Shh. Listen. SEO is talking to you
As site owners have become fully aware they can make a full-time income JUST from selling links, the quality bar has never been lower.
But with these link farms becoming more and more difficult to spot, how can you keep your link profile clean and avoid the risk of a Google penalty as a result?
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!
Anthropic just announced Mythos. A model so powerful they won't release it to the public. It scored 93.9% on coding benchmarks where every other model has been stuck around 80. It hacked Firefox 84% of the time. And they're only giving it to companies like Apple and Amazon to patch their security before the rest of us get anywhere near it.
We sat down to figure out what this actually means for small businesses, not the hype, but the practical reality of where AI is heading in the next 3 to 6 months.
In this episode we break down:
→ Why Anthropic built an AI too dangerous to release publicly
→ What 93.9% on coding benchmarks actually means for non-developers
→ How Gael went from 2 weeks building an app to one-shotting it in a single prompt
→ The shift from giving AI tasks to giving it entire projects
→ Why Anthropic's revenue just jumped $10B in a single month
If you're not building systems to use these models when they arrive, you're already behind.
🔗 AI Accelerator: https://www.authorityhacker.com/ai-accelerator
💻 Learn Claude Code: https://www.authorityhacker.com/resources/learn-claude-code/
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!
We're back with another deep-dive niche analysis.
This time we focus our attention on the sleep niche. Is this a dream niche or is there more to it than the eye can see?
Tune in to find out!
Mar 30, 2026
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
