#indexnow

#indexnow

Grokipedia might be dropping more with the March 2026 broad core update. The decline seems to be continuing with the latest broad core update.

For most of the last two decades, SEO mostly meant one thing, where you ranked on Google (and occasionally Bing). The customer journey was familiar. Someone searched, scanned a list of links, clicked and explored. Now the journey is increasingly 'ask, get an answer, take action.' And the platforms shaping that journey include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google itself, which is inserting AI summaries, what Google calls AI Overviews, into search results.

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. Apple and Google reached a deal to have Gemini power Apple Intelligence and Siri. We are also seeing signs of Google search ranking volatility over the past couple of days. Microsoft Advertising allows up to 50 search themes in PMax campaigns. Google Shopping promotions now support subscriptions and abbreviations.

For years, big publishers treated Google as a distribution utility: publish a lot, cover everything and let domain authority do the rest. The December core update - rolled out Dec. 11-29 - is another sign that bargain is breaking. In multiple readouts, volatility hit news hard, and the sites that appear to be holding up best are those that behave less like general-interest news hubs and more like "the best answer" engines.

Google's selection of an image preview is completely automated and takes into account a number of different sources to select which image on a given page is shown on Google (for example, a text result image or the preview image in Discover). You can influence which image gets selected by providing your preferred image through one of the following metadata sources: Specify the schema.org primaryImageOfPage property with a URL or ImageObject, or specify an image URL or ImageObject property and attach it to the main entity, or specify the og:image meta tag.

When AI tools started taking off, Google faced a serious problem: the risk of its search results being flooded with AI-generated spam. If left unchecked, the world's most-used search engine would lose trust - and with it, revenue. Search drives almost 57% of Alphabet's income, totaling over $198bn annually. And that revenue was at risk. AI spam isn't like old-school SEO spam. It's better written, harder to detect, and convincing enough to fool algorithms.

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. OpenAI will be testing ads in ChatGPT very soon. Google's Gemini 3 Pro now powers some AI Overviews. Surprise, surprise, Google is appealing the search monopoly ruling. Google warns that using free subdomian hosts is not a good idea. Google also said that comment link spam won't help or hurt your site.

This week, we covered more ongoing Google search ranking volatility - January was a heated month. Google AI Overviews show more button officially flows to AI Mode, which is not good for publishers. Gemini 3 is powering AI Overviews globally now. Google is being forced to explore ways to let us say we don't want Google to use our content in AI Overviews or AI Mode. A poll says 33% of you will block Google from doing so.

What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots? What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing? What happens if they continue crawling those pages but actually toss them out before using the content to form a response? ...And we keep conflating "bot crawling activity" with "the bots are using/liking my markdown content?" How will we know if they're actually using the .md files or not?

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 said don't turn your content into chunk-sized pieces for LLMs. Google also spoke about hiring a GEO or AEO and buying AI-optimization tools. Microsoft launched Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents. Bing is testing a retro-style local pack. Microsoft Advertising reminds advertisers about the email settings. And I posted the weekly SEO video recap.

Google is brewing again - we got more search volatility kicking into gear. Some more legal docs disclose maybe more details about Google's search signals.