At First Optimise, our mission is built on a foundation of deep, hands-on expertise. We don’t just observe industry trends; we actively participate in shaping the conversation, solving complex challenges, and empowering brands to achieve true global visibility.
We are therefore immensely proud to share that our founder, Loki Yan, was recently invited to speak as a community guest at the prestigious Google Search Central Deep Dive APAC 2025. This invitation is more than a personal honour; it's a testament to our team's commitment to digging deeper, uncovering the technical truths that define digital success, and sharing that knowledge with the wider community.
Loki’s presentation, "The Best Lesson: Learned from a JavaScript SEO Disaster," tackled one of the most critical, and often overlooked, hurdles facing modern enterprises. Many companies invest heavily in state-of-the-art websites using modern JavaScript frameworks, only to find their global performance stagnates. The reason? A fatal gap between what their human visitors see and what Google's crawlers can actually access and understand. Loki provided a detailed, step-by-step methodology for diagnosing and solving this "invisibility," ensuring that a brand's message isn't lost in a technical blind spot.
Our Insights: Navigating the New Search Landscape
The event was a powerful reminder that in an era defined by AI, the fundamentals have become more important than ever. Here are our key takeaways from the deep dive, straight from Google and validated by our own in-the-trenches experience.
The AI Revolution is Built on an Old Foundation
The industry is saturated with talk of AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini. It’s easy to believe that these new technologies have completely rewritten the rules of search.
Google’s official team brought critical clarity to this: these new experiences are all, at their core, powered by the same fundamental process that has always defined search: Crawling, Indexing, and Serving.
This is not a minor detail; it is the entire strategic picture. It means that you cannot be featured in a generative AI answer if your content hasn't been successfully crawled. You cannot be part of an AI Overview if your site hasn't been properly indexed. And you cannot be served to a global audience if Google doesn't understand what your service or product is. The "new" AI-driven search is still, and will continue to be, sourced from the index. Your primary goal remains unchanged: ensure you are in it, accurately and completely.
Google's Official Proclamation: "SEO is Not Dead"
The Google team stated this explicitly, and we would take it a step further: In the age of AI, foundational SEO is more critical than ever before.
Why? Because AI models are not magic. They are learning machines that ingest data. Your website, its content, its products and its services, is that data. If your "data" is locked behind faulty JavaScript rendering, blocked by incorrect server configurations, or so poorly structured that a crawler cannot parse its meaning, the AI has nothing to learn from. Your brand simply will not exist in its world.
Chasing the latest AI trend is useless if you haven't first given the AI a language it can read.
The JavaScript Disaster: Why Technical Visibility is Step Zero
This brings us back to the core of Loki’s presentation. The "JavaScript disaster" he detailed is a story we see played out time and again with ambitious enterprises. They build beautiful, dynamic, interactive sites that look perfect to a human user, but to a Googlebot, they are blank pages.
The bottom line is this: If a search engine or an AI crawler cannot read your content, you have failed at the first and most fundamental step.
You lose before the race even begins.
Your meticulous market research, your compelling brand message, and your innovative product line are all rendered irrelevant if the technical gateway to that information is sealed shut. Before you can worry about ranking, keywords, or AI-generated snippets, you must first answer a simple question: "Can I be seen?" Loki's session provided the diagnostic toolkit to answer that question with certainty.
Is Your Brand Truly Visible?
The path to global success in 2025 and beyond isn't about abandoning SEO for AI; it's about mastering the technical foundations that allow AI to understand you. It's about ensuring your brand, your products, and your message can be successfully crawled, indexed, and served—no matter what new interface Google puts in front of it.
Is your global website truly visible? Are you confident that your technical framework is an asset, not a liability, in the new age of search?
These are the complex questions we live and breathe at First Optimise. If these insights resonate, or if you’re questioning whether your brand is truly being "seen" by Google, we invite you to start a conversation with us. Let’s build an unshakeable foundation for your global success together.
