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’s Disavow Tool Still Has Effects, But That Does Not Make It Routine SEO
Google’s Disavow Tool is not quite the dead instrument that parts of the SEO industry sometimes describe. The more accurate reading is narrower, but more interesting: Google still....
Read more →
Google AI Mode Is Quietly Becoming a Gemini Product, Not Just a Search Feature
Google Search’s AI Mode Gets Another Gemini Upgrade Google Search’s AI Mode is moving fast enough that the model behind it is now becoming the story. According to Barry Schwartz at...
Read more →
Google Search Is Becoming an AI Selection Engine, Not Just a Ranking Engine
For most of its history, Google Search could be understood through a relatively simple abstraction: a user submits a query, Google retrieves relevant documents, ranks them and pres...
Read more →
Google Is Quietly Removing the Boundary Between AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google’s AI search interface is no longer behaving like a layer placed on top of classic search. It is beginning to look like the default path through which many searches will be....
Read more →
Google’s August Spam Update Was More Disruptive Than It Looked
Google’s August 2026 spam update looked modest on paper. It appeared on the company’s Search Status Dashboard as a short global rollout affecting ranking, beginning on August 18...
Read more →
Google Says the Disavow Tool Still Has Effects — And That Makes Blind Backlink Cleanup Riskier
Google has spent years telling site owners that most of them do not need the Disavow Links tool. That advice has sometimes been simplified into a much stronger belief inside the SE...
Read more →
Google Tests AI-Generated “What Customers Love” Summaries Inside Search Ads
Google Tests AI-Generated “What Customers Love” Summaries Inside Search Ads Google’s advertising results are becoming another place where generative AI quietly turns scattered use...
Read more →
EU Regulators Question Publishers About Google’s AI Search Opt-Out
The European Commission is asking publishers whether Google’s proposed AI search opt-out would actually solve the pressure they face from AI-generated results. According to Reuter...
Read more →
Google Pics Shows Why Visibility Is Moving Beyond Search Results
Google Pics looks, at first glance, like a new AI design tool. Launched on September 1, it lets users generate images, isolate and transform objects, edit or translate text inside....
Read more →
Google Search Console Finally Measures AI Visibility — But Still Hides the Queries and Clicks
Google has taken an important step toward making AI search measurable inside Search Console. Website owners with access to the new generative AI performance report can see when the...
Read more →
Google Is Quietly Removing the Boundary Between AI Overviews and AI Mode
Google’s latest Search experiment looks, at first glance, like a small interface change. For some queries, the company is now testing AI Overviews that expand automatically at the...
Read more →