Google may have hit those self-promotional and self-serving listicle articles in one of the more recent unconfirmed Google search ranking updates. Lily Ray dug into a pattern she spotted with these types of pieces of content, mostly in the SaaS space, being hit hard with the January Google updates.

I was hoping, well, not really, that Google would calm down a bit since we had such a volatile January. But the Google Search results volatility is still very volatile, and the shuffling in those results is still shaking up.

Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace. This marketplace is designed to give publishers a new revenue stream, provides AI systems with scaled access to premium content, and deliver better responses for consumers. In short, it will pay for using your content in its AI.

Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The first sport Google covered is curling. The Doodle is an animated GIF of an Olympian pushing the curling stone down the ice.

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 says search algorithms, spam detection…

Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling challenges Google noticed amongst its 2025 year of crawling. The top challenges Google had with crawling included faceted navigation, action parameters, irrelevant parameters, calendar parameters and other “weird” parameters.

Google’s John Mueller said he would “caution against assuming that you need to do this level of analysis for all URLs on a website in order to achieve optimal SEO” when it comes to reviewing bad redirects or CSP settings. Why, because bad redirects or CSP settings are often simply visible when doing normal browsing, […]

OpenAI seems to be jazzing up its ChatGPT responses by showing more visual responses, like Google’s knowledge panels and top stories. This goes across people, places, products, and ideas, OpenAI said.

Bing Search has rolled out what it calls multi-turn search in Bing globally. This is something we saw Microsoft Bing test back in June, when we saw a floating Copilot follow up search box at the footer of the Bing search results page show up as you scroll. It is now globally live for all […]

Google’s John Mueller said that when it comes to AI Search and the changes that come with that, Google’s core search algorithms, spam detection methods, spam policies, and other search systems do not fundamentally change.

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

Welcome to the Google Webmaster report, where I sum up all the more important Google organic search topics that occurred over the past month – just in case you (or I) missed it. January was an incredibly volatile month regarding unconfirmed Google search ranking movement. I posted about it several times.

Google seems to be showing more and more ads in the local pack, aka Local Pack Ads. Just a couple of months ago, Google had ads on the local pack for less than 3% of tracked keywords; now it’s up to about 22% of tracked keywords.

Google seems to be replacing its Google Ads support form with an AI agent, maybe from its Ads Advisor system. When you go to support.google.com/google-ads/gethelp you are redirected to the chat experience now. I am not sure if this is global, but I am seeing this myself across two Google Ads accounts I have access […]