Google's New Cabinet of Weird URL Questions

2026-10-15 — SME marketing Bengaluru

Google launched something unusual last week. A sitcom-style video series about technical SEO questions that are too niche for the standard FAQ.

On October 14, Google Search published the first episode of "The Non-Canonical Cabinet," where developer advocates Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin explain what a domain name and URL path may contain.

The framing matters here. This isn't Google explaining the basics. The episode description explicitly notes these are "questions that don't belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features." It's the weird stuff. The edge cases that sit in your inbox for months because they don't fit anywhere else.

Emojis in domain names? No. The ICANN standards from 2017 block them entirely. But put that chicken emoji in your URL path and something different happens.

Emoji work in URL paths, where a chicken emoji is percent-encoded as %F0%9F%90%94. Googlebot will process it. Not every browser will display it correctly—some render it as gibberish—but the system handles it. That's the real distinction most people miss. Domain names follow strict internet standards. Paths are looser territory.

Actually, that's not quite right. It's not looser. It's just different rules entirely.

The keyword question came up too. Illyes calls keywords in a URL "an incredibly small signal" that matters only when Google has nothing else to go on. You get a site launched yesterday, zero content, zero backlinks, just a URL slug with your target keyword. Sure, it might help. Most consultants get this wrong, including us sometimes.

What makes this series different from Google's usual explainer content is the format. The trailer describes it as a sitcom-style comedy built on specific questions asked by website owners and the SEO industry. Illyes also hosted "How Search Works," a five-part Search Central series from 2024 that walked through crawling, indexing and serving in order. That one was methodical—foundational. This new series flips it. Users ask the questions. Google answers them. No curriculum, no lecture structure. Just an exchange between people who deal with these problems.

The series invited comments on each video for more questions. Google's signaling that this is community-driven, not top-down. Whether they actually work through the pile or cherry-pick the easy ones remains to be seen.

Source: "Gary Illyes said URL keywords only matter when Google has 'absolutely nothing else to go on'" — Relevant Audience