A Google Chrome Engineer published a LinkedIn post outlining the new Chrome AI History feature and the signals it uses to surface previously visited sites. The post illustrates that natural language browser history search could become a traffic source, and SEO must evolve in response.
History Search Powered By AI
Google recently announced a new opt-in feature in Chrome that gives users the benefit of AI to search through their browser history and find a page that they have previously visited. This makes it easier for a site that has previously been visited to obtain another visit from the same person.
Chrome AI History Searches Page Content
Chrome Engineering Leader Addy Osmani wrote a description of the new Chrome AI History feature that contained some undocumented information about how it works which shows how text and images are used as data sources for the AI to identify a site that a user had previously visited.
The Chrome Browser history normally just searches the URL and Page Title to find something in the search history. “History Search, powered by AI” looks at the webpage content, including the images.
Osmani shared an example where he identified a page he had previously visited in which the AI used image content to find what he was looking for.
He gave an example of finding a page he visited that’s related to shopping:
“Recently, I was browsing for a new sweater and took a look at a few options across a few sites. I saw some neat Burberry designs. But there was one specific Burberry sweater I liked from a while back that said “England” on it. I can’t remember where I saw it or how to find that page again.
With AI history search, I simply type “Burberry sweater England” and voilà – the exact page appears, even though “England” was only mentioned within an image on the site.”
What does he mean that the word “England” was only mentioned in an image? He doesn’t specifically say that the word was in the image meta data like in the alt tag. I assumed that’s what he meant, that the word England was in the image metadata. So I found the exact page he was looking at (it’s in a video he embedded in his LinkedIn post) and checked the source code and the word “England” was not in the meta data.
If you watch the video the AI Browser history shows multiple pages so it’s possible that the AI simply ignored the word “England” just surfaced everything that had a partial match. But, Osmani said it was surfaced because of the image.