Google Navigational Queries Shouldn’t Trigger Search Generative Experience

Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, said on Twitter that Google probably shouldn’t trigger a Search Generative Experience answer for navigational queries. You can always manually trigger the SGE response, but by default, it probably shouldn’t be generated.

Danny Sullivan wrote, “I would expect SGE to only appear if we think it’s helpful, and navigation queries, it probably isn’t so helpful then.”

This goes back to the complain, rightfully so, that SGE responses, rarely have links to where a searcher really wants to go. Here are these tweets in context:

Did SGE autogenerate on that for you? For me, I needed to manually trigger it. The corroborating links all do lead to it, of course.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 14, 2023

Thanks. I would expect SGE to only appear if we think it’s helpful, and navigation queries, it probably isn’t so helpful then. That might be why it didn’t automatically appear. But if someone does manually trigger it, then it’s probably not a navigational intent and the more…

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) August 14, 2023

As a reminder, Google recently started to experiment with links in SGE after all the negative feedback around the lack of links within the AI-generated answers that Google’s Search Generative Experience generates.

Of course, I can generate SGE responses for some navigational queries – including the most obvious one:

Compared to this one where you need to ask Google to generate one manually:

Forum discussion at Twitter.