Google Search, SEO & AI
News, research, updates and analysis about Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ranking systems, indexing and the evolution of search.
Most Top AI Citations Don’t Rank on Google’s First Page
Ranking on Google’s first page is still one of the strongest advantages a webpage can have. But a new AI-search study shows that the pages occupying the most prominent citation pos...
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Strong Google Rankings Don’t Guarantee AI Citations
PagePilot.ai had a problem that would have sounded contradictory a few years ago: its SEO was working, but AI search barely seemed to notice. The Shopify landing-page platform ent...
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Google Shipped an AI Mode Model That Temporarily Stopped Linking to Publishers
Google’s rollout of Gemini 3.8 Flash into AI Mode briefly created exactly the kind of failure publishers fear from generative search: the AI could answer questions while providing....
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Indexed Doesn’t Mean Visible: Publishers See Articles Vanish From Google News
For news publishers, seeing a fresh article indexed in Google Search usually removes one major diagnostic concern: Google has found the URL, crawled it and made it available in the...
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Google Tests a Faster Photo-Based Verification for Local Businesses
Google appears to be testing a simpler way for some storefront businesses to verify their Google Business Profiles: submit one photo showing the business’s permanent sign and the e...
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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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