Google does not penalise content for being written with AI. It penalises content that is low-value or produced at scale mainly to manipulate rankings, however it was made. AI-assisted pages rank well when they carry real expertise, original information and careful editing; mass-produced AI pages are exactly what Google’s scaled content abuse policy targets. What … Read more
Search Console’s generative AI performance report shows how often your pages appear inside AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features, but only as impressions: no clicks, no queries and no position. Read it as a measure of how citable your content is, and pair it with the classic Performance report to see which pages … Read more
Google’s September 2026 spam update ran from 24 September to 8 October 2026, taking 13 days and 16 hours, by far the longest of the year’s four spam updates. Google called it a normal spam update for all languages and locations and did not name a specific policy it targeted. If your traffic dropped in … Read more
For almost every site, the answer is no: don’t opt out of AI Overviews. Google’s 2026 opt-out setting removes your content from AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover’s AI features without hurting classic rankings, but it also removes you from the fastest-growing place people discover brands, and gives you nothing back. A narrow group of … Read more
Since 24 September 2026, Search Console splits web performance into “text-based” and “multimodal”, so you can finally see clicks and impressions from searches that start with an image, such as Google Lens and Circle to Search. Together with the AI performance report from June and platform properties for social and video content from July, it … Read more
AI Overviews are now cutting organic click-through on the average top-ranking result by roughly a third. The instinctive response from a lot of teams is to publish more — more posts, more pages, more coverage. That instinct is understandable and, on its own, wrong. Volume doesn’t fix a visibility problem that’s structural, not quantitative. More … Read more
Following the May 2026 core update, Reddit’s share of top-three Google rankings climbed noticeably while YouTube’s fell — a clear signal that Google is leaning harder on community-verified, first-hand content as a trust marker, even against video content that used to dominate those same queries. Why UGC Is Winning Right Now Forum threads carry a … Read more
Google is testing Web Guide, a search layout that groups results into topic clusters instead of the familiar ten blue links. Strip away the interface novelty and what’s left is a search engine literally organizing its output the way topic-cluster content strategy has organized websites for years — a pillar topic, broken into subtopics, each … Read more