seo

Blueprint illustration of a web crawler moving along a timeline ruler marked 30 days and 3-6 months, showing Google crawling, indexing and core update recovery times

Google Says Recovery Takes 3 to 6 Months, So Stop Judging SEO Fixes at Week Two

Google's Gary Illyes shared typical timing ranges for crawling, indexing and recovery at Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe in Barcelona on October 2, 2026, Search Engine Journal reported. Known URLs get refreshed roughly every 30 days, and core update recovery typically takes 3 to 6 months. Any

AI Overviews Hit 83% of Brand Searches, and Wikipedia Is Writing Them

Google showed an AI Overview on 82.9% of US desktop results for branded keywords as of September 29, 2026, up from a 61.3% monthly average in July, according to an Ahrefs analysis of 232.8 million SERP crawls. The summary that sits above your own homepage is mostly

Blueprint illustration of a Google search results page where an AI answer box covers organic links, with a small coin weighed against a stack of click arrows

Google Priced Your Content for AI Answers at 0.1% of Ad Revenue

Google is paying roughly 100 publishers through an "AI contribution pilot" for content used in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini, according to The Information. For small and midsize sites, those payments work out to less than 0.1% of their ad revenue. Meanwhile, AI Overviews cut the

Blueprint-style diagram of a Google EEA search results page with one expanded aggregator panel, collapsed tabs, and a row of hotel and airline supplier icons beneath

Google Handed EEA Search to Aggregators. Direct Brands Get a Box With No Prices.

Google rolled out two new result units across the European Economic Area on September 8, 2026: an aggregator unit for approved comparison sites and a supplier unit for direct providers, covering hotel, flight, long-distance train and bus, and product queries. The supplier unit only appears when an aggregator unit appears,

Blueprint diagram of a grid of identical template web pages marked for deletion beside a few original pages, with a trust gauge stuck low and a clock marked in months

Google Doesn't Forgive Programmatic SEO Just Because You Deleted the Pages

Google's John Mueller told a site owner on Bluesky this week that Google's systems have "possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages." The owner had already removed the low-value programmatic pages and seen no recovery.

Blueprint-style illustration of a newspaper printing press feeding pages into a sealed search box while a smaller stream flows to an email inbox and phone app

USA TODAY Just Admitted Publishing More Content Stopped Working

USA TODAY cut staff and dissolved its audience organization on September 3, 2026, replacing it with three desks built around owned channels and off-platform distribution. The memo's core admission is that producing more content no longer grows audience, because Google increasingly keeps the reader instead of sending them

Blueprint-style leaderboard of US website traffic bars, some rising and some collapsing, with two rulers giving different readings of the same bar

Semrush Says Amazon Lost 15% of Its Traffic. Similarweb Says It Grew.

Semrush traffic data published by Search Engine Land on September 4 shows ChatGPT.com up 48.38% year over year to 1.09 billion monthly US visits in July 2026, with Bing down 50.43% and Amazon down 15.31%. Similarweb's May 2026 panel shows Amazon growing 4.