Google explains how it ranks PDFs for SEO and GEO and how to check if a PDF is actually right for SEO purposes.
Google’s John Mueller recently discussed how Google processes PDFs for ranking purposes, how it indexes them for use in AI Mode and regular search, and why it is able to use links in PDFs the same as it does for regular HTML web pages.
Google’s Martin Splitt explained that Google uses a converter to transform PDFs into HTML, and then it indexes the HTML conversion, not the actual PDF. He also expressed uncertainty about whether images in PDFs do or do not get indexed. He appeared to lean toward the possibility that they do not get indexed and said that this state may change at some point in the future.
“And what we do is we are not using a PDF viewer. …What we are doing in Search is we have a component called a converter. And the converter component is part of what happens in indexing. It happens right after rendering and right before something potentially makes it into the index.
One of the things we do is we look at the format. We have converters for a bunch of different formats, such as rich text files, document files, Excel sheets, and Lotus Notes documents for some reason. But also one of them is a PDF converter. So we are taking that and producing an HTML version of it so that the processing in the rest of the pipeline pretty much only works with HTML.
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