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!
Internet Marketing Podcast
Transcript for Search and Open Source
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!
Are websites getting "fat"? Page weight, HTML size & Googlebot limits explained
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
Are websites getting "fat"? Page weight, HTML size & Googlebot limits explained – transcript
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!
Search and Open Source
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!
Transcript for JavaScript at Google
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!