Google’s Muller Warns SEOs About Changing Business Needs

Google’s John Mueller shared a piece of advice for all Search Engine optimization professionals who are still in 2020 on how their work fits in relation to current business needs.

Google’s Muller Warns SEOs About Changing Business Needs

John Mueller shared a piece of advice for all SEO professionals who are still in 2020 on how their work fits in relation to current business needs.

As web development evolves, SEO should follow, says Google’s Mueller

John Mueller – Google Search Advocate, encourages SEO professionals to rethink the way they train and the world in which their work sits in the context of the web stack.

He points to a “vibes-based” visualization showing where developers’ focus have changed.

Mueller observes a gap between what industry pros focus on (like JavaScript frameworks, performance optimizations, or new AI-driven tech) and what online businesses require.

But to him, it represents a chance for SEO specialists. He offers tips for remaining relevant in changing business environments.

Changing Business Priorities

Laurie Voss, VP of Developer Relations at Llama Index, shared a really interesting chart on the subject, showing the areas of focus of software professionals 1990-through-2025.

Developers were mostly worrying about hardware and networking in the early days. They were followed by the HTML+CSS+Server era in the mid-2000s. Recently, we have started to see a push towards client frameworks, responsive design, and AI-assisted development.

While subjective, Mueller emphasizes its usefulness for SEOs. It illustrates how rapidly areas like server-level work are becoming much less relevant to the average web developer.

Mueller’s Take

He point is a simple one: as the web evolves, search engine optimization needs to evolve, too.

“Think about what the average web developer thinks about and that’s not what’s relevant for the “online business” (in whatever form you’re working). If your particular graphic focus was something like “SEO at server level,” well, this piece you have here has already shrunk noticeably.

This is consistent with Voss’s argument in his recent article, “AI’s effects on programming jobs.”

AI won’t eliminate development jobs, Voss argues, but rather will establish a new abstraction layer that rewrites how work gets done. The same is likely true for SEO work.

What Should Search Pros Be Looking At?

Interpolating from Mueller’s comment and the chart above, here’s where a few areas that SEOs should be getting into:

Mobile performance skills

Working with AI tools

Responsive design in a nutshell

Experience of working with client-side frameworks and their influence on SEO

Prompt engineering

In short, put server-level optimizations aside, and work on client-side rendering and UX attributes

Technical SEO not long ago really just entailed dealing with sitemaps, robots. txt files, and elementary schema mark-up. Now we’re covering JavaScript rendering, Core Web Vitals, and AI content evaluation.

The best industry pros are those who grow their technical knowledge, not those who maintain outdated practices. Those familiar with classical

and new web technologies will still prevail when our industry matures.

Mueller’s insistent reminder to adapt is more than good advice; it’s imperative for relevancy in search.