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 AI Mode Is Turning Query Fan-Out Into a Visible Interface Users Can Control
Google AI Mode may be turning one of generative search’s most important hidden mechanisms into something users can increasingly steer on screen.A new interface test spotted by Sach...
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Some Sites Just Recovered From Google’s September 4 Drop Almost Overnight—and Nobody Knows What Changed
Some large websites that lost substantial Google Search visibility around September 4 appear to have recovered almost as abruptly nine days later. For several of the affected sites...
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Google’s Automated Assistant Is Collecting Business Details—Now Owners Can Finally See and Delete Them
Google Business Profile owners can now inspect a category of information that previously sat largely behind the scenes: details Google collected directly from a business through au...
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Google’s New EU Search Layout Gives Comparison Sites More Visibility—While Direct Hotel and Restaurant Listings Lose Features
Google is redesigning some of its most commercially important search results in Europe, giving specialist comparison services more prominent placement while stripping features from...
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Google Search Console Can Count an AI Citation the User Never Saw—and Still Can’t Tell You Where It Appeared
Google Search Console can record an impression for a source inside an AI Overview even when the user never scrolls far enough to see that source on screen. At the same time, Search...
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Google Indexed Every Tested Page It Crawled—and None It Didn’t. The Real Bottleneck May Be Getting Googlebot to Visit
A small but unusually instrumented indexing experiment has produced a striking pattern: every tested page that Googlebot fetched entered Google’s index, while every page Googlebot....
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Google Says the Traditional Position 1–10 Model No Longer Maps Cleanly to Modern Search
For decades, one of SEO’s most intuitive questions was also one of its simplest: does a page rank first, third or tenth? Google’s John Mueller now says that familiar model is incre...
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A Randomized Google Search Experiment Found AI Mode Cut External CTR by 18.8 Points—and Reduced User Trust
Google’s AI Mode did more than reduce clicks to the open web in a randomized field experiment. It also reduced how often people searched, pushed more users toward rival search engi...
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Google Business Profile Brings Back Post-Level View Counts After Three Years
Google is giving local businesses a visibility metric they have been missing for more than three years. Post-level view counts are returning to Google Business Profile, allowing ow...
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Google Has Shut Down Entertainment Review Profiles—and Users Have One Month to Save Their Data
Google has switched off the user profiles that once allowed people to manage reviews of entertainment content such as movies and television shows directly through Google Search. Th...
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Google Is Turning Sports SERPs Into an AI-Powered Live Game Feed
For years, a sports query on Google has been one of the clearest examples of an answer-first search result: type in a matchup and the SERP immediately surfaces the score, schedule....
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