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 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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Your Schema Defines the Brand — But Google May Not Understand It Yet
Structured data has long been treated as a way to tell search engines what a page contains. In the AI search era, it is becoming something more strategic: a declared map of what...
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Google Is Changing How AdSense Impressions Are Counted — Publisher Numbers May Drop
Google is preparing a significant measurement change for AdSense publishers, and the first impact may show up as a visible drop in reported display ad impressions. Beginning Feb...
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Google Ads Can Now Pre-Fill Asset Groups With AI-Generated Assets
Google Ads is continuing to fold generative AI more deeply into campaign creation, this time by reducing the amount of manual assembly required when advertisers build asset grou...
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From Generic Query to Recognizable Result: An Update to the NetContentSEO Google Entity Test
In early August, we started a small experiment around an awkwardly ambiguous name. If someone searched Google for “net content seo,” would Google understand those three words as a....
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Google Finally Separates AI Search From Traditional Search — but Is the Opt-Out Enough for Publishers?
Google has finally made a separation publishers have demanded throughout the rise of generative search: a website can now tell Google not to use or display its content in AI Overvi...
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Google Assistant Dies Today — Gemini Takes Over the Android Ecosystem
After a decade of being the default voice behind Android, Google Assistant is reaching its end on most mobile devices. September 4 is the key cutoff in Google's migration to Gemini...
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Microsoft Defender Mistakenly Flags Google Search Links as Malicious
Security software has to make difficult decisions at enormous scale: which links are safe enough to open and which should be stopped before a user reaches them. On September 2, Mic...
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