Google's September 2026 spam update entered a second phase on September 30, following the initial rollout announced September 24, according to Search Engine Roundtable's October 2 recap. Google also u…
Google updated its Search guidance document on using generative AI content on websites to state that it is "critical to manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content" for accuracy and trustwo…
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta dismissed Penske Media's antitrust lawsuit against Google over AI Overviews, ruling that Penske failed to plead any actual agreement in which Google promised to sell …
Google is now displaying AI Overviews for branded and navigational queries across most large brand names, according to testing by Chris Long, who reported that 93% of the roughly 100 brands he tested …
Google officially appealed the European Commission's Digital Markets Act mandate requiring it to share search history data with competitors, saying the decision would force it to share people's privat…
OpenAI has fired multiple contractors hired to improve its AI models after they used AI to train the AI, according to a 404 Media report. 404 Media found that OpenAI employs thousands of contractors a…
Google's AI Overviews now include external links in over 25% of results, up from close to 0%, according to new data reported by Search Engine Roundtable. The same September 23, 2026 search forum recap…
The UK Competition and Markets Authority proposed new measures requiring Google to give Android and Chrome users a choice of search services on first use and an annual prompt to pick a default provide…
Google added help documentation explaining how advertisers can test AI Max against Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) using Google Ads experiments, offering two methods: custom experiments and an experiment te…
Peec AI data posted to X by Malte Landwehr shows Google's AI Overviews now include external links in over 25% of answers, up from close to 0%, a shift Landwehr described as Google having "massively in…
Google announced at the DMEXCO conference in Cologne, Germany, that its Gemini-powered AI Brief feature in Google Ads now supports audience targeting and campaign messaging in Dutch, French, German, I…
Google is automatically enabling native checkout for eligible Google Merchant Center products whose Shopify storefronts support the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), letting customers buy directly in…
Google Discover is testing a "Dive deeper" feature that routes clicks to an AI-generated topic overview with links to Google itself rather than to publisher articles, according to Search Engine Roundt…
Spammers are exploiting public Gemini Notebook (NotebookLM) pages to flood Google Search with content on sex toys, porn, peptides, and coupon codes, with Google indexing over 12,000 of these pages, ac…
Google is testing anchor links inside AI Overviews that route users into AI Mode rather than to external web pages, according to SEO practitioner Gagan Ghotra, who posted a video of the behavior on X …
Google's beta Web Guide search feature contains a bug that prevents users from returning to classic search, according to SEO analyst Damien Andell, who reported on X that clicking the "Classic search"…
Google is testing a new "Dive deeper" feature in Google Discover that opens an AI-generated short topic overview instead of taking users directly to a publisher's article, Robby Stein announced on X. …
Google dropped free product listings and carousel formats from Google Search in the European Economic Area, one of several search changes reported in the September 18, 2026 Search Engine Roundtable re…
Google launched an AI contribution pilot that pays publishers for the use of their content in Gemini, AI Mode and AI Overviews, according to Search Engine Roundtable's weekly recap. The same recap rep…
Google appears to have blocked third-party SEO data scrapers since around September 13, 2026, with Nozzle's Derek Perkins reporting an approximately 80% drop in data his tools could pull from Google S…