Google Search, SEO & AI
News, research, updates and analysis about Google Search, AI Overviews, AI Mode, ranking systems, indexing and the evolution of search.
A Randomized Google Search Experiment Found AI Mode Cut External CTR by 18.8 Points—and Reduced User Trust
Google’s AI Mode did more than reduce clicks to the open web in a randomized field experiment. It also reduced how often people searched, pushed more users toward rival search engi...
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Google Business Profile Brings Back Post-Level View Counts After Three Years
Google is giving local businesses a visibility metric they have been missing for more than three years. Post-level view counts are returning to Google Business Profile, allowing ow...
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Google Has Shut Down Entertainment Review Profiles—and Users Have One Month to Save Their Data
Google has switched off the user profiles that once allowed people to manage reviews of entertainment content such as movies and television shows directly through Google Search. Th...
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Google Is Turning Sports SERPs Into an AI-Powered Live Game Feed
For years, a sports query on Google has been one of the clearest examples of an answer-first search result: type in a matchup and the SERP immediately surfaces the score, schedule....
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Google AI Mode Can Now Access Your Live Fantasy Roster—and Recommend Who to Start
Google is turning AI Mode into something more personal than a general-purpose sports assistant. Fantasy football players in the United States can now connect their Yahoo Fantasy or...
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Google Search and AI Overviews Shared Only 18% of Their Sources in an 11,500-Query Study
Ranking in Google Search and being cited by Google’s generative search features may be far less closely connected than many publishers assume. A large empirical study of 11,500 que...
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Researchers Found 72 Google Maps Signals—but 25 Are Deprecated and None Reveal Their Weight
Reverse engineering of Google Maps has exposed one of the most detailed public views yet of the vocabulary behind Google's local-search infrastructure: 72 named ranking signals ins...
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Google Says Europe’s New DMA Search Results Are Its Biggest Quality Downgrade Ever
Google Search in Europe is beginning to look materially different from Search elsewhere in the world, and Google says the latest regulatory redesign is the most damaging change to....
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Google Researchers Are Testing an LLM That Generates the Search Ranking Itself
Most modern search ranking systems are built around a compromise. One model retrieves a manageable set of candidate documents quickly, while a more computationally expensive model....
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Google Has a Full-Web Search API—but Only Approved Partners Can Access It
Google has publicly documented an API that does something developers have long wanted from the company: perform a full-web Google search programmatically and return the results in....
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Google Analytics Finally Lets Marketers Build a Single Custom Dashboard Without Leaving GA
Google Analytics has added something marketers have wanted from GA4 since its early days: a native, flexible dashboard that can bring the KPIs and reports that matter into one cust...
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