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 Jobs May Be Hiding Fresh Listings While Still Showing Stale Results
Google’s job-search experience appears to be suffering from a freshness problem for at least some users, with recent vacancies becoming unusually difficult to find while older list...
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Google Search Went Down for Some Users — but Its Official Dashboard Reported No Incident
Google users in the United States reported widespread problems across Search, Images, Gmail and YouTube on Sunday, September 6, creating an unusual split between what people were e...
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Fixing the SEO Problem Doesn’t Mean Google Will Restore Rankings Quickly
Fixing the problem that caused a major Google ranking loss does not necessarily start an immediate climb back to the previous position. According to Google’s John Mueller, sites af...
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LocusPilot Lets Directory Owners Preserve Old Backlinked URLs Without Polluting Google’s Index
LocusPilot has added a small but strategically useful SEO control to its directory builder: publishers can now create custom pages at specific URLs, including legacy addresses that...
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Google Rankings Are Moving — but the SEO Sensors Can’t Agree Why
Google rankings are moving, but the usual alarm system is not speaking with one voice. A fresh cross-check of popular SEO volatility trackers shows a split picture: an aggregate...
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Google AI Overviews May Be Costing Wikipedia 100 Million Visits Every Month
Google's AI Overviews may be diverting roughly 100 million search-originated visits from English Wikipedia every month, according to a revised University of Washington study that a...
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Google Tests Exact and Phrase Match Search Ads Inside AI Mode
Google is testing a small but notable change to how Search ads can appear inside AI Mode, according to a September 4, 2026 report attributed to Barry Schwartz. The experiment al...
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Google Can Quietly Limit Your Ads Without Disapproving Them
A Google Ads account can lose a large share of its reach without having a single ad disapproved. The campaigns can remain active, the ads can still be technically eligible and the....
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Google Fixes Gemini 3.8 Flash’s Missing Citations in AI Mode
Google has fixed the Gemini 3.8 Flash bug that caused AI Mode to return almost no links or citations, closing a short but consequential episode for publishers watching how Google's...
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Google Ads Tests Collapsed Sitelinks That Users Must Expand
Google is testing another way to compress Search ads: show only part of an advertiser's sitelink set by default, then make the user manually expand the ad to reveal the remaining l...
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Google Tests Business Profile Verification With a Single Location Photo
Google appears to be testing a simpler way to verify a Business Profile: submit a photo of the physical business location. The option has been spotted in the verification interface...
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