Industry News

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web...

Nick Fox is the SVP of Knowledge and Information at Google was interviewed again on the AI Inside channel by Jason Howel and Jeff Jarvin. He said a lot of interesting things but said no, Google won't be offering standarized licensing deals for all publishers. He also said that optimizing for AI Search is the same as what you do for web search and normal SEO.

Google updated its JavaScript SEO documentation to warn against using a noindex tag in the original page code on JavaScript pages. Google wrote, "if you do want the page indexed, don't use a noindex tag in the original page code."

Google can not show ads in AI Overviews with the exact match type. This is a change from back in May, where Google said otherwise. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, wrote on X, "We have since updated this."

Earlier this month, we documented that the average position sharply increased for many sites when Google made that num 100 change blocking a lot of automated queries. Well, for some sites, that number is dropping again, which may mean that there is a workaround for the blocking of those bots and automated queries.

Google Search Console's performance report seems to finally be all caught up and up-to-date as of last night and this morning. I am seeing the normal two-hour or so delay, which has always fluctuated from an hour to five hours on a normal day.

After several months of testing, Google seems to be rolling out the "Read more" links at the end of some of the search results listings. We saw Google test variations of this back in July and it now seems to be live.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

We are starting to see big movement from the Google December 2025 core update...

On Friday, Google announced a number of updates around translation, language, audio, voice interactions and thus Search Live. Google said it released a more "fluid and expressive conversations when you go Live with Search."

Google's John Mueller said that it is impossible for Google to pre-announce quality improvements to Google Search, including core updates. He said, "having quality changes ready for a specific date/time is never a given, and pre-announcing for a fixed date isn't possible."