Reverse Engineering

Dissecting how a system works inside.

How AI Search Grounding Actually Works: Google vs OpenAI vs Anthropic

An analysis of how Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic handle web grounding, comparing their search processes, citation rates, and how they process page content.

13 June 2026

Chrome’s New Shopping Classifier

An analysis of Google's shopping classifier model in Chrome, detailing its content extraction pipeline, chunking logic, and impact on e-commerce SEO.

3 April 2026

Rufus – Under the Hood. What Drives Amazon’s AI Shopping Assistant?

An overview of the technical architecture behind Amazon's Rufus, covering its query planning, RAG-based retrieval, custom LLM models, and streaming response.

15 March 2026

What extraction method is Google using to build grounding snippets?

An analysis of Google's Gemini grounding pipeline, examining how extractive summarization selects query-focused sentences to build grounding context from web sources.

24 February 2026

Google’s Ranking Signals

Overview of search ranking factors including popularity signals, PCTR models, semantic relevance, keyword matching, freshness, and various search modes.

24 December 2025

How GPT Sees the Web

A technical walkthrough of how GPT handles web search, including snippets, expansions, context size settings, and the sliding window mechanism for retrieval.

14 November 2025

How much of your content survives the AI Search filter?

An analysis of the Google grounding process, detailing how user prompts and source snippets are processed by models and measuring citation coverage rates.

8 November 2025

Browsing vs Content Fetcher

Google's AI Mode uses browsing for single URL retrieval and content_fetcher for batch processing of multiple structured sources within a workflow.

8 November 2025

Claude System Internals

An exploration of the internal processes of Claude, including system prompts, token budgets, search grounding algorithms, and hidden reasoning blocks.

9 October 2025

Chrome Screen AI Protos

A directory of protocol buffer files covering various machine intelligence technologies, including OCR, vision, face detection, and image classification.

23 September 2025

Annotated Page Content (APC)

Annotated Page Content (APC) is a structured protobuf representation of a webpage's layout and content, designed for actionable and efficient downstream use.

22 September 2025

Deconstructing DomDistiller: How Chrome’s Reader Mode Algorithm Impacts Technical SEO

An analysis of Chrome's DomDistiller engine explains how it uses heuristics, DOM traversal, and semantic HTML to isolate main content from page boilerplate.

22 September 2025

Gemini App Tools – A Technical Overview

Gemini acts as an orchestration layer that manages a large language model by deconstructing prompts into tasks for tools like Code Interpreter and APIs.

14 September 2025

Inside Chrome’s Semantic Engine: A Technical Analysis of History Embeddings

Technical analysis of Chrome's history embeddings system, detailing the DocumentChunker algorithm, passage extraction, and the 1540-dimensional vector pipeline.

21 August 2025

Google’s Query Fan-Out System – A Technical Overview

This article describes a system that replicates Google's query fan-out approach by using generative neural networks to automatically create intelligent search variants.

9 August 2025

GPT-5 System Prompt

Here it is: Credit to: https://x.com/elder_plinius/status/1953583554287562823H/T https://x.com/DarwinSantosNYC for spotting it.

8 August 2025

AI Mode Internals

An exploration of Google's AI Mode and Gemini tools, including its use of Google Search, Python libraries, and how it processes date, time, and location data.

28 May 2025

The Inner Workings of GPT’s file_search Tool

The file_search tool allows GPT models to extract precise information from uploaded documents using structured queries and provides citations for verification.

27 May 2025

Live Blog: Hacking Gemini Embeddings

An experimental study reproducing the vec2vec research paper by attempting to translate and align Gemini and MxbAI embedding spaces using unsupervised methods.

24 May 2025

How Google grounds its LLM, Gemini.

An analysis of Gemini's internal grounding processes, revealing its structured indexing method, operational stages, and use of external verification tools.

8 May 2025

Google Lens Modes

The lns_mode parameter classifies Google Lens queries into text, unimodal, or multimodal modes to help route requests and support AI Mode functionality.

8 May 2025

How Google Decides When to Use Gemini Grounding for User Queries

Google uses dynamic retrieval to decide when Gemini models should use grounding. A prediction score and configurable threshold determine if a query needs search data.

29 March 2025

Revealed: The exact search result data sent to Google’s AI.

An analysis of Gemini's grounding capabilities, addressing issues with hallucinations, guardrails, and the discovery of multi-passage snippet context.

14 March 2025

Beyond Links: Understanding Page Transitions in Chrome

Explore Chrome page transition types and qualifiers to understand user intent, navigation pathways, and the SEO implications of different browser behaviors.

27 November 2024

Chrome AI Frameworks & Models

A comprehensive list of Chrome's on-device machine learning models, including specialized tools for language processing, page analysis, and content safety.

30 October 2024

How Gemini Selects Results

An explanation of how internal algorithms use relevance scoring, recency bias, user intent, and stochasticity to retrieve and present information.

26 August 2024

Gemini System Prompt

Gemini Advanced provides access to the Gemini 1.5 Pro model, featuring a 1 million token context window for analyzing up to 1500 pages of information.

26 August 2024

← All articles