Google Search, SEO & AI
News, research, updates and analysis about Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ranking systems, indexing and the evolution of search.
Advertisers Spent Their Google Credits—Then Google Took the Credits Back
Promotional credits are designed to make the first dollars of an advertising campaign easier to commit. But two cases reported by a PPC consultant expose the opposite risk: what ha...
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Scammers Are Hijacking Google Maps Calls Without Changing the Business Profile Phone Number
A Google Business Profile can display the correct phone number and still send a customer toward a scammer. A newly documented Google Maps abuse pattern does not depend on winning a...
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Google Researchers Are Testing an LLM That Generates the Ranked List Itself
Most modern neural search systems separate speed from precision. A dual encoder can retrieve candidates efficiently from a large collection, while a more computationally expensive....
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Google Says the Classic Top 10 No Longer Maps Cleanly to Modern Search
For most of SEO’s history, “position” offered a convenient mental model: position one was the first organic result, position two sat below it, and the first ten results roughly des...
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Google AI Mode Can Now Use Private Account Data to Deliver Personalized Search Recommendations
Google Search has spent decades personalizing results with signals such as location, language and search context. Its newest football features push personalization into a more cons...
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The Fastest Way to Make a Google Spam Recovery Worse Is to Fix It Too Fast
A severe Google ranking loss creates exactly the conditions in which bad recovery decisions become tempting. Revenue drops, executives want an explanation, SEO teams feel pressure....
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Google’s New European SERP Gives Comparison Sites More Space—and Local Businesses Less
Google Search is becoming a materially different product in Europe, and the latest redesign could shift visibility away from hotels, airlines, restaurants and other direct supplier...
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Expand the Page or Create a New One? Google Says There May Be No Single Right SEO Answer
One of the most common content-architecture questions in SEO sounds as if it should have a precise technical answer: when a topic develops a distinct sub-intent, should you expand....
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Fixing a Rejected Google Ads Location Asset May Now Start Inside Your Business Profile
A rejected Google Ads location asset can look like an advertising problem, but Google’s latest troubleshooting guidance makes an important distinction: for some editorial rejection...
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Google Has Quietly Turned 97% of People Also Ask Answers Into AI Overviews
People Also Ask used to be one of Google’s clearest bridges between a question and a publisher’s answer. A user expanded a related question, Google extracted a passage from a webpa...
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Google Merchant Center Now Shows Which Terms and Attributes Drive Product Visibility in AI Search
Google is giving ecommerce teams a much clearer view into a question that has been difficult to answer since shopping moved into generative search: why does one product appear in a...
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