Google is no longer just a search engine. Marie Haynes, one of the most respected voices in search engine optimization, explained in a December 2025 interview how the company is fundamentally transforming into an AI agent that makes decisions on behalf of users rather than simply presenting ranked links.

Haynes has spent more than 16 years studying Google's algorithms. She began as a veterinarian before pivoting to SEO consulting following the Penguin algorithm update on April 24, 2012. Her career trajectory changed dramatically when Danny Sullivan, then Google's Public Search Liaison, reached out to her and a small group of experts in 2022 to discuss a new algorithmic approach that would become the Helpful Content system.

That conversation marked the beginning of Haynes' intensive focus on artificial intelligence's role in search. The Helpful Content system, launched in August 2022, represented Google's explicit use of machine learning to evaluate website quality. By March 2024, Google had absorbed those signals directly into its core ranking algorithms, eliminating the separate system entirely.

When Google became AI-first

The shift toward AI-powered ranking began earlier than most SEO professionals realized. According to Haynes, the transformation started in February 2017 with an undocumented algorithm change that affected primarily "your money or your life" content—websites covering health, finance, and other topics with significant real-world impact.

"Around that time we had just gotten access to Google's quality raters guidelines," Haynes explained, referencing the internal documentation that Google uses to train human evaluators who assess search result quality. The guidelines emphasized expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness—concepts that would later evolve into the E-E-A-T framework (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).

The February 2017 change preceded the August 2018 "Medic" update by more than a year. That widely-discussed update amplified patterns Haynes had already identified: websites demonstrating clear expertise in sensitive topics gained visibility, while sites lacking demonstrated authority lost rankings dramatically.

"This is my opinion. I can't point to something from Google to say this, but this is when Google said they started going AI first when none of us really were talking about AI," Haynes stated. She noted that Google had been incorporating AI components since 2015, when the company announced RankBrain, a machine learning system that processes user queries to determine relevance.

The Department of Justice versus Google antitrust trial revealed significant technical details about these systems. Testimony from Google witnesses described how AI systems continuously learn from every search interaction, similar to how a person learns to look both ways before crossing any street after almost being hit by a car on their own street.