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Reviewed by Steve Fink
Research led by Richard Allen (University of California, Berkeley / Google)
Jul 17, 2025

Google's earthquake alert system shows two notifications to Android users. (Credit: Google Crisis Response)
BERKELEY, Calif. — Getting a warning on your phone seconds before an earthquake hits isn’t science fiction anymore; it’s reality for millions of people worldwide. Scientists at Google and UC Berkeley have turned ordinary Android smartphones into the world’s largest earthquake detection network, reaching 2.5 billion people across 98 countries.
Over three years, this smartphone-based system detected more than 11,000 earthquakes and delivered alerts with accuracy matching traditional seismic monitoring systems. For earthquake-prone regions without expensive monitoring networks, a simple Android phone could mean the difference between life and death. The research behind this remarkable system is now published in Science.
Android phones work as earthquake detectors by using their built-in accelerometers, the same motion sensors that rotate your screen when you flip your device. When a phone sits still, it continuously monitors for sudden movement spikes matching earthquake wave patterns.
“When an individual phone triggers, it sends a message to Google servers with acceleration information and an approximate location,” the researchers, led by Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab, explain in their paper.
Google’s algorithms then analyze reports from multiple phones to determine if the pattern represents a real earthquake rather than construction work or passing trucks.
This crowd-sourced approach fundamentally changes earthquake monitoring. Traditional systems rely on expensive seismic stations costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each, requiring ongoing maintenance that many earthquake-prone regions simply can’t afford.
The Android system automatically runs on most devices through Google Play Services, meaning roughly 70% of the world’s smartphones participate in this detection network without users doing anything special.
During the study period from April 2021 to March 2024, the Android Earthquake Alerts system detected an average of 312 earthquakes monthly, ranging from magnitude 1.9 to 7.8. Crucially, 85% of these detections matched earthquakes listed in traditional scientific catalogs, proving the system’s reliability.
Accuracy improved dramatically as Google’s engineers refined their algorithms. Early magnitude estimates had a median error of 0.50, dropping to just 0.25 by study’s end, rivaling the performance of Japan’s national earthquake warning network.
The system delivers two warning types based on predicted shaking intensity. “TakeAction” alerts break through all phone settings for areas expecting strong shaking, taking over the entire screen and playing loud sounds while displaying instructions to “Drop, cover and hold on.” “BeAware” alerts appear as standard notifications for lighter shaking areas, still providing valuable safety information.
The system faced its biggest test during the catastrophic February 2023 earthquakes in Turkey. The first quake, measuring 7.8 magnitude, killed tens of thousands and revealed both the system’s potential and limitations.
Initially, the system underestimated the first earthquake’s size, providing a magnitude estimate of 4.5 instead of 7.8. However, researchers used this experience to improve their algorithms. When they tested updated software on the same earthquake data, results were dramatically better: the system would have detected the earthquake in 6.3 seconds and closely estimated a magnitude of 7.4, potentially warning 67 million people.
During a magnitude 5.7 earthquake in Nepal, the system delivered over 10 million alerts, with some people receiving warnings up to 60 seconds before feeling shaking.
Survey responses from over 1.5 million alert recipients revealed overwhelming satisfaction with the system. An impressive 85% rated alerts as “very helpful”—even among those who didn’t feel earthquake shaking during the event.
Results showed 36% of people received alerts before feeling shaking, 28% during earthquakes, and 23% afterward. Among recipients of urgent TakeAction alerts, 28% followed recommended “drop, cover, and hold on” responses, higher compliance than previous earthquake warning studies.
Trust remains strong: 84% of respondents said they would trust future alerts more based on their experience, while only 3% expressed decreased trust. After three years of operation, fewer than 0.1% of users have disabled earthquake alerts entirely.
Before Android’s system launched, only 250 million people worldwide had earthquake early warning access. Countries with high seismic risk but limited resources, including nations in Central Asia, South America, and parts of Africa, suddenly gained access to potentially life-saving technology.
The system detects earthquakes in remote locations where traditional networks would never be cost-effective, even identifying offshore earthquakes up to 100 kilometers from coastlines when they reach magnitude 4.5 or higher.
Beyond emergency alerts, this technology could help identify unknown faults beneath cities, provide rapid post-earthquake damage assessment, and improve regional hazard models worldwide. For millions living in earthquake-prone areas without traditional monitoring, an Android phone represents their best defense against one of nature’s most unpredictable threats.
Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a peer-reviewed study published in Science on July 17, 2025. While the Android Earthquake Alerts system shows promising accuracy and reach, its performance can vary by region, phone density, and event size. The user survey data is based on voluntary responses and may not reflect the full user population. As with all early warning systems, predictions are limited by the physics of earthquakes and may not always provide actionable lead time in all scenarios.
Researchers analyzed three years of data from the Android Earthquake Alerts system, which uses accelerometers in Android smartphones to detect earthquakes. When phones detect earthquake-like motion, they send data to Google servers that analyze patterns from multiple devices to confirm real earthquakes. The system was evaluated against traditional earthquake catalogs and compared to established early warning systems in Japan and the United States. User feedback was collected through surveys completed by over 1.5 million alert recipients.
The system detected 11,231 earthquakes from April 2021 to March 2024, with 85% matching traditional earthquake catalogs. Detection accuracy improved significantly over time, with magnitude estimation errors dropping from 0.50 to 0.25. The system delivered alerts in 98 countries to approximately 18 million users monthly. User surveys showed 85% found alerts “very helpful,” and 84% said they would trust future alerts more. The system demonstrated performance comparable to traditional earthquake warning systems while reaching far more people globally.
The study acknowledged several limitations: the system struggled with the largest earthquakes (magnitude 7.5+), had only three false alerts but showed vulnerability to certain types of interference, and detection capability depends on smartphone density in affected areas. The user survey was self-selected rather than randomized, and the system’s performance varies by region based on local building types and phone models.
This research was funded by Google LLC. Several authors are Google employees, and the lead author Richard Allen holds patents related to smartphone-based earthquake warning systems and serves on advisory committees for existing earthquake warning projects.
This study was published in Science magazine on July 17, 2025, authored by Richard M. Allen and colleagues from Google LLC, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University. The research was submitted in August 2024, resubmitted in March 2025, and accepted in May 2025.
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Google’s June 2025 Core Update just finished. What’s notable is that while some say it was a big update, it didn’t feel disruptive, indicating that the changes may have been more subtle than game changing. Here are some clues that may explain what happened with this update.
Although a lot of people are saying that the June 2025 Update was related to MUVERA, that’s not really the whole story. There were two notable backend announcements over the past few weeks, MUVERA and Google’s Graph Foundation…

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Google’s June 2025 Core Update just finished. What’s notable is that while some say it was a big update, it didn’t feel disruptive, indicating that the changes may have been more subtle than game changing. Here are some clues that may explain what happened with this update.
Although a lot of people are saying that the June 2025 Update was related to MUVERA, that’s not really the whole story. There were two notable backend announcements over the past few weeks, MUVERA and Google’s Graph Foundation…

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SEO professionals are on the verge of a new era.
With hindsight, the previous epoch could be called “The Age of the One-Trick Pony.” It began back in 2002 when Google passed more than a dozen crawlers and directories to become the dominant search engine.
If you learned how to improve a website’s visibility in Google’s natural or unpaid search results, then you could get a respectable job as a search engine optimizer.
But, the era of one-trick ponies is about to end. So, it’s time to re-envision your career path.
Going forward, SEO specialists will need to invest more time in learning four additional disciplines: digital analytics, digital advertising, content marketing, and social media marketing.
SEO managers will also need to demonstrate critical thinking about digital marketing strategy if they ever hope to climb the ladder.
So, where should you begin?
You should start by learning more about digital analytics, which is the process of collecting, measuring, analyzing, and interpreting data from digital sources to understand how users interact with online content.
This will help you understand why traditional metrics like “keyword rankings” and “organic pageviews” – which are the top two performance metrics that SEO professionals use to measure success in 2024 – aren’t getting noticed anymore. This means they’re never going to help you get a promotion, let alone a seat at the big table.
As Search Engine Journal’s State Of SEO 2025 noted:
“Keyword rankings and pageviews are not necessarily relevant to business goals. They’re the main metrics being disrupted right now, but it’s critical to lean into disruption to discover opportunities and change strategies.”
So, it is worth learning how digital analytics can help you measure success using key performance indicators (KPIs) that are tied to business goals like “drive online sales” for ecommerce sites, “generate leads” for lead-generation sites, and even “raise brand awareness” for publishers.
For example, Rand Fishkin recently wrote a blog post titled, 2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 EU Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the US, it’s 360.
He used a clickstream panel from Datos to tackle a couple of critical questions:
As the twin charts below indicate, close to 60% of Google searches result in zero clicks, while slightly more than 40% result in a click.
Of the searches that result in a click, about 25-30% go to platforms that Google owns, including YouTube, Google Images, Google Maps, and Google News. Meanwhile, the other 70% to 75% go to a non-Google-owned, non-Google-ad-paying property.
For every 1,000 Google searches, only 360 clicks in the U.S. and just 374 clicks in Europe go to the open web.
That is why you should use digital analytics to measure the impact of visibility in Google’s natural or unpaid search results on raising brand awareness.
How do you do that? As I mentioned in No-Click Searches Require A New Way To Measure SEO Results, this issue might be relatively new for SEO specialists and managers, but it’s a long-standing challenge for PR professionals.
In the late 1980s, I was the director of corporate communications at Lotus Development Corporation and at Ziff-Davis during the 1990s. Back then, I began utilizing surveys to measure the impact of publicity on brand awareness.
Today, you can use a modified version of brand lift surveys to measure this KPI.
Brand lift surveys ask people questions about your brand and products – either before and after your target audience has been exposed to a new campaign or at regular intervals.
The questions can help you understand how your SEO efforts and other cross-channel programs are impacting your brand, including:
In other words, learning to use digital analytics to measure, analyze, and interpret data is significantly more valuable to your career than just using the same old web analytics metrics that SEO pros have been collecting and reporting for more than 20 years.
Next, I would recommend learning more about digital advertising, which includes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Digital ads can appear in many forms, including text, images, audio, and video, and can be found on various platforms, such as search engines, social media, and websites.
You’re probably sharing your keyword research with colleagues in your advertising department or over at your ad agency. But that is just the front end of a longer process – you should learn more about the middle and back end, too.
For example, I had bet dollars to donuts that your colleagues in advertising are busy setting up audiences in Google Analytics 4, which lets them segment users in ways that are important to your business.
By linking your GA4 account to Google Ads, they can remarket to them.
Why does this represent a strategic opportunity for SEO pros?
Back in December 2020, I wrote The Future Of SEO Lies In The ‘Messy Middle’ Of The Purchase Journey. I reported on research by Google’s Market Insights team in the UK, which found:
“People don’t make decisions in a neat, linear fashion.”
Between the moment they realize they need or want something and the moment they make a purchase, a lot happens.
The research also found:
“People look for information about a category’s products and brands, and then weigh all the options.”
They go through two different mental modes in the messy middle: exploration, which is an expansive activity, and evaluation, which is a reductive activity.
It concluded:
“Whatever a person is doing, across a huge array of online sources, such as search engines, social media, and review sites, can be classified into one of these two mental modes.”
So, how do SEO professionals harness this insight?
What if you started building “SEO audiences” in GA4 to help people in the “messy middle” of their purchase journey?
You could then share your SEO audiences with your colleague in advertising, who could then create a remarketing campaign targeted at this specific group of users – and help them complete their purchase journey.
For example, if your SEO program builds an audience of 1,000 users who:
SEJ’s State of SEO 2025 says the biggest barrier to SEO success in the last 12 months was “budget and resources.” And that was followed by two other traditional barriers: “Google algorithm updates” and “competition in SERPs.”
But if you dig a little deeper, the fourth item on the list of the biggest barriers to SEO success was “alignment with other departments.”
So, imagine what would happen if the SEO and PPC people started working together to help people in the “messy middle” of their purchase journey?
Speaking of alignment with other departments, SEO pros need to learn even more than they already know about content marketing and social media marketing.
Why? Because these three disciplines often overlap, as you can see in the illustration below, which appears in Digital Marketing Fundamentals: OMCP’s Official Guide to OMCA Certification. (Disclosure: I am one of the co-authors.)
Overlapping responsibilities can be a waste of time and frustrating for teams. So, these tend to be the first things that companies and clients trim when they tighten their purse strings.
Ironically, slightly overlapping roles can improve workflow integration. This is because each role’s activities impact the next process in the workflow.
Alignment with other departments isn’t just a way to keep your SEO budget and resources from being cut. It is also a way to overcome other barriers to SEO success, like “Google algorithm updates” and “competition in SERPs.”
Want an example?
Just read AI On Innovation: Analysis Of +546,000 AI Overviews.
The article by Kevin Indig dives into the latest data on AI Overviews (AIO) to understand domain visibility, citation trends, and effective search strategies crucial for SEO success.
What does he notice? The top three most cited domains in AIOs are:
What does he wonder?
“The fact that two social networks, YouTube and LinkedIn, are in the top three most cited domains raises the question of whether we can influence AIO answers with content on YouTube and LinkedIn more than our own.”
Indig also notes that videos take more effort to produce than LinkedIn answers, but videos might also be more defensible against copycats. So, “AIO-optimization strategies should include social and video content.”
Let us imagine that you are the SEO manager at a Fortune 500 company. What would happen if your chief marketing officer (CMO) decided to create a task force to develop AIO-optimization strategies?
If the task force included managers from the SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing departments, then how likely is it that you would be selected to head up this team?
Unfortunately, your CMO has probably read The people who ruined the internet, which was published in The Verge on Nov. 1, 2023.
Since then, SEJ’s State of SEO 2025 confirms that 46.3% of SEO professionals are “content goblins,” a term that the author coined to describe people “willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash.”
Another 25.2% of SEO pros are “alligator wrestlers,” another term coined by The Verge to describe the link spammers who want people to click on “WATCH: 10-foot Gator Prepares to Maul Digital Marketers.”
And 19.6% were confused by these descriptions, which indicates that they don’t get out of their silos very often.
So, how do you avoid the stereotype that SEO pros are hustlers, while simultaneously demonstrating that you have the education, expertise, and experience needed to lead an interdisciplinary team?
Yes, you could cram for the job interview by reading 20 Confirmed Facts About YouTube’s Algorithm and LinkedIn Algorithm Change Could Promote Your Best Posts For Months.
But you’d probably improve your chances of getting the new position by also reading:
In other words, the more you know about content marketing and social media marketing, the more likely it is that you will be chosen to head up a task force to develop AIO-optimization strategies.
And working collaboratively with other departments to leverage YouTube, LinkedIn, and cross-channel strategies will also increase your odds of getting promoted in the foreseeable future.
But when you climb the corporate ladder, don’t be surprised if your next job title doesn’t include the term “search engine optimization” or “SEO.”
Back in November 2020, I noticed that there were very few vice presidents of search engine optimization. And back then, I wondered what SEO managers still needed to learn to become a VP of SEO.
In February 2024, Adam Audette provided an update in a post titled, The Demise of the VP of SEO Role. He noticed:
“Over the last 18 months there has been a marked decline in the job market for senior SEO leadership roles across in-house and agency landscapes, and this trend is persisting.”
And he wondered:
“Maybe companies don’t believe SEO by itself is enough anymore. Job seekers need SEO plus something extra.”
As I mentioned earlier, the era of one-trick ponies is about to end. What comes next can only be described using Words of Estimative Probability (WEP), which are used by intelligence analysts in analytic reports to convey the likelihood of a future event occurring.
So, whether you’re called the VP of marketing, CMO, or chief growth officer (CGO), the challenge will be the same: Create successful digital marketing strategies when your global company or top brand is faced with unexpected opportunities or unanticipated threats in the unforeseeable future.
What are the odds that you can overcome that challenge?
You can increase the likelihood of success by reading case studies and then asking yourself two questions:
I used this approach when I wrote the chapter on digital marketing strategy in the book, “Digital Marketing Fundamentals.” I shared two articles that I had written for Search Engine Journal:
Now, learning lessons from others is a good start, but you can significantly improve your chances of success by borrowing a big idea from my old friend and former colleague, Avinash Kaushik. He wrote an article titled, Stop Exceeding Expectations, Suck Less First.
He said that we should stop trying to “exceed the (often less-than-optimally informed) expectations of Wall Street Analysts” because “this desire to overachieve also comes at a very heavy cost – it drives sub-optimal behavior.”
Instead, he recommended this “as the #1 goal for your company: Suck less, every day.”
How does this incremental approach help a VP of marketing, CMO, or CGO achieve their business objectives?
In the same chapter on digital marketing strategy, I referenced a post in Occam’s Razor by Kaushik titled, Digital Marketing And Analytics: Two Ladders For Magnificent Success.
Back in December 2013, he said:
“More often than not, magnificent success results from executing a business plan that is rooted in a strong understanding of the landscape of possibilities, and a deep self-awareness of business capabilities. These business plans will contain a structured approach…”
Then, he shared the Digital Marketing “Ladder of Awesomeness” below.
Next, Kaushik shared the Digital Analytics “Ladder of Awesomeness” below, which outlines the KPIs for each step.
Now, your twin ladders of awesomeness might look a little different than his because this is 2024 – not 2013.
And both digital marketing and digital analytics have evolved. But the step-by-step process that Kaushik outlined will help you make the hard choices that are the most relevant for your company or brand when it finds itself in an unexpected, unanticipated, or unforeseeable position.
So, the first step in this new era of SEO is developing digital marketing strategies that help you avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and climb the ladder of success.
In parallel, the second step should be learning how to measure incrementality, the conversions that would not have occurred without marketing influence.
Oh, it’s also smart to start climbing these twin ladders of awesomeness as quickly as you can.
Why? Because the clock is ticking.
According to Spencer Stuart’s most recent CMO Tenure Study, Fortune 500 CMOs had an average tenure of 4.2 years last year.
However, there are differences between diverse types of companies.
CMOs at B2B companies tend to stay in their roles for an average of 4.5 years; CMOs at B2C companies average 4.0 years; CMOs at the top 100 advertisers hand on to their jobs for just 3.1 years.
In the next couple of years, a significant percentage of CMO jobs are going to open suddenly. How likely is it that you’ll be ready to be interviewed for one of them?
Spencer Stuart also noticed that 34% of Fortune 500 CMOs lead functions in addition to marketing, such as communications. So, the “plus something extra” trend extends from the SEO manager level all the way up to the CMO level.
Take an expanded view of marketing leaders’ growing purview and start climbing the ladder as soon as humanly possible.
The only thing that’s left to do is coin a unique term for the new era we’re entering.
We could call it the “Age of Awesomeness” or the “Epoch of Twin Escalators.” But I’m open to other suggestions.
What have you noticed, and what have you wondered?
More resources: 
Featured Image: ImageFlow/Shutterstock
Greg Jarboe is president of SEO-PR, which he co-founded with Jamie O’Donnell in 2003. Their digital marketing agency has won …
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Google has launched a suite of its AI-powered advertising tools in India, which debuted in the U.S. in May, as the repeal of the “Google tax” has made the South Asian market more attractive to global tech firms selling online ads.
In March, the Indian government scrapped its 6% levy on digital advertisements, effective in April, as a move to address some of the trade concerns raised by the Trump administration.
The United States Trade Representative had criticized the levy by calling it “discriminatory and unreasonable,” as domestic companies were exempt. Its repeal would ease costs for tech giants, including Google, Meta, and Amazon.
On Thursday, Google hosted the local version of its Marketing Live event to debut its AI-powered tools for Indian marketers.
One of the tools is “Generated for You,” available within Product Studio, which identifies relevant content opportunities across shopping catalogs and pre-generates images and videos via AI that merchants can save or publish across Google platforms. Another tool is an opt-in feature called Smart Bidding Exploration in search campaigns, which is built on existing Smart Bidding and uses AI to find newer, qualified leads that merchants wouldn’t typically have captured or bid on.
Plus, Google introduced new agentic capabilities in Google Ads and Analytics.
“These agentic tools can learn from advertising inputs, including datasets, landing pages, assets, and real-time campaign performance, to take the guesswork out of achieving business goals,” Dan Taylor, vice president for Global Ads at Google, said at a virtual media roundtable.
Google brought AI Max for Search Campaigns, which aims to enhance search ad campaign performance by identifying more relevant and high-performing search queries by learning from brands’ landing pages, their existing ads, and existing keyword lists.
Indian online marketplace for used electronics goods, Cashify, saw its conversions up by 15% and customer acquisition costs reduced by 12% after deploying AI Max during its early testing, Google said.
Google also announced that ads will start appearing on AI Overviews in India later this year.
Additionally, the company has introduced its shoppable connected TV ads on YouTube in India. YouTube’s masthead on mobile will now also start serving ads in the country.
YouTube on connected TVs has been the most-watched streaming service on television in India over the past year, said Roma Datta Chobey, managing director of Digital Native Industries at Google India.
Similarly, the country has been a significant market for YouTube Shorts, with short videos on the platform viewed trillions of times since launch. As many as 87% of Indian consumers watch YouTube or Shorts as part of their shopping journey, Chobey said.
India’s digital advertising presence is growing, as the world’s second-largest internet market continues to see more users come online. The country’s digital ad market is projected to grow over 20% year-over-year, reaching nearly $7 billion by the end of 2025, per a recent Dentsu Digital Advertising report.
“India is such a thriving digital ecosystem. We have the largest number of users who are actively trying and testing our products. So that’s really the reason behind us getting these innovations to India faster,” Chobey said in response to TechCrunch’s question about the timing of the new AI ad tools.
Google confirmed to TechCrunch that its newly launched features — including AI Max for Search Campaigns, Smart Bidding Exploration, YouTube’s shoppable masthead and CTV, and Performance Max Retention-Only Mode — support Hindi to improve local campaign compatibility. Additionally, the company introduced state-level urban and rural audience filters for Indian advertisers to enable more granular media planning, buying, and reporting.
India has long been a key market for Google, not just because it hosts the company’s largest user base but also because of consistent growth in ad revenues. In fiscal year 2024, Google’s gross ad revenue in India increased 11% year-over-year to ₹312.21 billion ($3.6 billion), while its net advertising revenue rose 18% to ₹27.43 billion ($320 million).
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Google has rolled out a Material 3 Expressive update for the Phone app on Wear OS  Android Police
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