Google and I Share a Birth Year, and It Changed How I See Every Algorithm Update Since

Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on 4 September 1998. A few months later, I was building my first website. Neither of us knew what the other would become. I’d spend the next twenty-eight years finding out, one algorithm update at a time, because the company I started my career next to is the same one still deciding whether anyone can find me.

A coincidence that turned into a vantage point

I didn’t set out to watch Google grow up. I set out to get a small site found by anyone searching for it, which in late 1998 meant learning whatever handful of rules the search engines of the day actually followed. Google wasn’t the biggest of them yet. It was one more engine among several, running on an idea, PageRank, that hadn’t proven itself outside a Stanford paper.

What that timing gave me, without my noticing at first, was a front-row seat that started at row one. I didn’t join search when it was already a mature industry with established best practice and a decade of case studies behind it. I joined when the practice was being invented, by the same company, in roughly the same months I was inventing my own.

Twenty-eight years of the same company changing the rules

Every SEO who’s been doing this for a decade or two has a story about surviving an update. Panda, Penguin, the Knowledge Graph, RankBrain, BERT, the helpful content updates, and now the shift toward AI-generated answers that skip the results page altogether. I’ve watched all of them land, not as history I read about afterwards, but as changes that broke client rankings on a Tuesday and needed explaining by Wednesday.

That’s not a claim to being right about everything. I’ve been wrong plenty of times, and I’ve written about it. It’s a claim to something narrower and more useful: I’ve seen the pattern repeat enough times to recognise it before the trade press names it. Google adds a new way of judging a page. The industry panics, then adapts, then treats the new rule as if it had always been obvious. Then Google adds another one. The current move, from ranking pages to answering questions directly, reads to a lot of people as an unprecedented rupture. It’s the same pattern I watched in 2003 and 2012 and 2019, wearing a new outfit.

Why the date matters more than the trivia

I could leave this as a nice fact for a speaker bio; the same year, near enough. But the useful part isn’t the coincidence. It’s what growing up alongside the thing you’re studying does to how you study it. I don’t think of Google as a black box I’m decoding from the outside, because I was never outside it. I was building a website while it was still deciding what a good one looked like, and every update since has felt less like a new rulebook and more like the same conversation continuing.

That’s the frame I bring to how businesses need to work with AI search engines today. They’re not a new species that arrived to disrupt search. They’re the next sentence in a conversation Google, Bing, and the rest of us have been having since before most people working in this industry were born. The businesses that will handle this well are the ones who treat it that way, not as a fire to put out, but as the same fire that’s been burning since 1998, changing shape again.

I turned twenty-eight in this industry the same year Google did. Neither of us is done changing yet.