Google clearly recognized that “mobile phone” and “cellular phone” were good matches. This was about a year before the Hummingbird update and text embeddings launched in Google, and a decade before publicly available large-language models (LLMs).
Along with Google’s capabilities, searchers themselves have evolved and are more inclined to use natural language. In 2026, you‘re less likely to search for “smartphone” and more likely to search for something like “What’s the best budget android phone with a good camera?” You expect Google to correctly interpret that more complex question.
So, how much has Google improved, and can we measure that improvement?
1,000 long-tail queries / 8,703 results
We chose to use a research corpus of 1,000 “long-tail” queries built specifically for prompt-tracking and spanning 20 industry categories. Here are a few sample queries:
- “What metrics should I track for e-commerce success?”
- “Is it better to work out in the morning?”
- “Do streaming services track what I watch offline?”
We ran these as Google/US/desktop searches and looked specifically at page-one organic results. This yielded 8,703 organic results and display titles (note that, due to SERP features, page one may contain less than ten organic results).
