NetContentSEO Topic

Google Search, SEO & AI

News, research, updates and analysis about Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ranking systems, indexing and the evolution of search.

FREE PERSONALIZED ALERTS

Stay ahead of SEO & AI Search.

Follow the topics that matter to you. Get relevant new articles by email every 8 hours.

Create Free Alerts Free to join · Choose your topics · Unsubscribe anytime
Google Turns Product Reviews Into a Programmable Shopping-Visibility Feed
Google Sep 23, 2026

Google Turns Product Reviews Into a Programmable Shopping-Visibility Feed

Google has turned product reviews into a programmable Merchant Center data source. Merchants can now use the Merchant API to create or update individual product reviews, retrieve t...

Read more →
Google Can Now Freeze New Reviews When Its Spam System Detects an Unnatural Spike
Google Sep 23, 2026

Google Can Now Freeze New Reviews When Its Spam System Detects an Unnatural Spike

Google is giving Business Profile owners a clearer warning when its anti-spam systems decide that a sudden burst of reviews looks suspicious. A newly observed email tells businesse...

Read more →
Google Business Profiles May Be Losing the Button Businesses Need to Close a Location Correctly
Google Sep 23, 2026

Google Business Profiles May Be Losing the Button Businesses Need to Close a Location Correctly

Some Google Business Profile owners are reporting that one of the platform’s most basic location-management controls has disappeared: the option to mark a business as “Permanently....

Read more →
Google Store Ratings Are Now Explicitly Local: Reviews From One Country Don’t Build Eligibility in Another
Google Sep 23, 2026

Google Store Ratings Are Now Explicitly Local: Reviews From One Country Don’t Build Eligibility in Another

Google has made the requirements behind Store Ratings considerably more explicit, and the most important clarification for international ecommerce businesses is geographic: reviews...

Read more →
Spammers Are Using Google’s Own NotebookLM Pages to Hijack Search and AI Overviews
Google Sep 22, 2026

Spammers Are Using Google’s Own NotebookLM Pages to Hijack Search and AI Overviews

Google’s NotebookLM is being turned into an unlikely parasite SEO host. Public notebook pages are appearing in Google Search for spam-oriented queries covering coupon codes, peptid...

Read more →
Google’s AI Overview Links Are Starting to Keep Users Inside Google’s AI Funnel
Google Sep 22, 2026

Google’s AI Overview Links Are Starting to Keep Users Inside Google’s AI Funnel

A link inside a Google AI Overview no longer necessarily means a click to the open web. In a newly documented test, Google is displaying normal-looking anchor links near the bottom...

Read more →
Google Discover Inserts an AI Summary Before the Publisher Click
Google Sep 22, 2026

Google Discover Inserts an AI Summary Before the Publisher Click

Google is testing a new Discover experience that adds another layer between a piece of content in the feed and the publisher behind it. The feature, called “Dive deeper,” opens a G...

Read more →
Google Opens Its EEA Comparison Units to Local Businesses—Directories Need Feeds, Direct Providers Only Need Crawlable Pages
Google Sep 22, 2026

Google Opens Its EEA Comparison Units to Local Businesses—Directories Need Feeds, Direct Providers Only Need Crawlable Pages

Google has expanded two EEA-specific Search features beyond travel and shopping into local-business queries, creating a new route into comparison-style results for both directories...

Read more →
The First Real-World Randomized Test of Google AI Mode Finds 18.8 Points Fewer External Clicks—and More Users Trying Rival Search Engines
Google Sep 22, 2026

The First Real-World Randomized Test of Google AI Mode Finds 18.8 Points Fewer External Clicks—and More Users Trying Rival Search Engines

For publishers trying to understand what Google's shift toward generative search means for referral traffic, a new study offers something unusually valuable: ra...

Read more →
Google Lighthouse Starts Auditing Whether AI Agents Can Discover Your Tools—but It Checks an Already Outdated Manifest Path
Google Sep 22, 2026

Google Lighthouse Starts Auditing Whether AI Agents Can Discover Your Tools—but It Checks an Already Outdated Manifest Path

Google Lighthouse is beginning to test a part of the web that barely existed a few months ago: whether AI agents can discover the tools, services and other callable resources a web...

Read more →
Google Search Console Lost a Day of Crawl Data—Don’t Mistake the Reporting Gap for a Googlebot Outage
Google Sep 20, 2026

Google Search Console Lost a Day of Crawl Data—Don’t Mistake the Reporting Gap for a Googlebot Outage

Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report is missing an entire day of data around September 15, 2026, across multiple properties. The gap is conspicuous enough to look like Google...

Read more →