Google's Gary Illyes on URLs: Keywords Are a Tiny Signal, Use Hyphens, and Think Twice About Emoji

Ras Al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates, 16 October 2026.

Google's Search Central channel published a video on 14 October 2026 in which Search developer advocates Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin answer edge-case questions about URLs. "What can you actually put in a URL?" is the first episode of a new series and runs through domain rules, internationalised domain names, emoji, keywords in URLs, percent-encoding and the long-running hyphens versus underscores question. According to the video's description, the next episode covers robots.txt.

Search Engine Roundtable, which covered the video the same day, reported that Illyes called keywords in a URL or domain an "incredibly small signal" for ranking and said Google can detect spam in URLs. The rest of this explainer sets those points against what Google's own URL structure documentation says.

What the video covers

Chapter	Topic
02:05	Domain rules set by ICANN and RFC standards
03:46	Allowed characters: ASCII, internationalised domain names and Punycode
05:18	Emoji in domain names
06:01	Whether keywords in URLs affect ranking
07:02	URL paths, UTF-8 and special characters
08:28	Encoding in domains versus URL paths
09:06	Why emoji URLs may be a poor choice
10:45	Hyphens versus underscores in paths

Keywords in URLs: a very small signal

The headline point for most SEO teams is the ranking question. As reported, Illyes said keywords in a URL or domain carry very little weight, and that long, keyword-stuffed URLs do not help. Google has said similar things for years; the video restates it on the record in 2026.

Google's documentation frames URLs around people rather than rankings. It recommends descriptive, readable words instead of long ID numbers, and words in the audience's language, so that users and Google can understand what a page is about. It does not describe URL keywords as a ranking lever.

Hyphens versus underscores

The video's description calls the takeaway simple: keep URLs readable and built for people. On separators, Google's documentation is explicit. It recommends hyphens instead of underscores to separate words, because underscores are widely used to join concepts that should stay together, such as function names in programming languages (its example is format_date). It also lists joined words with no separator (its example is "greendress") as not recommended.

Punycode, non-Latin scripts and emoji

Domains and paths follow different encoding rules, which the video covers in separate chapters. Internationalised domain names are converted to an ASCII form called Punycode, which is why such domains begin with "xn--" in their encoded form.

For paths, Google's documentation says to use words in the audience's language, including non-Latin scripts such as Japanese or Arabic, and to percent-encode non-ASCII characters in the href attributes of your links. Its own examples include an emoji path shown encoded as %F0%9F%A6%99%E2%9C%A8. The video's chapter list flags why emoji URLs may be a poor choice in practice.

Other URL rules in Google's documentation

• Follow IETF STD 66. Reserved characters must be percent-encoded.
• Do not use fragments to change content. Google Search generally does not support URL fragments; use the History API for JavaScript-driven content changes.
• Use standard parameter encoding. An equals sign between key and value, an ampersand between parameters.
• URLs are case sensitive. Google treats /APPLE and /apple as different URLs. If your server treats them the same, normalise to one case.
• Trim unnecessary parameters. Additive filters, sorting and session IDs can create many URLs for the same content and waste crawling.

What to do

• Do not rewrite working URLs for keywords. Given how small the signal is, the redirect work and risk of migrating URLs to add keywords rarely pays back.
• Use hyphens for new URLs. If an existing site uses underscores and ranks well, there is no reason in Google's guidance to migrate; apply hyphens going forward.
• Normalise case and parameters. Audit for uppercase duplicates and parameter variants in crawl logs and Search Console's page indexing report.
• For multilingual sites, use the local language in paths and make sure internal links use percent-encoded hrefs.
• Avoid emoji in URLs unless there is a strong brand reason; they encode into long strings and are harder to share and type.

Conclusion

Google's new video restates long-standing guidance: URL keywords are a minor signal, hyphens are preferred over underscores, and readability matters more than cleverness. Google's URL structure documentation backs each point and adds technical rules on encoding, fragments, parameters and case sensitivity that matter more for crawling than keywords do.

The series continues with robots.txt in its next episode.

Questions and answers

Do keywords in URLs help Google rankings?

Only slightly. Gary Illyes described them as a very small signal in Google's 14 October 2026 video, as reported by Search Engine Roundtable. Google's documentation recommends descriptive URLs for users, not as a ranking tactic.

Should I use hyphens or underscores in URLs?

Google's URL structure documentation recommends hyphens to separate words and does not recommend underscores, because underscores are commonly used to join concepts that belong together.

Can URLs use non-English characters?

Yes. Google recommends words in your audience's language, including non-Latin scripts, and percent-encoding non-ASCII characters in link href attributes.

Does Google treat uppercase and lowercase URLs as the same?

No. Google's documentation says URL handling is case sensitive, so /APPLE and /apple are distinct URLs.

###