Today we've released the February 2026 Discover core update. This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover. Our testing shows that people find the Discover experience more useful and worthwhile with this update.

Search Central Live is coming back to South America! After many successful events in the region, we're continuing our mission to help you enhance your site's performance in Google Search.

It has been a busy second half of the year for the Search Central Live (SCL) team! Zipping through the busy streets of Bangkok to the skyscrapers of Tokyo and the vibrant harbor of Hong Kong, we've been on a mission to connect, share, and—most importantly—listen.

Today, we are excited to introduce a new feature in the Search Console Performance report: weekly and monthly views. This new functionality allows you to adjust the time aggregation of any of the performance charts, helping you smooth out daily changes and focus on the overall trend of traffic to your website.

Today, we are excited to announce a new experiment in Search Console that offers site owners a unified view of their Google Search performance across their websites and social channels. With this update, we are expanding the Search Console Insights report to include performance data not only for your website, but also for some of your social channels. This new integration allows you to review Search performance of social channels associated with your website directly within Search Console.

The Search Console Performance report is a powerful tool to analyze organic search traffic, but finding the exact data you need can take more time than you'd like. Today, we're excited to announce an experimental feature in the Performance report designed to reduce the effort it takes for you to select, filter, and compare your data: AI-powered configuration.

We're happy to announce we're providing an additional tool to analyze the performance of your website by query type in the Search Console Performance Report: the branded queries filter. This new feature is designed to help analyze the queries driving traffic to your site by automatically differentiating between branded and non-branded queries.

We're always looking for new ways to help you understand your data and make smarter decisions when it comes to Google Search. That's why we're happy to announce a new feature within the Search Console performance reports: Custom annotations. This feature is designed to empower you to add your own contextual notes directly to your performance charts. Think of it as a personal notebook for your Search data.

We're excited to announce that we're now expanding the options for merchants to provide shipping and returns information, even if they don't have a Merchant Center account. Merchants can now tell Google about their shipping and returns policies in two distinct ways: by configuring them directly in Search Console or by using new organization-level structured data.

We're thrilled to announce our upcoming Search Central Live Zurich on December 9th! This is a fantastic opportunity for SEO and digital marketing professionals to connect, learn and engage with each other and the Google Search teams.

We're constantly working to simplify the search results page, so that it's quick and easy to find the information and websites you're looking for. As part of this effort, we regularly evaluate all of our existing features to make sure they're still useful, both for people searching on Google and for website owners.

We are excited to announce Query groups, a powerful Search Console Insights feature that groups similar search queries. One of the challenges when analyzing search performance data is that there are many different ways to write the same query: you might see a dozen different variations for a single user question - including common misspellings, slightly different phrasing, and different languages. Query groups solve this problem by grouping similar queries.

For the first time, Search Central Live is coming to Dubai on October 21, 2025! After events in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, we're continuing our mission to help you enhance your site's performance in Google Search, live in Dubai, UAE.

When shoppers are online, knowing which store to buy from can be a tough decision. The new store widget powered by Google brings valuable information directly to a merchant's website, which can turn shopper hesitation into sales. It addresses two fundamental challenges ecommerce retailers face: boosting visibility and establishing legitimacy. The widget helps you attract customers and encourage them to make a purchase. Businesses using the store widget on their websites saw up to 8% higher sales within 90 days compared to similar businesses without it.

Get ready, Japan! We're thrilled to announce the return of Search Central Live Tokyo on Nov 7, 2025! If you are fluent in Japanese and are interested, read on! We're bringing back all the elements you loved, with even more opportunities for you to shape the experience.

As part of our broader APAC plan, which includes new Deep Dive events and two local language editions, we are happy to announce the details for our Chinese language event: Search Central Live Hong Kong!

We're very excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming back to Ciudad de Mexico on September 25! Following successful events throughout the world earlier this year, we're continuing our mission to helpyou enhance your site's performance in Google Search.

We're excited to announce the Google Trends API alpha test. This new API will help Researchers, Journalists, and Developers to understand Search behaviors and patterns. While Trends data is available through the Trends website, the API provides new ways to use the data inside your organization in a scalable way.

We're excited to announce the launch of the new Search Console Insights report. The new report offers even more insights and a deeper integration with Search Console's Performance report. With this change, we aim to streamline your workflow, make it easier to find opportunities to improve your site's performance, and provide more ways to explore specific areas of interest.

We hope you're as excited about Search Central Live Deep Dive APAC as we are! With just a few weeks to go, we wanted to share an exciting experiment that we're planning to run at the event, and introduce our community speakers. Let's start with the experiment.

As part of our ongoing efforts to simplify the Google Search results page, we will be phasing out support for a few structured data features in Search. We regularly evaluate the usefulness of Search features, both for users and website owners.

Member benefits, such as lower prices and earning loyalty points are a major factor considered by shoppers when buying products online. Today we're adding support for defining loyalty programs under Organization structured data combined with loyalty benefits under Product structured data.

As a site owner, publisher or creator, you may be wondering how to best succeed in our AI search experiences, such as AI Overviews and our new AI Mode. The underpinnings of what Google has long advised carries across to these new experiences. Focus on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content. Then you should be well positioned as Google Search evolves, as our core goal remains the same: to help people find outstanding, original content that adds unique value. With that in mind, here are some things to consider for success in Google Search all around, including our AI experiences.

Since 2013, Search has recognized the importance of app deep links in a mobile-centric world. In this post, we'll review the current state of app deep links — take a look at what they are, the benefits of using them, and how to implement them effectively.

We're ready to open registrations for the first ever Search Central Live Deep Dive, a 3-day event that will be held in Bangkok, Thailand this year on July 23-25!

A few months ago, we announced an improved way to view recent performance data in Search Console. The "24 hours" view includes data from the last available 24 hours and appears with a delay of only a few hours. This view can help you find information about which pages and queries are performing in this recent timeframe and how content you recently published is picking up.

In the previous posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) we explored what's already possible to do with its various components — namely robots.txt and the URI level controls. In this post we will explore how the REP can play a supporting role in the ever-evolving relation between automatic clients and the human web.

Hello 2025! (Yeah, we know, time flies!) We've had some exciting plans in the works for Search Central Live (SCL) Asia Pacific this year, and we're super excited to let you in on what we've been up to. We've been listening closely to your feedback, and we're cooking up something different than what we usually do–something bigger, deeper, and more tailored to you!

With the robots.txt file, site owners have a simple way to control which parts of a website are accessible by crawlers. To help site owners further express how search engines and web crawlers can use their pages, the web standards group came up with robots meta tags in 1996, just a few months after meta tags were proposed for HTML (and anecdotally, also before Google was founded). Later, X-Robots-Tag HTTP response headers were added. These instructions are sent together with a URL, so crawlers can only take them into account if they're not disallowed from crawling the URL through the robots.txt file. Together, they form the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).

A long-standing tool for website owners, robots.txt has been in active use for over 30 years and is broadly supported by crawler operators (such as tools for site owners, services, and search engines). In this edition of the robots refresher series, we'll take a closer look at robots.txt as a flexible way to tell robots what you want them to do (or not do) on your website.

We're very excited to announce that Search Central Live is going to Madrid for the first time on April 9! The event will have a mix of presenters from the Google Search, News, and Partnerships teams and the content will be delivered in English and Spanish, but we'll have live translation.

On April 2, 2025 we'll be in Johannesburg, South Africa for the very first Search Central Live event in Africa! We're excited to welcome you at Search Central Live South Africa and talk about all things Google Search!

Every now and then we get questions about robots.txt, robots meta tags, and the control functionality that they offer. Following our December series on crawling, we thought this would be the perfect time to put together a light refresher. So, if you're curious about these controls, follow along in this new blog post series!

Mobile searchers will soon see a cleaner, more streamlined look for how URLs appear in search results. Initially introduced as part of the "site hierarchy" feature, we've found that the breadcrumb element isn't as useful to people who are searching on mobile devices, as it gets cut off on smaller screens. Starting today, we'll no longer show breadcrumbs on mobile search results in all languages and regions where Google Search is available (they continue to appear on desktop search results).

It might happen that by the end of this post you're going to try to decide who wrote this blog post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you'd be right to ponder that and delve into the intricacies of the language used that gives away LLMs, for this is the time of the year when we can get away with publishing a blog post with barely any review (future Gary will deal with the potential, nay, likely fallout I guess). As we often do in the last post of a year, we're looking at what happened on Google Search Central in 2024 according to an LLM (or Gary), and maybe hinting at what might be coming in 2025 (but maybe this is just a hook to keep you reading...).

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are particularly well suited for decreasing latency of your website and in general keeping web traffic-related headaches away. This is their primary purpose after all: speedy delivery of your content even if your site is getting loads of traffic. The "D" in CDN is for delivering or distributing the content across the world, so transfer times to your users is also lower than just hosting in one data center somewhere. In this post we're going to explore how to make use of CDNs in a way that improves crawling and users' experience on your site, and we also look at some nuances of crawling CDN-backed sites.

Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite number of URLs, which causes all sorts of crawling problems.

The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of enthusiasm and engagement from attendees even if, on the day prior to the Taipei event, we collectively had to deal with typhoon Kong Rey, the first supertyphoon in Taiwan's history to make landfall after mid-October. Here's a deeper dive into what made these events so special and what's next.