Episode 87: The Public Position

Send us Fan Mail In 2018, Google's search team gave an internal presentation that told engineers not to discuss how clicks are used in search, except on a need-to-know basis. One line said it plainly: Google has a public position. That deck, now a public court exhibit from the U.S. antitrust case against Google, changes how every business owner should hear the words “Google says.” In this episode, Jeff Payne pairs it with a second exhibit from 2016 that shows what Google actually measures: what real people would choose, given a fair opportunity, corrected for whether they should have chosen it. The takeaway isn't a ranking trick. It's why chasing ranking factors is the wrong question, why manufactured signals backfire, why the same logic applies to AI answer engines, and what the one question to ask about your marketing is instead. Picked, not placed.