We’re already in the final aber session at the SEASON 2026 conference in Hamburg, which starts with Sebastian Schultheiß, whose interest is in the impacts of search engine optimisation. SEO includes all measures a Website can take to improve its ranking in the organic search results provided by a search engine, as opposed to any paid advertising.
SEO’ed content may not actually be of better quality than the content it displaces in search results, of course – but what do we mean by quality here? We might think about intrinsic quality, referring to the inherent attributes of a document and its information, while representational quality describes the way it communicates its contents to a user. Such questions become especially important if search engines are used for important personal topics – for example in the context of health-related information.
How, then, does search engine optimisation, or explicit search engine marketing (SEM) using search advertising, affect the quality of the documents retrieved? Also, how does search engine literacy influences users’ content selection behaviour? How do the intrinsic and representational quality of documents affect users’ knowledge gains after such content interactions?
Sebastian works with a new preliminary information search behaviour model, building on existing models but also including the impacts of SEO and SEM. This separates into a user-centric and a content producer-centric track.
Users might start a search session, select a search engine, enter a query, choose a result, evaluate the content snippet it provides and estimate its relevance to their search, click on the document (with these last few elements also affected by SEO and SEM, as well as search engine literacy), read (part of) the document and estimate its relevance, end or repeat their query, and finally end or repeat their session; this produces some degree of knowledge gain. Higher intrinsic and representational quality should produce a greater level of knowledge gain.
For content producers, there may be specific SEM objectives, leading them to engage in SEO activities and/or to run search ads; whether or not they use SEO and SEM, they may also seek to ensure the representational and intrinsic information quality of their documents, as well as broader contextual and accessibility information quality, and all these will influence the position of the content on the search engine results page.
User journeys were explored through an online survey of some 2,400 German Internet users, with a focus on various health- and environment-related topics; they were asked to perform a search task on these topics, and questioned about their topical knowledge both before and after their tasks. Search tasks were not open-ended: participants weer confronted by predesigned search results pages which they could explore and click through instead.
Information quality evaluations of documents in search results were undertaken by invited subject experts; these assessed both intrinsic and representational document qualities.
Both elements were eventually combined into an information search behaviour model, which further modified the preliminary model. It turns out that people with higher search engine literacy were less likely to engage with search ads, but also more likely to select the top-ranked results; also, intrinsic quality resulted in a small knowledge gain, but representational quality had no notable effect.
Further, on the content producer side, SEO and SEM measures had clearly different effects. SEO showed no intrinsic disadvantages in terms of document quality; Google effectively delivered high-quality content in the top organic positions. Search engine-literate users appeared to recognise quality signals at the search engine results page level, and search engine literacy thus seems to be a very critical factor.
Paid ads, by contrast, were associated with much lower-quality content, which is a significant concern. How all of this is now affected by the emergence of AI Overviews in search results requires further study in future work, though.
