Google Search, SEO & AI
News, research, updates and analysis about Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ranking systems, indexing and the evolution of search.
Fixing the SEO Problem Doesn’t Mean Google Will Restore Rankings Quickly
One of the hardest messages to communicate after a major organic traffic loss is that correcting the underlying SEO problem does not necessarily reset rankings. A site can make the...
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Ranking in Google Shopping Barely Predicts Product Visibility in AI Mode
A strong position in Google’s familiar shopping results may tell retailers surprisingly little about whether the same product will appear in AI Mode. New research tracking more tha...
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Google Expands AI Shopping Visibility Reports Beyond the US
Retailers have spent much of the generative-search era trying to answer a deceptively simple question: are their products actually visible when consumers shop through AI? Google is...
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Indexed but Missing From Google News: Publishers Report a New Visibility Problem
For news publishers, speed is part of visibility. An article that appears hours after a story breaks may still be indexed, technically healthy and perfectly accessible, but it can....
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Gemini 3.8 Flash May Be Faster — but Is Google AI Mode Becoming Less Citation-Friendly?
Google’s AI search experience has always carried a difficult promise: answer the question directly while still giving users meaningful routes back to the open web. A new round of e...
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Google’s August Spam Update Hit French Sites Hard — Coincidence or Language-Specific Pattern?
Google’s August Spam Update Hit French Sites Hard — Coincidence or Language-Specific Pattern? Google’s August 2026 spam update was officially described as a global ranking ch...
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Google Avoids Another Breakup — but Publishers May Finally Get More Ad-Tech Transparency
Google has avoided another forced breakup, but the company’s victory in the latest U.S. ad-tech antitrust ruling is not a clean escape. According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge L...
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Google’s Disavow Tool Still Has Effects, But That Does Not Make It Routine SEO
Google’s Disavow Tool is not quite the dead instrument that parts of the SEO industry sometimes describe. The more accurate reading is narrower, but more interesting: Google still....
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Google AI Mode Is Quietly Becoming a Gemini Product, Not Just a Search Feature
Google Search’s AI Mode Gets Another Gemini Upgrade Google Search’s AI Mode is moving fast enough that the model behind it is now becoming the story. According to Barry Schwartz at...
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Google Search Is Becoming an AI Selection Engine, Not Just a Ranking Engine
For most of its history, Google Search could be understood through a relatively simple abstraction: a user submits a query, Google retrieves relevant documents, ranks them and pres...
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Google Is Quietly Removing the Boundary Between AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google’s AI search interface is no longer behaving like a layer placed on top of classic search. It is beginning to look like the default path through which many searches will be....
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