Industry News

Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, spoke about a presentation he gave at Zurich in December at Google Search Central live (I was there). He dug into it on a recent Search Off the Record named How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO. In there, he explained how AI and machine learning have been used in isolation within Google Search.

Google is testing a new label for the search results snippet named "Fresh updates." This was spotted on a weather website result, Accuweather.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

This week in search, we are seeing yet again more Google search ranking volatility. Google sent out notifications about back button hijacking penalties to those sites that have the problem. Google AdSense vignette ads may trigger the penalty...

SEOs and site owners are always complaining about indexing issues with Google Search. Why is this page not indexed, why is that page not indexed. But some seasoned SEOs are asking if Google is more picky about what it indexes in the past month or so, than it was maybe a year ago.

Back in December, Google expanded Preferred sources globally, but only for English-language content. Now, according to The Verge, Google's preferred sources support all languages globally.

Google annnounced a number of new updates for AI Max within Google Ads. These include (1) AI Brief, (2) text disclaimers and (3) Expansion with AI Max for shopping and Search Campaigns for travel.

Google is showing a new label on the Discover feed that says "You asked to see." This label is added to items in your feed that are customized based on the Tailor Your Feed feature.

I missed last month's Google Webmaster Report, so I am combining both April and May into one big report. Google completed rolling out the March 2026 spam update in March, and started the March core update, which completed in April. We also had a lot of other ranking volatility throughout.

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.

Google and Microsoft reported earnings...