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 Is Changing How AdSense Impressions Are Counted — Publisher Numbers May Drop
Google is preparing a significant measurement change for AdSense publishers, and the first impact may show up as a visible drop in reported display ad impressions. Beginning Feb...
Read more →
Google Ads Can Now Pre-Fill Asset Groups With AI-Generated Assets
Google Ads is continuing to fold generative AI more deeply into campaign creation, this time by reducing the amount of manual assembly required when advertisers build asset grou...
Read more →
From Generic Query to Recognizable Result: An Update to the NetContentSEO Google Entity Test
In early August, we started a small experiment around an awkwardly ambiguous name. If someone searched Google for “net content seo,” would Google understand those three words as a....
Read more →
Google Finally Separates AI Search From Traditional Search — but Is the Opt-Out Enough for Publishers?
Google has finally made a separation publishers have demanded throughout the rise of generative search: a website can now tell Google not to use or display its content in AI Overvi...
Read more →
Google Assistant Dies Today — Gemini Takes Over the Android Ecosystem
After a decade of being the default voice behind Android, Google Assistant is reaching its end on most mobile devices. September 4 is the key cutoff in Google's migration to Gemini...
Read more →
Microsoft Defender Mistakenly Flags Google Search Links as Malicious
Security software has to make difficult decisions at enormous scale: which links are safe enough to open and which should be stopped before a user reaches them. On September 2, Mic...
Read more →
Google Trends Adds Category-Level Search Discovery
Google Trends has traditionally encouraged researchers to begin with a word: enter a topic, compare it with another term and see how search interest changes over time. A new update...
Read more →
Google Turns Workspace Search Into a Voice Conversation With Gemini
Google is turning some of the most familiar actions in Workspace into conversations. Instead of typing a Gmail search, starting a document from a blank page or manually reorganizin...
Read more →
Google Search Weather Is Now Powered by a Higher-Resolution AI Model
Checking the weather in Google Search is becoming an AI inference task at much higher resolution. Google DeepMind and Google Research have introduced WeatherNext 3, a new global fo...
Read more →
Why Google Ads Hourly Reports Can Mislead Advertisers Using Smart Bidding
An hour-of-day report in Google Ads can make optimization look deceptively simple. If 2 a.m. produced a handful of clicks and no conversions while lunchtime generated dozens of sal...
Read more →
Your Organic Traffic Looks Healthy — but Google May Already Be Sending Warning Signs
A healthy organic traffic graph can be one of the most dangerous things in an SEO report when it encourages a team to stop looking. Sitewide clicks may be flat or rising while comm...
Read more →