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 Search Status: No Official Incidents Reported Across Crawling, Indexing, Ranking or Serving on September 17
Google's official Search Status Dashboard continues to show a clean bill of health on September 17, 2026. At the time of checking, Google reports “No incidents”, with no service di...
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Google Is Testing Local Search Ads That Expand When Users Hover Over Them
Google is testing a more interactive version of its Sponsored Places format in Search: when a user moves the pointer over one of the local ads, the placement can expand to reveal a...
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Google Said Discover Was Coming to Desktop—Now the Rollout Appears to Have Vanished
Google said Discover was expanding to desktop Search in 2025, and shortly afterward the personalized feed was actually spotted appearing beneath the search box on the Google.com de...
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Google Is Turning Local Business Profiles Into AI Overviews—and “Show More” Opens an AI Mode Conversation
Google appears to be testing a significant change to one of the most familiar surfaces in local search: the Local Knowledge Panel. A Google Business Profile has been spotted displa...
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Google Is Turning Merchant Center Into an AI Visibility Dashboard—and Connecting Visibility Directly to Agentic Checkout
Google Merchant Center is becoming more than the place where retailers submit product feeds and diagnose listing problems. As of September 16, Google's AI Performance Insights are....
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Google Admits AI Search Position Is Not an Absolute Metric—and Search Console Will Keep Changing How It Measures It
Google is warning SEOs not to treat “position” in AI search as a fixed physical measurement. John Mueller says the way Search Console records impressions and positions for Google S...
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Google Just Made Search Profiles Easier for Publishers to Access—and Multiple Profiles Can Now Be Managed From One Login
Google is making Search Profiles easier for publishers to access and considerably easier for multi-brand media companies to manage. In an update announced September 16, the company...
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Google Just Changed the GoogleProducer User-Agent—Another Sign That AI-Era Crawling and User-Triggered Retrieval Need to Be Treated Separately
Google made a small but revealing change to its crawler documentation on September 16, 2026: the company updated the HTTP User-Agent string used by GoogleProducer, the fetcher asso...
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Google Search Is Becoming a Multilingual Visual Conversation—And Gemini 3.8 Live Can Keep Searching While the User Keeps Talking
Google Search is moving further away from the idea that searching means typing a query, waiting for a results page and starting over with another query.Search Live is being upgrade...
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Google Can Now Measure Exactly How Many Ads Users See—and How Much CPU and Bandwidth They Consume. Is Ad Experience Becoming the Next Search Quality Metric?
Chrome can now quantify something publishers, advertisers and users have long experienced but struggled to describe with consistent field data: how much advertising a real visitor....
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Google Business Profile API Applications Are Backlogged—and Google Can’t Say When Pending Access Will Be Approved
Developers waiting for access to the Google Business Profile APIs may be waiting considerably longer than expected. Google says it is dealing with an unusually high volume of acces...
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