Google deployed its fourth spam update of 2026 and expanded Search Console with multimodal search filters and new Page Experience metrics.

Google confirmed a temporary Search Console indexing bug and acknowledged its biggest EU search quality reduction due to DMA compliance changes.

Google DeepMind is testing Autoregressive Ranking (ARR), an AI model designed to consolidate retrieval and ranking into a single unified system.

Cloudflare introduced a Disallow AI Training option that blocks AI crawlers from training data while preserving access for Googlebot and other search engines.

Google added a multimodal filter to Search Console that reveals which pages drive traffic from image-based searches.

A UK news publisher lost nearly all its Google News search visibility after switching from .co.uk to .com, with the new domain failing to inherit the old one's rankings.

Google's John Mueller indicates that old low-value programmatic pages can continue to harm a site's ability to recover rankings, even after removal or improvement.

Google is rolling out a new multimodal search type filter in Search Console's performance report to help SEOs segment traffic by search modality.

Google Lighthouse 13.5 introduces a new audit for AI agent resource discovery, though its approach differs from the current ARD specification.

Cloudflare launched Bot Preference Sync, allowing sites to set AI crawler access policies by category rather than managing individual crawlers in robots.txt.

Google appears to have strengthened its ability to block AI scrapers, search scrapers, and third-party tracking tools starting around mid-September.

John Mueller addressed how cross-domain canonicals can cause de-indexing and how publishers should monitor for such issues.

Google has added four new ad experience metrics to the Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) for publishers to track.

Google is testing new ad metrics—Ad Count, Ad Density, Ad Weight (Network), and Ad Weight (CPU)—in CrUX to measure page ad impact.

Google redesigned Search results in the EEA with reworked aggregator units and new supplier units for hotel, flight, transport, and product queries.

Google Search Console's links report has stalled for approximately a month without fresh data.

Job board operators are experiencing multi-month approval delays for Google's Indexing API with no documented review timeline from Google.

Google updated its EEA search result units to include local business queries alongside directories and direct providers.

Common Crawl's analysis of over 584,000 llms.txt files reveals most are template-generated, many contain no links, and some misapply crawler-control rules the format doesn't support.

Apple updated its Applebot documentation to confirm that Applebot-Extended crawlers are excluded from Search rankings, mirroring Google's approach with Googlebot-Extended.

Google Maps now requires users to sign in with a Google account to view all reviews, sort results, and leave feedback on business listings.

Google updated its video structured data schema to add support for the creator property and clarified which interaction types are supported in VideoObject.

Google announced R4T-Diffusion, a new query fan-out framework designed for production-scale search systems.

Google has begun rolling out an Ecosystem carousel across European regions to showcase vertical search services as part of Digital Markets Act compliance.

Google is experimenting with a two-row button layout for local search panel actions on mobile devices.

Google removed Web Search Service API documentation it had accidentally published, though the API itself remains unavailable to most users.

Google added newly-launched CrUX ad metrics to its Page Experience documentation without confirming them as a ranking signal.

Google updated its policies to require ecommerce sites to explicitly label adult products in their product feeds and structured markup.

Google expanded its aggregator and supplier search units to now support local business queries.

Google expanded its guidance for the Mediapartners-Google crawler to apply beyond AdSense contexts.

John Mueller confirmed that delays in Google Search updating image thumbnails are expected behavior, especially when images are moved within page content.

Google released documentation outlining regional search feature eligibility and setup requirements for the EEA, Türkiye, and South Africa.

Google published documentation clarifying how search features and layouts vary by region and country.

Google's new booking search widgets in the EU now show a disclaimer indicating displayed prices are customized based on device type and potentially other factors.

Google's job search feature appears to be malfunctioning, displaying few or no new job listings despite a week-long pattern.

Google updated its hreflang documentation to use uppercase language codes, but the change is purely cosmetic since hreflang is case-insensitive.

Google has removed the Follow button from desktop search results while keeping it on mobile.

SERoundtable reports that some Google search results show misaligned sponsored results labels, likely a formatting bug.