Breaking from Google Search Central APAC 2025 – Day 2 reveals major shifts in search strategy
Published: July 28, 2025 | Source: Search Engine Journal
In a surprising turn of events at Google Search Central APAC 2025’s second day, Google engineers made several groundbreaking announcements that are already sending shockwaves through the SEO community. 
🤖 Google AI Images PageRank 2025: AI Images Officially Endorsed by Google – Major Search Updates
In the most headline-grabbing revelation, Google’s Ian Huang declared that the search giant “doesn’t care if your images are AI-generated” as long as they effectively communicate your message. This marks a definitive end to months of speculation about AI content penalties.
“As long as images are understandable, their AI origins are irrelevant,” Huang stated, effectively giving millions of content creators the green light to use AI-generated visuals without fear of search penalties.
Key implications:
- No penalties for AI-generated images
- Minor AI artifacts acceptable if not main content
- Human review still recommended for quality control
📊 PageRank Confirmed Still Powering Google in 2025
Perhaps even more shocking, Gary Illyes confirmed that Google still uses PageRank internally – debunking years of industry speculation that the algorithm was obsolete.
“It’s not the exact algorithm from the 1996 White Paper, but it bears the same name,” Illyes revealed, sending SEO professionals scrambling to reassess their link-building strategies.
🔍 Major Indexing Process Revelations
Google’s Cherry Prommawin pulled back the curtain on the search giant’s indexing process, revealing a sophisticated 5-stage system:
- HTML parsing
- Rendering and JavaScript execution
- Deduplication
- Feature extraction
- Signal extraction
The money quote: “Links are still an important part of the internet and used to discover new pages, determine site structure, and we use them for ranking.”
🎯 Content Placement Can Make or Break Rankings
In a practical demonstration, Illyes showed how moving content from sidebars to main content areas led to measurable ranking improvements. The example involved moving “Hugo 7” references from a sidebar to central content, resulting in increased visibility.
Takeaway for SEOs: “If you want to rank for certain things, put those words and topics in important places on the page.”
🌍 Geotargeting Gets Simpler
Google clarified its geotargeting approach, emphasizing that hreflang handles international duplicate content without penalties. The primary signals remain:
- Country-code top-level domains (ccTLD)
- Hreflang annotations
- Server location
- Local language and currency signals
🚫 Spam Fighting Reaches New Scale
Perhaps most impressive, Google revealed it now identifies 40 billion spam pages daily using its LLM-based “SpamBrain” system – a staggering increase that demonstrates the scale of modern web spam.
📈 Google Trends API Alpha Launches
In the final announcement, Google unveiled the Google Trends API (Alpha), offering:
- Consistently scaled search interest data
- 5-year rolling window updated every 48 hours
- Flexible time aggregation options
- Regional and sub-regional breakdowns
💡 Bottom Line for SEO Professionals
The overarching message from Day 2 is clear: quality and user value trump technical manipulation. Google’s systems increasingly reward content that genuinely serves users rather than attempts to game algorithmic signals.
Key action items:
- ✅ Use AI images confidently if they serve your content
- ✅ Focus on main content placement for important topics
- ✅ Don’t fear international duplicate content with proper hreflang
- ✅ Prioritize content quality over technical SEO tricks
With one more day of Google Search Central APAC 2025 remaining, the SEO community eagerly awaits what other surprises Google has in store.
