The Enduring Value of Multimodal Content for Google Search (and AI Assistants), a Hamsterdam History Lesson

By Ethan Lazuk

Welcome to another edition of Hamsterdam History!

In case you’re new here, this is a series of posts where we look at vintage SEO articles to celebrate their contributors, gain historical knowledge, and discuss how things have changed since (or haven’t).

In this post, we’ll be going back in time roughly 15 years to look at “What Wins In Google Universal Search? Videos, Images & Google!” authored by Barry Schwartz for Search Engine Land on July 28, 2011.

The article looks at data from Searchmetrics about what types of content appear most often in Google Universal Search.

If “Universal Search” is an unfamiliar term to you, let’s examine what it means.

In May 2007, Google unveiled Universal Search. Here is how Vanessa Fox described it back then in a blog post now on Google’s developer website:

“With universal search, we’ve begun blending results from more than just the web in order to provide the most relevant and useful results possible. In addition to web pages, for instance, the search results may include video, news, images, maps, and books.”

– Taking advantage of universal search, Vanessa Fox, Google (2007)

In the SEL article written four years later (2011), Barry talks about how Searchmetrics’ data showed that “having a video is one of the best ways of showing up in the top results at Google.”

Next to video were images, a distant second, then map results, news, books, shopping, and blogs.

Also reported in the 2011 SEL article was how Google’s own properties performed well in Universal Search, specifically YouTube, Google Maps, Google Product Search, and Blogger:

For those of you familiar with SEO/GEO strategies today, you’ll likely already see a bunch of parallels.

Let’s compare today’s SEO/GEO landscape with the landscape in 2011.

First, we’ll talk about content strategy.

Just as video was important in 2011, so it remains today.

A 2025 SEL article reported that “YouTube is cited 200x more than any other video platform in AI search results, according to new data from enterprise SEO platform BrightEdge.”

More recently, a July 2026 article from Muck Rack says in the title “AI loves YouTube.” Specifically, they report that “Among every domain cited by Perplexity, YouTube ranked #1 by a wide margin: nine times more than the next closest source.” Their research also “found that how-to queries account for 29% of all YouTube citations, making instructional searches the biggest driver of YouTube citations across AI responses.”

And in early 2026, Goodie AI reported on LinkedIn that “YouTube has overtaken Reddit as the #1 social source for LLM answers.”

We can also see YouTube’s prevalence in prompt-tracking data. For example, I track 50 SEO/GEO-themed prompts in Peec AI across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. YouTube is the top domain overall in terms of retrievals:

So just as video (on YouTube) was important for visibility in Google’s Universal Search back in 2011, so too is it a prominent source in AI assistant answers for GEO strategies today.

But that’s not where the parallels end.

The 2011 SEL article also talks about Google showing its own properties in search results. We see similar behavior today with AI assistant answers.

YouTube is the obvious example, being owned by Google.

But there are also recent reports of AI Mode increasingly citing Google-hosted properties, specifically Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels from Google Shopping:

New data shows Google is now AI Mode's second most-cited domain, driven by Google-hosted Business Profile and Product Knowledge Panel cards. via @mattgsouthern.bsky.social#Google

— Search Engine Journal (@sejournal.bsky.social) 2026-07-20T23:29:24+00:00

Writing about data from Profound in the SEJ article linked above, Matt G. Southern explains, “The report shows citation share for google.com rose 8.4x between April 15 and June 30, with almost all of that increase going to two Google-hosted surfaces, Business Profile cards and Product Knowledge Panels.”

Coincidentally, if we look back at that earlier screenshot of top domains by retrievals from Peec AI for my tracked prompts, Google.com was number four.

And if we filter by AI Mode chats, it becomes number three:

But this is a bit misleading, because my prompts are mainly informational ones related to SEO/GEO topics (and not shopping or local businesses), so the majority of Google.com URLs retrieved as sources are actually developer docs and articles:

Wrapping up, we can see parallels between 2011 and 2026 …

The first parallel is the importance of multimodal content, specifically video. AI assistants frequently cite video content (specifically YouTube), just as Universal Search reportedly did in 2011.

The second parallel is the prominent visibility of Google’s own properties, yes including YouTube, but also Google Business Profiles and Product Knowledge Panels in AI Mode, similar to the reported visibility shown to Google Maps and Google Product Search in 2011 in Universal Search.

As for takeaways, it’s always been a good idea to create multimodal content, especially video content on YouTube as well as custom images, and that’s as true today as it was 15 years ago. The same can be said for getting your business or products featured in Google’s maps and shopping ecosystems.

Outro

I hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Hamsterdam History!

It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these, and I forgot how fun they are to create.

Stay tuned for another lesson soon, or check out related history articles below.

Until next time, enjoy the vibes:

Thanks for reading. Happy optimizing!

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Related history posts: