul confirmed, Google still relies on robots.txt as the primary way to control crawling. If you want to block AI bots, that’s where to do it — just don’t expect all bots to listen.
Looking Ahead
As queries become more multimodal — combining text, voice, images, and more — Google’s evolving how it interprets them. The rise of AI Overviews and generative experiences in Search means that your content needs to be useful, usable, and ready to show up anywhere — not just in the blue links.
We’re only through day one, and already there’s a lot to unpack.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s recap as we move from crawling to indexing, with more expert insights and hands-on advice from the folks behind Search.
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