Plain-English breakdowns of the algorithm changes, core updates, and AI-search shifts that actually affect your rankings — curated and explained.
Since 30 September 2026, Google Maps has been seen asking people to sign in to a Google account before they can read all of a business's reviews, search them or sort them. Google has not announced or confirmed the change.
Read Full ArticleGoogle updated its guidance on generative AI content on 1 October 2026. It now says it is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content before publishing — and that covers titles, meta descriptions, structured data and alt text, not just body copy.
Read Full ArticleGoogle's video structured data documentation now includes a recommended creator property — the person or organization that made the video — and documents the four interaction types it supports in interactionStatistic.
Read Full ArticleSeveral Merchant Center policy pages now set out the same enforcement and appeal process: product disapproval or account suspension, three ways to request a review, and a warning that bulk appeals need the violating items removed first.
Read Full ArticleGoogle's Merchant Center help now sets out what a store needs for a store rating: generally at least 100 eligible, unique reviews, collected in a rolling 24-month window and calculated per country — plus a 3.5-star floor for ratings in ads.
Read Full ArticleChrome added four experimental ad metrics to CrUX on 15 September, and on 22 September Google listed them in its page experience documentation. John Mueller says they are there to help evaluate a site, not as a ranking factor.
Read Full ArticleGoogle released the September 2026 spam update on 24 September. It applies globally and to all languages, and the rollout may take up to two weeks — so hold off judging your traffic until it completes.
Read Full ArticleGoogle's Business Profile documentation now sets a four-day window to accept or reject a user-suggested edit. If nobody answers, Google may publish the change when other public information — your own website — supports it.
Read Full ArticleGoogle has split the Web search type in Search Console into text-based and multimodal, surfacing traffic from Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads. John Mueller confirmed the multimodal figures are new data, not a re-split of existing web totals.
Read Full ArticleOne deprecation broke live dashboards this month, and one robots.txt mistake is quietly removing sites from AI citations. Both are fixable this week.
Read Full ArticleSix confirmed updates in eight months. Here is the dated record of what Google actually rolled out in 2026 — and what each one asked of site owners.
Read Full ArticleSearch Console changed more in 2026 than in the previous three years combined — gaining AI reporting and social data, and losing FAQ. Here is the full record.
Read Full ArticleGoogle spent 2026 building a checkout that happens inside the AI answer. For ecommerce SEO, the product feed is quietly becoming more important than the product page.
Read Full ArticleLocal SEO attracts more unsourced claims than any other speciality. Here is a dated log of what actually changed — and what is being asserted without evidence.
Read Full ArticleAnswer Engine Optimisation is full of confident numbers and thin sourcing. Here is what is actually documented about LLM search in 2026 — and what is still guesswork.
Read Full ArticleMost 2026 trend pieces are predictions. This one is a review: what Google actually shipped between January and August, and what it should change about your plan.
Read Full ArticleGoogle finally put numbers on AI search and gave site owners data to measure it. Here is what changed in 2026, with dates — and what it means for your visibility.
Read Full ArticleReading about an update?
Find out whether it touched your site.
Send me your URL. I’ll check it myself against the changes on this page — what moved, what didn’t, and whether Google’s AI names you or a competitor. Free, reply within 24 hours.
Google updated its guidance on generative AI content on 1 October 2026. It now says it is critical to manually fact-check and review all AI-generated content before publishing — and that covers titles, meta descriptions, structured data and alt text, not just body copy.
Source: Google Search CentralSince 30 September 2026, Google Maps has been seen asking people to sign in to a Google account before they can read all of a business's reviews, search them or sort them. Google has not announced or confirmed the change.
Source: Search Engine RoundtableSeveral Merchant Center policy pages now set out the same enforcement and appeal process: product disapproval or account suspension, three ways to request a review, and a warning that bulk appeals need the violating items removed first.
Source: Google Merchant Center HelpGoogle released the September 2026 spam update on 24 September. It applies globally and to all languages, and the rollout may take up to two weeks — so hold off judging your traffic until it completes.
Source: Google Search Status DashboardGoogle has split the Web search type in Search Console into text-based and multimodal, surfacing traffic from Lens, Circle to Search and image uploads. John Mueller confirmed the multimodal figures are new data, not a re-split of existing web totals.
Source: Google Search CentralGoogle's video structured data documentation now includes a recommended creator property — the person or organization that made the video — and documents the four interaction types it supports in interactionStatistic.
Source: Google Search CentralGoogle's Business Profile documentation now sets a four-day window to accept or reject a user-suggested edit. If nobody answers, Google may publish the change when other public information — your own website — supports it.
Source: Google Business Profile HelpGoogle's Merchant Center help now sets out what a store needs for a store rating: generally at least 100 eligible, unique reviews, collected in a rolling 24-month window and calculated per country — plus a 3.5-star floor for ratings in ads.
Source: Google Merchant Center HelpChrome added four experimental ad metrics to CrUX on 15 September, and on 22 September Google listed them in its page experience documentation. John Mueller says they are there to help evaluate a site, not as a ranking factor.
Source: Google Search CentralGoogle's third spam update of 2026 started on August 18 and was marked complete on August 21 — roughly two days and 16 hours, applied globally and across all languages. Google published no list of the techniques it targeted. The practical read: a site that lost visibility here is being judged against the spam policies, not against core-update quality signals, so recovery means finding and removing the actual policy violation rather than broadly "improving content".
Source: Search Engine LandIntroduced on July 7 and available to all Search Console users from July 29, platform properties let you connect Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube accounts and see how those posts perform in Google Search, Discover and News. You get Performance (clicks, impressions, queries), Insights (trends and top posts) and Achievements (28-day milestones). Notably it works for creators with no website at all — the first time Search Console has served people who don't own a domain.
Source: Google Search Central BlogGoogle announced the June 2026 spam update at around noon ET on June 24, applying globally and to all languages, and said the rollout would take a few days to complete. It was the second of three spam updates Google has confirmed so far in 2026, following March and preceding August — a noticeably higher cadence than the one or two spam updates per year site owners had grown used to.
Source: Search Engine LandOn June 3 Google introduced Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, covering AI Overviews, AI Mode and AI features in Discover, broken out by page, country, device and date. Two limits matter: there are no clicks, no CTR and no query data in this version, and data only begins on May 18, 2026 with no historical backfill. It shipped first to a subset of UK sites alongside a new control letting owners keep their content out of generative AI features — which Google states is not used as a ranking signal outside those features.
Source: Google Search Central BlogThe second broad core update of 2026 began on May 21 and was confirmed complete on June 2. The sharpest movement landed on May 23 — just two days in — with a second spike around May 30, so sites that judged their position in the first 48 hours were reading an incomplete rollout. Google's standing guidance held: there is no fix for a core update, and the largest recoveries tend to arrive with the next core update rather than between them.
Source: Search Engine LandAt I/O 2026 Google put numbers on AI search: AI Overviews now reaches more than 2.5 billion monthly users and AI Mode has passed 1 billion, with AI Mode queries more than doubling every quarter since launch. Gemini 3.5 Flash became the default model in AI Mode globally, and Google merged AI Overviews and AI Mode into a single continuous AI Search experience, live worldwide on desktop and mobile. Being cited inside the answer is now its own visibility channel, separate from the blue link.
Source: Google BlogFAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search on May 7, 2026 — announced only as a note on the FAQ structured data documentation, with no blog post and no stated reason. The Search Console appearance filter, the FAQ rich result report and Rich Results Test support were removed in June; the Search Console API drops FAQ data in August. Existing FAQPage markup is still valid schema.org and causes no harm, but it no longer earns anything in Search, so it should not be a line item in anyone's 2026 SEO plan.
Source: Search Engine LandThe first broad core update of 2026 ran from March 27 to April 8 — 12 days and 4 hours. Like the May update that followed, both the announcement and the completion notice came only through the Search Status Dashboard and Search Central's social accounts, with no accompanying blog post. That is now the normal communication pattern, and it means the dashboard, not the Search Central blog, is the authoritative place to confirm whether a rollout is actually finished.
Source: Search Engine LandGoogle released the March 2026 spam update on March 24 at noon PT and marked it complete the following morning at 7:30 AM PT — about 19 and a half hours, the shortest confirmed spam update rollout in the Search Status Dashboard's history. Short rollouts leave no window to react mid-flight: by the time third-party trackers registered the movement, the update had already finished.
Source: Search Engine LandThe February 2026 Discover core update ran from February 5 to February 27 — the first confirmed Google update of the year and the first update Google has ever announced that targets Discover alone. Google said it surfaces more locally relevant content from sites based in the user's own country, reduces sensational content and clickbait, and favours more in-depth, original and timely content from sites with demonstrated expertise. It launched for English-language users in the U.S. first, expanding to other countries and languages after.
Source: Search Engine LandOn January 11 Google introduced the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard giving AI agents a shared language for talking to commerce systems — discovery through checkout through post-purchase support — without custom integrations per agent or platform. It was built with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair and Target and endorsed by 20+ retail and payments companies, and it powers checkout inside AI Mode in Search and the Gemini app. For ecommerce SEO it moves the centre of gravity toward feed accuracy and structured product data.
Source: Search Engine LandUpdated as major SEO news breaks. Summaries are our own; always check the linked source for full details.
Two fields. I’ll pinpoint what changed for you and what to fix first — written by me, within 24 hours.
Or book a 30-min call