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 Will Preview Its Next Local AI Search Updates on September 24
Google representatives are scheduled to preview upcoming AI Search changes affecting local discovery during a September 24 webinar, giving local marketers a date to watch for new i...
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Google Brings Post-Level View Counts Back to Business Profiles—But Leaves Them Out of the API
Google is restoring a piece of local-search reporting that Business Profile managers lost more than three years ago: view counts for individual posts. The company says post-level r...
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Google’s AI Overview Can Answer a Query With No Search Intent at All
Google Search has an odd new edge case: an AI Overview can appear even when the user has not supplied anything resembling a normal search query. Triggered through a manipulated Sea...
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Google Ads Can Now Connect Maps and Waze Intent Directly With Offline Store Sales
Google Ads is tightening one of the most difficult loops in local advertising: identifying consumers who appear ready to visit a physical business, spending campaign budget to reac...
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Google Is Adding AI Agents and Branded Search Demand to Marketing Measurement
Google is trying to make marketing measurement behave less like a collection of reports and more like an operating system for investment decisions. Its latest updates connect three...
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Advertisers Spent Their Google Credits—Then Google Took the Credits Back
Promotional credits are designed to make the first dollars of an advertising campaign easier to commit. But two cases reported by a PPC consultant expose the opposite risk: what ha...
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Scammers Are Hijacking Google Maps Calls Without Changing the Business Profile Phone Number
A Google Business Profile can display the correct phone number and still send a customer toward a scammer. A newly documented Google Maps abuse pattern does not depend on winning a...
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Google Researchers Are Testing an LLM That Generates the Ranked List Itself
Most modern neural search systems separate speed from precision. A dual encoder can retrieve candidates efficiently from a large collection, while a more computationally expensive....
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Google Says the Classic Top 10 No Longer Maps Cleanly to Modern Search
For most of SEO’s history, “position” offered a convenient mental model: position one was the first organic result, position two sat below it, and the first ten results roughly des...
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Google AI Mode Can Now Use Private Account Data to Deliver Personalized Search Recommendations
Google Search has spent decades personalizing results with signals such as location, language and search context. Its newest football features push personalization into a more cons...
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The Fastest Way to Make a Google Spam Recovery Worse Is to Fix It Too Fast
A severe Google ranking loss creates exactly the conditions in which bad recovery decisions become tempting. Revenue drops, executives want an explanation, SEO teams feel pressure....
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