{"id":2179,"slug":"google-two-wave-indexing-officially-downplayed","title":"\"Two waves of indexing\" — Google's Martin Splitt now calls it an oversimplification; \"pretty much every website, when we see them for the first time, goes to rendering\" and the waves \"play less and less of a role\"","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"internal","audiences":["kevin","candid-team"],"topics":["google-search-pipeline","rendering-pipeline"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** The \"two waves of indexing\" model — index raw HTML first, render JS later in a \"second wave\" that could lag days/weeks — was widely repeated in SEO circles from a 2018 Google I/O talk. Google **itself now disowns it as an over-simplification**.\n\nMartin Splitt, who helped present the original model:\n\n\"That was an oversimplification… it implied a bunch of stuff that were not meant to be implied.\"\n\nIn a 2019 Zürich discussion he said the two waves \"play less and less of a role,\" that \"pretty much every website, when we see them for the first time, goes to rendering,\" and that rendering is cheap enough that even non-JS pages pass through it. He stopped short of declaring it dead and said crawling/rendering/indexing would eventually \"come closer together.\"\n\n**Source:** Martin Splitt (Google), 2019 Zürich SEO discussion and subsequent commentary.\n\n**Confidence:** High (direct Splitt quotes).\n\n**Caveat:** \"Two waves\" is still a **useful mental model** for explaining *why JS content can lag*, but it is **no longer an accurate literal description** of Google's pipeline. Do not use it to claim \"JS content takes a week longer to index\" as if it were a hard rule. See [[rule-two-wave-indexing-obsolete-as-literal-model]].","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"rule-two-wave-indexing-obsolete-as-literal-model","title":"Rule: do not present \"two waves of indexing\" as a literal current model — Google itself has called it an oversimplification; use it only as a teaching aid for why JS content can lag","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-google-search-lifecycle-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the lifecycle of a website in Google Search — from launch to mature standing and the perpetual re-evaluation that follows (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"google-render-queue-all-200-pages","title":"Google queues ALL 200-status pages for rendering, JS or not — Splitt: \"you don't really see how long it takes us to render, if we render at all, when we render\"","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"research-brief-launch-build-technical-foundation-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the launch-build technical foundation — what the technology must get right before a new site can be found (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"google-two-stage-processing-200-pages-render-queue","title":"Google two-stage processing — crawl raw HTML first; all 200-status pages queued for rendering (\"a headless Chromium renders the page and executes the JavaScript\") with delays from seconds to hours per Vercel/MERJ","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-25T15:19:39.183Z","updated_at":"2026-06-25T17:07:10.774Z"}