Google Search, SEO & AI
News, research, updates and analysis about Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ranking systems, indexing and the evolution of search.
Google Admits AI Search Position Is Not an Absolute Metric—and Search Console Will Keep Changing How It Measures It
Google is warning SEOs not to treat “position” in AI search as a fixed physical measurement. John Mueller says the way Search Console records impressions and positions for Google S...
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Google Just Made Search Profiles Easier for Publishers to Access—and Multiple Profiles Can Now Be Managed From One Login
Google is making Search Profiles easier for publishers to access and considerably easier for multi-brand media companies to manage. In an update announced September 16, the company...
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Google Just Changed the GoogleProducer User-Agent—Another Sign That AI-Era Crawling and User-Triggered Retrieval Need to Be Treated Separately
Google made a small but revealing change to its crawler documentation on September 16, 2026: the company updated the HTTP User-Agent string used by GoogleProducer, the fetcher asso...
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Google Search Is Becoming a Multilingual Visual Conversation—And Gemini 3.8 Live Can Keep Searching While the User Keeps Talking
Google Search is moving further away from the idea that searching means typing a query, waiting for a results page and starting over with another query.Search Live is being upgrade...
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Google Can Now Measure Exactly How Many Ads Users See—and How Much CPU and Bandwidth They Consume. Is Ad Experience Becoming the Next Search Quality Metric?
Chrome can now quantify something publishers, advertisers and users have long experienced but struggled to describe with consistent field data: how much advertising a real visitor....
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Google Business Profile API Applications Are Backlogged—and Google Can’t Say When Pending Access Will Be Approved
Developers waiting for access to the Google Business Profile APIs may be waiting considerably longer than expected. Google says it is dealing with an unusually high volume of acces...
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Google’s New EU Ecosystem Carousel Gives Weather, Finance, Sports and Translation Providers a Route Into Previously Closed Search Widgets
Google is giving external weather, sports, finance and translation providers a new route into some of the Search experiences that have historically answered a user’s question direc...
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Google Is Testing Sponsored Links That Look Like Native Citations Inside AI Mode Answers
Google is testing a new kind of advertising inside AI Mode that narrows the visual distance between a paid placement and the links users already encounter in generative answers. In...
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Google Rankings Are Moving Again After the September 13 Reversal—But the Volatility Sensors Are Only Starting to Catch Up
Google Search rankings appear to be moving again only days after several sites saw a sharp September 13 recovery from losses that had begun around September 3–4. This time, the ear...
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Google AI Overviews Are Becoming Interactive Destinations—Now They Can Quiz Users Without Sending Them to a Website
Google Search is increasingly behaving less like a page of links and more like an application that can complete a task before the user ever visits a website. Interactive quizzes in...
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Changing Your Recipe Schema Image May Not Change Google’s Thumbnail While the Old Photo Remains on the Page
Changing the image in Recipe JSON-LD does not necessarily tell Google to replace the thumbnail it shows beside a normal search result. If the previous photo is still present and pr...
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