SEO

When you type something into Google, you get a list of results. Almost everyone clicks on one of the first three results. What comes after that barely gets noticed, and virtually nobody looks at the second page. SEO means: designing a website so that it lands high up on this list. The abbreviation stands for the English term “Search Engine Optimization,” in German Suchmaschinenoptimierung. The key difference from advertising is important: SEO placement cannot be bought, it has to be earned.

Why first place is worth so much money

For many companies, the search engine is the most important way of being found at all. An online shop for running shoes depends on people typing “buy running shoes” and landing there. If the site slips from position two to position ten, visitor traffic can collapse by the largest part. Revenue therefore hangs directly on a position in a list that a company doesn’t control itself.

That’s why SEO is its own branch of industry, with agencies, software, and specialists. The comparison always goes like this: advertising costs money per click and stops working the moment you stop paying. Good SEO costs work, but then keeps working afterward. The downside is the slowness. It often takes months before a site climbs upward.

For investors, this topic is relevant because Google changes can shake entire business models. When Google adjusts its ranking rules, some companies lose half their visitors overnight. Such drops later show up in quarterly figures.

What search engines evaluate

A search engine sends programs across the web that collect pages and store them in a huge index. When a search query comes in, it’s not the entire internet that gets searched, but only this index. Then a computing procedure decides which of the matching pages gets shown first. This procedure takes hundreds of factors into account at the same time.

Part of the factors concerns the content: Does the text really address the topic being searched for, and does it answer the question completely? Part concerns the technology: Does the page load quickly, does it work on mobile, is it transmitted securely? A third part concerns reputation. If many other, well-regarded sites link to this page, Google counts that as a recommendation.

You can think of it like a job application. The content is the cover letter, the technology is the clean layout, the links are the letters of recommendation. A common misconception is that it’s enough to repeat a search term as often as possible in the text. That worked twenty years ago and is now penalized as manipulation.

SEO in the age of AI answers

You encounter SEO all the time without noticing it. Recipe pages with long backstories before the ingredient list are a result of SEO. Headlines like “The 10 Best Headphones 2025” are also built around the fact that someone searches exactly that way. Comparison portals and advice sites sometimes exist only because they serve a search query.

In the news, the term mostly comes up in two contexts. First, in connection with Google updates, meaning changes to the ranking rules, after which winners and losers get reported. Second, in connection with lawsuits from publishers and price comparison sites who feel disadvantaged by Google.

Newly added are AI answers directly within search. The search engine now writes its own summary instead of just displaying links. For websites, this means: the user gets the information but no longer clicks through. This is exactly what the current debate revolves around, and there’s already a new buzzword for it: optimizing not for results lists anymore, but for being mentioned at all within AI answers.