This week, we covered the first core update of 2026, the February 2026 Discover core update. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing super-heated and volatile Google search rankings. Google has nothing to share about the recent unconfirmed ranking updates…

Google has released its first core update of 2026, which is focused on just Google Discover. Google named it the February 2026 Discover core update. This one is rolling over the next two weeks or so just English language users in the US and at some point will roll out beyond that to all countries […]

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

Microsoft Advertising is testing a new ad format within its newish Answer Card format called a magazine layout. These load ads in the card formats you see at the top of some of the Bing search results.

Google AdSense seems to be rolling out new metrics for the AdSense reports in the console. These include Browser breakdown, Hosting App breakdown and Operating system breakdown metrics.

Did you know that when Google AI Mode uses Personal Intelligence, Google will add icons of the various connected Google apps used to tailor your message. So you might see a Gmail icon, or Google Photos icon or Search or something else show up as a citation or source near the responses.

Google is testing labeling some photos in the local hotel listings with “Good to Know” AI-generated descriptions of some of those photos. These labels seem to summarize what the photo and reviews say about the specific area of that hotel.

Google has launched what it calls Multi-party approval for Google Ads. “Multi-party approval (MPA) is a security feature for Google Ads designed to protect your account from unauthorized activity by requiring a second account administrator to verify high-risk changes,” Google wrote.

Google reported its earnings today, its Q4 2025 earnings report showed ad revenues up by 14% at $82.3 billion and overall revenue was up 17% at $113.8 billion. I specifically like to dig in as best as I can on the ad revenue side to see how Google Ads have performed.

Google confirmed there is a bug with AI Overviews not showing links for some responses. The bug was spotted by Lily Ray, who posted some examples several hours ago. Rajan Patel, Google’s VP, Engineering for Search, replied saying it is a bug and Google is working on fixing it.

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’s search rankings are highly volatile…

We have known for a long time that Google can crawl web pages up to the first 15MB but now Google updated some of its help documentation to clarify that it will crawl the first 64MB of a PDF file and the first 2MB of other supported file types.

Mike Ryan posted data on the percentage of invalid clicks on the Google Ad Network, broken down by fraudulent clicks or likely accidental clicks. It shows the Google Display Network has the most invalid clicks, but search partners have the most fraudulent invalid clicks.

Google’s John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to LLM crawlers and bots. John didn’t say much but he did list a number of concerns and things you should be on top of, if you do go down that avenue.