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 Is Testing Sponsored Links That Look Like Native Citations Inside AI Mode Answers
Google is testing a new kind of advertising inside AI Mode that narrows the visual distance between a paid placement and the links users already encounter in generative answers. In...
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Google Rankings Are Moving Again After the September 13 Reversal—But the Volatility Sensors Are Only Starting to Catch Up
Google Search rankings appear to be moving again only days after several sites saw a sharp September 13 recovery from losses that had begun around September 3–4. This time, the ear...
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Google AI Overviews Are Becoming Interactive Destinations—Now They Can Quiz Users Without Sending Them to a Website
Google Search is increasingly behaving less like a page of links and more like an application that can complete a task before the user ever visits a website. Interactive quizzes in...
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Changing Your Recipe Schema Image May Not Change Google’s Thumbnail While the Old Photo Remains on the Page
Changing the image in Recipe JSON-LD does not necessarily tell Google to replace the thumbnail it shows beside a normal search result. If the previous photo is still present and pr...
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Google Tests Making the “More Retailers” Link Harder to Ignore in Shopping Results
Google is testing a small Shopping interface change that could have an outsized effect on where product-search clicks go.In some product grids, the normally understated link indica...
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Google AI Mode Is Turning Query Fan-Out Into a Visible Interface Users Can Control
Google AI Mode may be turning one of generative search’s most important hidden mechanisms into something users can increasingly steer on screen.A new interface test spotted by Sach...
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Some Sites Just Recovered From Google’s September 4 Drop Almost Overnight—and Nobody Knows What Changed
Some large websites that lost substantial Google Search visibility around September 4 appear to have recovered almost as abruptly nine days later. For several of the affected sites...
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Google’s Automated Assistant Is Collecting Business Details—Now Owners Can Finally See and Delete Them
Google Business Profile owners can now inspect a category of information that previously sat largely behind the scenes: details Google collected directly from a business through au...
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Google’s New EU Search Layout Gives Comparison Sites More Visibility—While Direct Hotel and Restaurant Listings Lose Features
Google is redesigning some of its most commercially important search results in Europe, giving specialist comparison services more prominent placement while stripping features from...
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Google Search Console Can Count an AI Citation the User Never Saw—and Still Can’t Tell You Where It Appeared
Google Search Console can record an impression for a source inside an AI Overview even when the user never scrolls far enough to see that source on screen. At the same time, Search...
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Google Indexed Every Tested Page It Crawled—and None It Didn’t. The Real Bottleneck May Be Getting Googlebot to Visit
A small but unusually instrumented indexing experiment has produced a striking pattern: every tested page that Googlebot fetched entered Google’s index, while every page Googlebot....
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