Earlier this morning, in a room flanked by laser projection screens and packed tight with journalists, VP Search Marissa Mayer announced the launch of Google Instant.

Instant increases search efficiency by predicting searches before they’re typed. For example the letter “W” yields 5 likely results including weather, walmart, white pages, wikipedia and W hotels. In addition to these autocomplete results, IP addresses allow Google to geotarget local results for weather and hotel information in addition to serving advertising and sponsored links predictively and in real-time. Obviously, one of the first questions asked by trade journalists was, “How does this effect ad impressions?” Afterall, most of the people sitting in that room have a stake in how ad dollars are spent across the web.

According to the AdWords Blog, Google only counts impressions if “a user takes an action to choose a query (for example, presses the Enter key or clicks the Search button), clicks a link on the results page, or stops typing for three or more seconds.”

Because some of us are slower scanners than others, it’s highly likely that impressions will fluctuate.

These changes to Google Search have a few writers marking the death of SEO; nevertheless, the reality is that content will remain as relevant as ever. Honestly, what’s in an impression?

If your SEO strategy is to trick search into serving you as a relevant ad or link and you aren’t, then impressions are totally meaningless. You can ad rickroll people til the cows come home, but the true measure of your worth and ability to earn coin should come from who you’re reaching, who is reacting and your ability to make others think.