Show overview
Search Off the Record has been publishing since 2022, and across the 4 years since has built a catalogue of 112 episodes. That works out to roughly 35 hours of audio in total. Releases follow a fortnightly cadence.
Episodes typically run twenty to thirty-five minutes — most land between 27 min and 34 min — and the run-time is fairly consistent across the catalogue. None of the episodes are flagged explicit by the publisher. It is catalogued as a EN-language Technology show.
The show is actively publishing — the most recent episode landed 2 months ago, with 24 episodes already out so far this year. Published by Google Developer Studio.
From the publisher
Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes of Google Search and its inner workings! In each episode, the folks from the Search Relations team will give you background info on the decision-making behind launches, feature prioritization in Search Console, and the projects Google Search teams are working on. They will share fun stories from the many conferences they attend as well as from their day-to-day working life at Google. They will also dive into the currently trending conversations in the SEO community at large. Have a listen!
Latest Episodes
View all 112 episodesShould you block your Search result pages? - transcript
Should you block your Search result pages?
How to read the Indexing Report - Transcript
How to read the Indexing Report
Should I use markdown for my site? - Transcript
Should I use markdown for my site?
Vibe Coding - yay or nay? - Transcript
Vibe Coding - yay or nay?
How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO - transcript
How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO
Analysing Robots.txt at scale with HTTP Archive and BigQuery - transcript
Analysing Robots.txt at scale with HTTP Archive and BigQuery
Are websites getting "fat"? Page weight, HTML size & Googlebot limits explained - transcript
Are websites getting "fat"? Page weight, HTML size & Googlebot limits explained
In this episode of Search Off the Record, Gary and Martin dig into what "page size" and "page weight" actually mean for developers, users, and search engines. They discuss exploding web page sizes: median mobile homepages hit 2.3 MB in 2025 Web Almanac (up 3x from 2015), key insights for developers on page weight definitions, Googlebot's crawl limits, HTML bloat from structured data/images, and why size still hurts UX on slow connections despite faster networks. If you build or maintain websites, this conversation will help you rethink how much data your pages ship, where bloat really comes from, and why page weight still matters even as connections get faster. Resources: Web Almanac → https://almanac.httparchive.org/en/2025/ HTML living standard → https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/ How page speed helps with conversions → https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/mobile-page-speed-data/ Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr106-transcript Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team. #SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes
Google crawlers behind the scenes - transcript
Google crawlers behind the scenes
Developers often talk about Googlebot as if it were a single program you could just run as "googlebot.exe", but that is not how Google's crawling actually works. In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin and Gary from the Search Relations team unpack how Google's crawling infrastructure is really built and operated. They cover why "Googlebot" is a misnomer and how it relates to a central crawling software-as-a-service used by many Google products, how crawl behavior is controlled centrally to avoid overwhelming sites (throttling, handling 503s, and "don't break the internet" safeguards) and more! If you build for the web, work on SEO, or just want a more accurate mental model of how Google crawls pages, this behind‑the‑scenes discussion is for you. Resources: Crawlers → https://developer.google.com/crawling Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr107-transcript Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team. #SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes
How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO) - transcript
How Browsers Really Parse HTML (and What That Means for SEO)
Martin and Gary unpack how HTML parsing really works, why the HTML standard is so lenient, and how messy markup can silently break key SEO signals like hreflang and rel=canonical. They revisit validators and cross‑browser hacks from the Netscape/IE days, and discuss whether semantic HTML and strict validity truly matter for search. You'll also hear when link hints like preload, prefetch, and DNS prefetch help performance (and indirectly SEO), and where meta and link tags really belong. Resources: HTML Living Standard → https://html.spec.whatwg.org/ Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr105-transcript Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team. #SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes
Do You Still Need a Website in 2026? (Transcript)
Do You Still Need a Website in 2026?
In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin and Gary from the Google Search Relations team tackle a deceptively simple question: do you still need a website in 2026? Starting from the recurring industry claim that "the web is dead," they explore how the web has evolved through the rise of apps, AI chatbots, and social platforms, and why the answer almost always ends up being "it depends." Tune in for an engaging discussion on how websites remain relevant and what it means for content creation and discovery. Episode transcript → https://goo.gle/sotr103-transcript Listen to more Search Off the Record → https://goo.gle/sotr-yt Subscribe to Google Search Channel → https://goo.gle/SearchCentral Search Off the Record is a podcast series that takes you behind the scenes of Google Search with the Search Relations team. #SOTRpodcast #SEO #GoogleSearch Speakers: Martin Splitt, Gary Illyes