{ "dataset": "updates", "source": "https://best-seo-software.org", "licence": "CC BY 4.0 — attribution required", "generated": "2026-08-09T14:47:56.209Z", "count": 195, "records": [ { "id": "google-platform-properties-2026", "slug": "google-platform-properties-2026", "name": "Platform properties roll out globally in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2026-07-29", "startDate": "2026-07-29", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google made Search Console platform properties available worldwide and published a social and video performance guide alongside them.", "description": "Platform properties let a brand claim and measure its presence on social and video platforms within Search Console rather than only its own websites. Google completed the global rollout in July 2026 and published a companion guide on interpreting social and video performance in Search. It is the most recent significant Search Console change before August 2026.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "search console", "social", "video", "reporting" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/platform-properties-social-video-guide", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/platform-properties-social-video-guide", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-social-video-2026", "slug": "google-search-console-social-video-2026", "name": "Social and video platform performance in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2026-07-07", "startDate": "2026-07-07", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console began showing how a brand's content on social and video platforms performs inside Google Search.", "description": "Google extended Search Console reporting to cover content a brand publishes on third-party social and video platforms, showing how those posts and videos perform in Google Search results. It recognises that a large share of brand visibility now sits on platforms the brand does not own. The reporting is tied to verified platform properties rather than to the brand's own domain.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "search console", "social", "video", "reporting" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-console-social-video-platforms", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-console-social-video-platforms", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-spam-update-june-2026", "slug": "google-spam-update-june-2026", "name": "June 2026 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2026-06-24", "startDate": "2026-06-24", "endDate": "2026-06-26", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Spam update rolled out in under two days, the second of 2026.", "description": "Google ran a spam update from 24 to 26 June 2026, recorded on the Search Status Dashboard. As with recent spam releases, Google named no specific technique and pointed publishers to its spam policies documentation. It is the most recent announced spam update before August 2026.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": 2 }, { "id": "google-gen-ai-performance-reports-2026", "slug": "google-gen-ai-performance-reports-2026", "name": "Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2026-06-03", "startDate": "2026-06-03", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google began reporting performance in AI Overviews and AI Mode separately within Search Console, addressing a long-standing publisher request.", "description": "Google introduced generative AI performance reporting in Search Console, separating impressions and clicks originating in AI experiences from conventional web results. Until this point AI Overviews and AI Mode data was aggregated into the main web search totals, which made it impossible for publishers to measure the effect of AI answers on their traffic. The reports were the most-requested Search Console feature since AI Overviews launched in 2024.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "search console", "ai answers", "reporting", "referral traffic" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-may-2026", "slug": "google-core-update-may-2026", "name": "May 2026 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2026-05-21", "startDate": "2026-05-21", "endDate": "2026-06-02", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second core update of 2026, completing in twelve days and reported as causing significant ranking volatility.", "description": "Google ran the May 2026 core update from 21 May to 2 June. Third-party tracking recorded substantial movement during the rollout, particularly for publishers and informational content. Google announced it with its standard guidance and made no accompanying policy changes.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": 12 }, { "id": "google-generative-ai-optimization-resource-2026", "slug": "google-generative-ai-optimization-resource-2026", "name": "New resource for optimizing for generative AI in Google Search", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2026-05-15", "startDate": "2026-05-15", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google published a consolidated documentation resource on how content is surfaced in its generative AI search experiences.", "description": "Google released a dedicated resource covering how content becomes eligible for AI Overviews and AI Mode, consolidating guidance that had previously been spread across blog posts. It reiterates that eligibility follows ordinary Search indexing and quality expectations rather than a separate optimisation discipline, and covers snippet and preview controls for publishers who want to limit how their content is used. It is documentation rather than a ranking change.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "documentation", "preview controls" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/05/a-new-resource-for-optimizing", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/05/a-new-resource-for-optimizing", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-back-button-hijacking-policy-2026", "slug": "google-back-button-hijacking-policy-2026", "name": "Back button hijacking spam policy", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2026-04-13", "startDate": "2026-04-13", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google added a spam policy prohibiting pages that manipulate browser history to prevent users returning to search results.", "description": "Google introduced a new spam policy covering back button hijacking, where a page injects history entries or intercepts navigation so that pressing back does not return the user to the search results. Google classified the practice as a deceptive user experience violating its spam policies, subject to both algorithmic action and manual actions. The policy applies regardless of whether the behaviour comes from the site itself or from third-party scripts and advertising it hosts.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam", "user experience", "ads" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/04/back-button-hijacking", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-inside-googlebot-2026", "slug": "google-inside-googlebot-2026", "name": "Inside Googlebot: crawling and fetching documentation", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2026-03-31", "startDate": "2026-03-31", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google published an unusually detailed explanation of how Googlebot crawls, fetches and processes bytes from a page.", "description": "Google published a technical post demystifying the crawling and fetching pipeline, covering how requests are scheduled, what is fetched beyond the HTML, and how the volume of processed bytes relates to crawl budget. It was aimed at reducing common misconceptions about crawl budget and rendering. It is documentation rather than a behavioural change to crawling.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "crawling", "crawl budget", "documentation" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/03/crawler-blog-post", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/03/crawler-blog-post", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-crawler-ip-ranges-move-2026", "slug": "google-crawler-ip-ranges-move-2026", "name": "New location for Google crawler IP range files", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2026-03-31", "startDate": "2026-03-31", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google moved the published JSON files listing Googlebot and other crawler IP ranges to a new location.", "description": "Google announced a new hosting location for the machine-readable IP range files used to verify that a request genuinely comes from Googlebot or another Google crawler. Site owners and security vendors with hard-coded URLs needed to update their verification tooling. Reverse DNS verification remained the recommended alternative. The change is operational rather than a ranking change.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "crawling", "verification", "documentation" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/03/crawler-ip-ranges", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/03/crawler-ip-ranges", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-march-2026", "slug": "google-core-update-march-2026", "name": "March 2026 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2026-03-27", "startDate": "2026-03-27", "endDate": "2026-04-08", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First core update of 2026, described by Google as a regular update to better surface relevant, satisfying content.", "description": "Google ran the March 2026 core update from 27 March to 8 April, three days after a spam update. The announcement used Google's now-standard framing about surfacing relevant and satisfying content, with no new guidance or policy changes. The twelve-day rollout was shorter than most recent core updates.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": 12 }, { "id": "google-spam-update-march-2026", "slug": "google-spam-update-march-2026", "name": "March 2026 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2026-03-24", "startDate": "2026-03-24", "endDate": "2026-03-24", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Spam update that began and completed on the same day, the fastest rollout Google has recorded on its status dashboard.", "description": "Google announced a spam update on 24 March 2026 that finished rolling out within the same day. Google referred publishers to its spam policies and named no specific technique. It preceded the March 2026 core update by three days, which again made attribution of ranking changes difficult for affected sites.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": 0 }, { "id": "google-discover-update-february-2026", "slug": "google-discover-update-february-2026", "name": "February 2026 Discover update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2026-02-05", "startDate": "2026-02-05", "endDate": "2026-02-27", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First broad update Google announced specifically for the Discover feed rather than Search, taking three weeks to roll out.", "description": "Google announced an update to the systems that select and surface articles in Discover, running from 5 to 27 February 2026 and recorded on the Search Status Dashboard. Unlike a core update it applied to the Discover feed rather than search results, making it the first time Google formally announced a Discover-specific broad change. Publishers dependent on Discover traffic reported significant swings across the rollout window.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "discover", "publishers", "content quality" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2026, "durationDays": 22 }, { "id": "google-core-update-december-2025", "slug": "google-core-update-december-2025", "name": "December 2025 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2025-12-11", "startDate": "2025-12-11", "endDate": "2025-12-29", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Third and final core update of 2025, running for eighteen days across the holiday period.", "description": "Google ran the December 2025 core update from 11 to 29 December, its third of the year. It was announced with the standard core update guidance and no accompanying policy change. As with earlier December releases, retailers noted the timing across the peak trading period.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "ecommerce", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": 18 }, { "id": "google-search-console-social-channels-2025", "slug": "google-search-console-social-channels-2025", "name": "Social channels in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-12-01", "startDate": "2025-12-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console began reporting on how a brand's social and creator channels perform in Google Search.", "description": "Google introduced a social channels capability in Search Console, the first step toward reporting on content that a brand publishes on third-party platforms rather than on its own domain. It reflects the growing share of search results occupied by social video and community content. The work continued in 2026 with platform properties and a dedicated social and video performance guide. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "search console", "social", "reporting" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-weekly-monthly-views-2025", "slug": "google-search-console-weekly-monthly-views-2025", "name": "Weekly and monthly views in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-12-01", "startDate": "2025-12-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console performance reports gained weekly and monthly aggregation alongside the existing daily view.", "description": "Google added the option to aggregate Search Console performance data by week or by month, smoothing daily noise and making longer-term trends easier to read within the sixteen-month window. It does not extend the retention period. The change followed the earlier addition of hourly and 24-hour views at the other end of the granularity range. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "reporting" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-branded-queries-2025", "slug": "google-search-console-branded-queries-2025", "name": "Branded queries filter in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-11-01", "startDate": "2025-11-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console gained a filter separating branded from non-branded queries in the performance reports.", "description": "Google added a branded queries filter that lets site owners split performance data between searches containing the site's brand and everything else, a segmentation practitioners had previously built manually with regular expressions. Google generates the brand classification automatically from the property's data. It makes non-brand demand trends visible without manual query filtering. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "search console", "reporting", "branded search" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-annotations-2025", "slug": "google-search-console-annotations-2025", "name": "Custom annotations in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-11-01", "startDate": "2025-11-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console let site owners annotate performance charts with their own events such as migrations and releases.", "description": "Google added the ability to mark dates in the Search Console performance charts with custom notes, so that site changes, migrations, campaigns and known algorithm updates can be read against traffic movement. Annotations are per property and visible to users with access to it. It addressed a long-standing request for context alongside the performance graph. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "reporting", "tooling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-serp-simplification-update-2025", "slug": "google-serp-simplification-update-2025", "name": "Update on the search results simplification programme", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2025-11-01", "startDate": "2025-11-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google reported progress on removing low-value rich results and SERP enhancements begun in mid-2025.", "description": "Google published a follow-up to its June 2025 simplification announcement, setting out which result enhancements had been withdrawn and confirming the direction of travel toward fewer, higher-value result types. Structured data that no longer produces a visual enhancement remains valid but stops yielding a rich result, and the associated Search Console reports were retired in step. Publishers were advised to keep markup that serves other purposes such as feeding Google's understanding of entities. Only the month of the post is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "structured data", "rich results", "serp features" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-insights-query-groups-2025", "slug": "google-search-console-insights-query-groups-2025", "name": "Query groups in Search Console Insights", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-10-01", "startDate": "2025-10-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console Insights began clustering related queries into groups so performance could be read at topic level.", "description": "Google added automatic query grouping to Search Console Insights, clustering semantically related search terms so publishers can see performance by topic rather than by individual query string. It reduces the effect of query fragmentation and of anonymised long-tail terms being hidden. The grouping is generated by Google and cannot be edited by the site owner. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "reporting", "keyword research" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "us-v-google-remedies-ruling-2025", "slug": "us-v-google-remedies-ruling-2025", "name": "US v. Google remedies ruling", "engine": "Other", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2025-09-02", "startDate": "2025-09-02", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "The court ordered Google to share search index and user interaction data with competitors and barred exclusive default search contracts.", "description": "On 2 September 2025 Judge Mehta issued the remedies decision in the US search monopoly case. Google was required to share certain search index and user interaction data with qualified competitors and prohibited from entering exclusive contracts that make its search the automatic default. The court declined to order divestiture of Chrome or Android. The data-sharing remedy is potentially the most consequential for the search market, since access to interaction data has been a principal barrier to building a competitive general search engine.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "regulation", "antitrust", "search data", "competition" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-num-100-parameter-removed-2025", "slug": "google-num-100-parameter-removed-2025", "name": "num=100 search parameter stops working", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2025-09-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Google silently stopped honouring the num=100 URL parameter, breaking the standard method for retrieving 100 results in one request.", "description": "In mid-September 2025 the num=100 parameter, long used by rank trackers and SEO tools to fetch the top hundred results in a single request, stopped returning more than the default page of results. Google never announced or explained the change, and it is included here as an unconfirmed but very widely documented event. The immediate consequences were higher data-collection costs for tooling vendors and a sharp, near-universal drop in reported Search Console desktop impressions, which had partly been generated by automated hundred-result requests. Many sites saw average position figures improve at the same time for the same reason. Only the month is documented here, so the start date is set to the first of the month.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "rank tracking", "search console", "impressions", "serp data" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": false, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "rsl-licensing-standard-2025", "slug": "rsl-licensing-standard-2025", "name": "Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard published", "engine": "Other", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2025-09-01", "startDate": "2025-09-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "A publisher-led open standard launched to express machine-readable licensing terms for AI use of web content, extending robots.txt.", "description": "Really Simple Licensing defines a machine-readable way for a site to state the terms under which its content may be used by AI systems, including free, attribution-required, paid and per-crawl arrangements, expressed alongside robots.txt and in RSS feeds. It was backed by a coalition of large publishers and platforms as a successor to the binary allow-or-block model. Adoption by AI companies is voluntary and, as with robots.txt, it depends on good-faith compliance. Only the month of publication is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content licensing", "robots.txt", "ai training", "standards" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-no-ai-crawl-without-compensation/", "verified": false, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-store-widget-2025", "slug": "google-store-widget-2025", "name": "Store widget in Google Search", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-09-01", "startDate": "2025-09-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google launched a merchant store widget surfacing shipping, returns and ratings information alongside retailer results.", "description": "Google introduced a store widget designed to display trust signals such as delivery options, return policy and store ratings for retailers in search results. It draws on Merchant Center data and structured data already supplied by the retailer. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "ecommerce", "serp features", "structured data" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-spam-update-august-2025", "slug": "google-spam-update-august-2025", "name": "August 2025 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2025-08-26", "startDate": "2025-08-26", "endDate": "2025-09-22", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First spam update in eight months, taking nearly four weeks to roll out.", "description": "Google launched a spam update on 26 August 2025 and confirmed completion on 22 September, an unusually long rollout for a spam release. It came after an eight-month gap in announced spam updates. Google referred publishers to its spam policies and did not name a specific technique.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": 27 }, { "id": "bing-search-apis-retired-2025", "slug": "bing-search-apis-retired-2025", "name": "Bing Search APIs retired", "engine": "Bing", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2025-05-01", "startDate": "2025-08-11", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Microsoft shut down the Bing Search and Bing Custom Search APIs, removing a major independent source of SERP data for tooling vendors.", "description": "Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on 11 August 2025, directing developers toward grounding with Bing Search in Azure AI Agents instead. Many rank trackers, research tools and independent search products had used the APIs as their non-Google data source, and pricing for the remaining options was substantially higher. The retirement reduced the number of viable large-scale web indexes available to third parties. Only the month of the retirement announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "api", "tooling", "serp data", "rank tracking" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster", "verified": false, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "cloudflare-perplexity-stealth-crawling-2025", "slug": "cloudflare-perplexity-stealth-crawling-2025", "name": "Cloudflare accuses Perplexity of stealth crawling", "engine": "Perplexity", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2025-08-04", "startDate": "2025-08-04", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Cloudflare published research alleging Perplexity used undeclared crawlers and rotating identities to fetch pages that had blocked its declared bot.", "description": "Cloudflare reported that when sites blocked PerplexityBot, requests continued to arrive from generic browser user agents on rotating networks, and said the pattern amounted to deliberate evasion of robots.txt and firewall rules. It de-listed Perplexity from its verified bot programme as a result. Perplexity disputed the characterisation, attributing some traffic to third-party infrastructure and user-initiated fetches. The dispute highlighted the limits of robots.txt as a control when crawler identity is not cryptographically verified.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "crawlers", "robots.txt", "ai answers", "enforcement" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "cloudflare-default-block-ai-crawlers-2025", "slug": "cloudflare-default-block-ai-crawlers-2025", "name": "Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default", "engine": "Other", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2025-07-01", "startDate": "2025-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Cloudflare made blocking AI crawlers the default for new domains, ending open-by-default access to a large share of the web.", "description": "Cloudflare announced that new domains on its network would block AI crawlers unless the site owner opts in, reversing the long-standing assumption that crawlers may access content unless told otherwise. It framed the change around the collapsing ratio of crawls to referral visits from AI platforms compared with traditional search. Because Cloudflare fronts a very large portion of web traffic, the policy shifted the practical default for AI data access across the open web.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "crawlers", "ai training", "content licensing", "infrastructure" ], "officialUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-no-ai-crawl-without-compensation/", "sourceUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-no-ai-crawl-without-compensation/", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "cloudflare-pay-per-crawl-2025", "slug": "cloudflare-pay-per-crawl-2025", "name": "Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl", "engine": "Other", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-07-01", "startDate": "2025-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Cloudflare launched a private beta letting publishers charge AI crawlers per request using the HTTP 402 Payment Required status code.", "description": "Pay Per Crawl gives site owners three options per crawler — allow free, charge a flat per-request price, or block — enforced at the edge using HTTP 402 responses and cryptographically signed crawler identity. Crawlers can either discover pricing reactively or declare a maximum price up front via request headers. It is the first infrastructure-level attempt to create a machine-readable market for content access rather than relying on bilateral licensing deals. The feature launched in private beta.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "crawlers", "content licensing", "monetisation", "infrastructure" ], "officialUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/", "sourceUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-trends-api-alpha-2025", "slug": "google-trends-api-alpha-2025", "name": "Google Trends API (alpha)", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-07-01", "startDate": "2025-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google opened an alpha API for Google Trends data, giving programmatic access to scaled search interest for the first time.", "description": "Google announced an alpha programme for a Google Trends API providing consistently scaled search interest data over a rolling five-year window, with breakdowns by region and time. Until this point practitioners relied on scraping or unofficial libraries. Access was limited to alpha testers at launch. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "keyword research", "api", "tooling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "perplexity-comet-browser-2025", "slug": "perplexity-comet-browser-2025", "name": "Perplexity Comet browser", "engine": "Perplexity", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-07-01", "startDate": "2025-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Perplexity released an agentic browser that navigates and acts on websites on the user's behalf, released free in October 2025.", "description": "Comet is a browser with an integrated agent that can browse, summarise and act across sites without the user visiting pages directly. It launched in July 2025 for top-tier subscribers and became freely available in October 2025. Agentic browsing raises new questions for publishers about analytics, advertising and bot identification, because agent traffic can be indistinguishable from human traffic at the request level. Only the month of each release is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "agents", "referral traffic", "analytics", "crawlers" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-june-2025", "slug": "google-core-update-june-2025", "name": "June 2025 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2025-06-30", "startDate": "2025-06-30", "endDate": "2025-07-17", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second core update of 2025, running for over two weeks and reported as substantially larger than the March release.", "description": "Google ran the June 2025 core update from 30 June to 17 July. Third-party monitoring recorded it as one of the more forceful updates of the period, with large swings across publisher, health and ecommerce categories. Google announced it with its standard guidance and made no accompanying policy changes.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": 17 }, { "id": "google-loyalty-program-markup-2025", "slug": "google-loyalty-program-markup-2025", "name": "Loyalty program structured data support", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2025-06-01", "startDate": "2025-06-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google added markup allowing retailers to describe member-only pricing and loyalty benefits in product results.", "description": "Google introduced structured data for loyalty programmes, letting retailers declare member prices, points and benefits so they can be reflected in product experiences on Search. It addressed the previous mismatch where member-only pricing shown on a page differed from the price Google had indexed. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "structured data", "ecommerce", "rich results" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-insights-2025", "slug": "google-search-console-insights-2025", "name": "New Search Console Insights report", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-06-01", "startDate": "2025-06-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google rebuilt Search Console Insights as a full report inside Search Console with richer trend and content analysis.", "description": "The Insights experience moved from a separate lightweight view into Search Console proper, adding longer trend windows, comparisons and breakdowns of which pages and queries are gaining or losing. Google added query grouping to it in October 2025. It is aimed at content teams rather than technical SEOs and does not introduce new data beyond the performance reports. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "reporting", "tooling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-simplifying-serp-2025", "slug": "google-simplifying-serp-2025", "name": "Simplifying the search results page", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2025-06-01", "startDate": "2025-06-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google began removing rarely used rich result types and SERP enhancements as part of a deliberate simplification programme.", "description": "Google announced a programme to reduce visual clutter on the results page by retiring rich result types with low usage or low user value, continuing the direction set by the 2023 FAQ and HowTo changes. Affected structured data types stopped generating enhanced listings, and the corresponding Search Console reports were retired alongside them. Google followed up with a further update on the programme in November 2025. Only the month of the announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "structured data", "rich results", "serp features", "search console" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-ai-mode-us-launch-2025", "slug": "google-ai-mode-us-launch-2025", "name": "AI Mode launches for all US users", "engine": "Google", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2025-05-20", "startDate": "2025-05-20", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google took AI Mode out of Labs and made it available to everyone in the United States, powered by a custom Gemini 2.5 model.", "description": "At Google I/O 2025 Google announced that AI Mode was available to all US users, describing it as its most powerful AI search with advanced reasoning and multimodality. Additional capabilities including Deep Search research reports, live camera input, agentic booking tasks and personalised context were staged through Labs afterwards. The launch established a search surface where conventional ranked results are absent and citation into a small set of sources determines publisher visibility.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "serp layout", "referral traffic", "citations" ], "officialUrl": "https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-update/", "sourceUrl": "https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-update/", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-app-deep-links-2025", "slug": "google-app-deep-links-2025", "name": "App deep link documentation for Search", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2025-05-01", "startDate": "2025-05-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google published guidance on connecting a website and its mobile app so search results can open the app at the right screen.", "description": "Google documented how to implement app deep links so that a result clicked on a mobile device can open the corresponding screen in an installed app rather than the mobile web page. It covers the required app configuration, association files and URL structure. The guidance is aimed at brands where the app is the primary conversion surface. Only the month of publication is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "mobile", "apps", "documentation" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-ai-experiences-guidance-2025", "slug": "google-ai-experiences-guidance-2025", "name": "Guidance for content in Google's AI experiences", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2025-05-01", "startDate": "2025-05-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google published its first consolidated guidance on how content is selected for AI Overviews and AI Mode.", "description": "Google published a post setting out what publishers should do to perform well in AI Overviews and AI Mode, stating that there is no separate optimisation track and that ordinary Search indexing, technical accessibility and content quality determine eligibility. It highlighted unique and satisfying content, good page experience, appropriate structured data, and preview controls such as nosnippet and max-snippet for publishers who want to limit use. It also explained that AI features draw on the same index as conventional results. Only the month is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "documentation", "preview controls" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "bing-copilot-search-2025", "slug": "bing-copilot-search-2025", "name": "Copilot Search in Bing", "engine": "Bing", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2025-04-04", "startDate": "2025-04-04", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Microsoft introduced Copilot Search as a mode within Bing that combines conventional results with generated, cited answers.", "description": "Copilot Search added a dedicated mode in Bing that returns a synthesised answer with inline citations while keeping web links available alongside it. It positioned generative answering as a first-class search mode rather than a chat sidebar. For publishers it consolidated Microsoft's several AI answering surfaces into a single, more discoverable experience within the search product.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "serp layout", "citations" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Copilot", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-analytics-hourly-api-2025", "slug": "google-search-analytics-hourly-api-2025", "name": "Hourly data in the Search Analytics API", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2025-04-01", "startDate": "2025-04-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google exposed hourly Search Console performance data through the Search Analytics API, not just the web interface.", "description": "Following the 24-hour view added to the Search Console interface, Google made hourly granularity available programmatically through the Search Analytics API. This allowed reporting tools and internal dashboards to track publication-level impact without waiting for daily aggregation. Google noted the same processing caveats as the interface view. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "api", "reporting" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "anthropic-claude-web-search-2025", "slug": "anthropic-claude-web-search-2025", "name": "Claude web search and Claude-SearchBot", "engine": "Anthropic", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2025-03-20", "startDate": "2025-03-20", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Anthropic added live web search to Claude with cited sources, alongside separate crawler identities for search and user-initiated fetches.", "description": "Anthropic enabled Claude to retrieve current web content and cite the pages it used, first for paid users in the United States and then more broadly. Anthropic documents three distinct user agents: ClaudeBot for gathering training content, Claude-User for fetches triggered by a user's question, and Claude-SearchBot for improving search result quality. Publishers can allow or disallow each independently in robots.txt, which lets a site appear in Claude's cited answers while refusing training use.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "crawlers", "robots.txt", "citations" ], "officialUrl": "https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler", "sourceUrl": "https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-march-2025", "slug": "google-core-update-march-2025", "name": "March 2025 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2025-03-13", "startDate": "2025-03-13", "endDate": "2025-03-27", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First core update of 2025, rolled out over two weeks with Google noting an emphasis on surfacing satisfying content from creators.", "description": "Google ran the March 2025 core update from 13 to 27 March. Its announcement repeated the framing used since August 2024 about better surfacing relevant, satisfying content, including from smaller creators. Third-party trackers recorded moderate volatility relative to the largest 2024 updates. No policy changes accompanied it.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": 14 }, { "id": "google-ai-mode-labs-2025", "slug": "google-ai-mode-labs-2025", "name": "AI Mode launched in Search Labs", "engine": "Google", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2025-03-05", "startDate": "2025-03-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google began testing AI Mode, a fully conversational search surface with no conventional results list, as a Labs experiment.", "description": "AI Mode was introduced as an opt-in Search Labs experiment offering an entirely generated, multi-step answering experience with follow-up questions, distinct from AI Overviews sitting above ordinary results. It used a query fan-out technique, issuing multiple related searches behind a single user question and synthesising across them. Google said links would remain part of the experience but publishers observed a much smaller set of cited sources than a conventional results page.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "serp layout", "referral traffic", "citations" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-update/", "verified": false, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-robots-refresher-2025", "slug": "google-robots-refresher-2025", "name": "Robots Refresher documentation series", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2025-02-01", "startDate": "2025-02-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google published a multi-part series restating how the Robots Exclusion Protocol works and how to use page-level controls correctly.", "description": "Between February and March 2025 Google ran a documentation series covering robots.txt fundamentals, page-level directives such as meta robots and X-Robots-Tag, and the extensibility of the Robots Exclusion Protocol for future uses. The series was published as AI crawler controls became a mainstream publisher concern and emphasised that the protocol can be extended with new user-agent tokens without changing the standard. It is guidance rather than a ranking change. Only the month the series began is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "robots.txt", "crawling", "documentation" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-visible-url-mobile-2025", "slug": "google-visible-url-mobile-2025", "name": "Visible URL element simplified on mobile results", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2025-01-01", "startDate": "2025-01-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google simplified the breadcrumb-style URL line shown above mobile search results, reducing what publishers could influence.", "description": "Google changed the display of the URL element on mobile search results to a simpler form, reducing the use of breadcrumb-style paths that had previously been derived from site structure and BreadcrumbList markup. Google said the change made results easier to scan on small screens. Publishers lost some ability to shape the visible path shown beneath a title. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "serp features", "structured data", "mobile" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2025, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-spam-update-december-2024", "slug": "google-spam-update-december-2024", "name": "December 2024 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2024-12-19", "startDate": "2024-12-19", "endDate": "2024-12-26", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Week-long spam update starting the day after the December core update finished, running through the holiday period.", "description": "Google launched a spam update on 19 December 2024, one day after the December core update completed, and finished on 26 December. Sites publishing scaled or scraped content reported deindexing during the rollout. Google gave no separate guidance and referred publishers to its spam policies.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam", "deindexing" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 7 }, { "id": "openai-chatgpt-search-free-2024", "slug": "openai-chatgpt-search-free-2024", "name": "ChatGPT search opened to all free users", "engine": "OpenAI", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2024-12-16", "startDate": "2024-12-16", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "OpenAI made web search available to all logged-in ChatGPT users at no cost, greatly expanding the audience for AI-cited content.", "description": "Six weeks after launching search for paying subscribers, OpenAI extended it to all logged-in free users, taking the potential audience for cited web content from millions to hundreds of millions. It made citation in ChatGPT answers a materially significant visibility channel for publishers. Access controls remained governed by the OAI-SearchBot user agent in robots.txt.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "referral traffic", "citations" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-december-2024", "slug": "google-core-update-december-2024", "name": "December 2024 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2024-12-12", "startDate": "2024-12-12", "endDate": "2024-12-18", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Unusually fast core update completing in six days, launched a week after the November update finished.", "description": "Google began the December 2024 core update on 12 December, only a week after the November core update completed, and finished it on 18 December. At six days it was one of the shortest core update rollouts recorded. Google gave no explanation for the rapid succession beyond its standard guidance, and it was followed days later by a spam update.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 6 }, { "id": "google-search-console-24-hour-view-2024", "slug": "google-search-console-24-hour-view-2024", "name": "24-hour view added to Search Console performance reports", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2024-12-01", "startDate": "2024-12-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console gained a near-real-time 24-hour performance view with data delayed by only a few hours.", "description": "Google added a 24-hour view to the Search Console performance reports for Search, Discover and Google News, showing hourly data with a lag of a few hours rather than the previous two-day delay. It made it practical to check the immediate effect of a publication or a site change. Google noted that the new view uses a different processing pipeline, so small discrepancies with the older reports are expected. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "search console", "reporting", "tooling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-site-reputation-abuse-update-2024", "slug": "google-site-reputation-abuse-update-2024", "name": "Site reputation abuse policy update", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-11-19", "startDate": "2024-11-19", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google clarified that first-party involvement or editorial oversight does not exempt third-party content from the site reputation abuse policy.", "description": "Google updated its site reputation abuse policy to state that the degree of first-party involvement is irrelevant: what matters is whether third-party content is produced primarily to exploit the host site's ranking signals rather than to serve that site's audience. This closed the argument that adding editorial review to a hosted coupon or affiliate section made it compliant. Google also began applying algorithmic demotions in addition to the manual actions used since May 2024. Coupon, review and deals sections on large publisher domains were the most affected.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "parasite seo", "third-party content", "publishers", "spam" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-november-2024", "slug": "google-core-update-november-2024", "name": "November 2024 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2024-11-11", "startDate": "2024-11-11", "endDate": "2024-12-05", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Core update running from 11 November to 5 December 2024, again spanning the peak retail period.", "description": "Google ran the November 2024 core update over roughly 24 days, finishing on 5 December. It was announced on the day of launch with Google's standard guidance and no accompanying policy changes. Trackers recorded strong movement, and the update completed only a week before another core update began.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "ecommerce" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 24 }, { "id": "openai-chatgpt-search-launch-2024", "slug": "openai-chatgpt-search-launch-2024", "name": "ChatGPT search launch", "engine": "OpenAI", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2024-10-31", "startDate": "2024-10-31", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "OpenAI shipped web search inside ChatGPT for paying users, with in-line citations and source sidebars.", "description": "ChatGPT search graduated from the SearchGPT prototype, giving ChatGPT automatic access to current web results with linked citations and a source panel. It launched for Plus and Team subscribers and was extended to all logged-in free users on 16 December 2024. For publishers it created a second large-scale AI answer surface with its own crawler controls via OAI-SearchBot, and generated a measurable, if small, new referral channel.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "citations", "referral traffic", "crawlers" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-sitelinks-search-box-removed-2024", "slug": "google-sitelinks-search-box-removed-2024", "name": "Sitelinks search box removed", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2024-10-21", "startDate": "2024-10-21", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google retired the sitelinks search box that had let users search within a site directly from the results page.", "description": "Google announced in a post titled \"Farewell, Sitelinks Search Box\" that the feature would stop appearing in search results, saying usage had declined substantially over time. The associated WebSite SearchAction structured data became unnecessary, though Google said leaving the markup in place caused no problems. Removal followed within weeks of the announcement; Google did not publish a single global cut-over date, so no start date is recorded here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "structured data", "serp features", "rich results" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/10/sitelinks-search-box", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/10/sitelinks-search-box", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "cjeu-google-shopping-ruling-2024", "slug": "cjeu-google-shopping-ruling-2024", "name": "CJEU upholds Google Shopping fine", "engine": "Other", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-09-10", "startDate": "2024-09-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "The EU Court of Justice made final the €2.4bn Google Shopping self-preferencing decision, ending a case running since 2010.", "description": "On 10 September 2024 the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed Google's final appeal against the European Commission's 2017 decision that it had abused its dominance by favouring its own comparison shopping service in search results. The judgment confirmed self-preferencing by a dominant search engine as an abuse under EU competition law, reinforcing the principles later codified in the Digital Markets Act. Comparison shopping services had already seen result-format changes in the EEA earlier that year.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "regulation", "antitrust", "comparison sites", "serp features" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-august-2024", "slug": "google-core-update-august-2024", "name": "August 2024 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2024-08-15", "startDate": "2024-08-15", "endDate": "2024-09-03", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Core update explicitly framed as an attempt to better surface small independent publishers after feedback on the September 2023 helpful content update.", "description": "Google ran the August 2024 core update from 15 August to 3 September and published an unusual accompanying blog post. It said the update was designed to better surface genuinely useful content, including from small or independent sites, and acknowledged that it had heard from creators affected by the September 2023 helpful content update. Google also said it had incorporated feedback from creators and had looked at what kinds of sites people find valuable. Recovery for previously affected sites was partial and uneven.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers", "helpful content" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 19 }, { "id": "us-v-google-liability-ruling-2024", "slug": "us-v-google-liability-ruling-2024", "name": "US v. Google search monopoly ruling", "engine": "Other", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-08-05", "startDate": "2024-08-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "A US federal judge ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in general search services and general text advertising.", "description": "On 5 August 2024 Judge Amit Mehta of the US District Court for the District of Columbia found that Google had acted illegally to maintain monopolies in general search and general search text advertising, principally through exclusive default placement payments to Apple, Mozilla and device makers. The liability decision did not itself change search results but set up a remedies phase that would. Evidence and testimony from the trial also produced a substantial amount of previously non-public information about how Google ranking works.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "regulation", "antitrust", "distribution" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-avif-support-2024", "slug": "google-avif-support-2024", "name": "AVIF image format supported in Google Search", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2024-08-01", "startDate": "2024-08-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google added AVIF to the image formats it can index and display in Google Images and image-based search features.", "description": "Google announced support for the AVIF format across Search, meaning AVIF files could be crawled, indexed and shown in Google Images and other image surfaces. AVIF offers substantially better compression than JPEG and WebP, so the change removed a practical barrier to adopting it for sites concerned about image search visibility and Core Web Vitals. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "images", "indexing", "performance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-search-console-recommendations-2024", "slug": "google-search-console-recommendations-2024", "name": "Recommendations introduced in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2024-08-01", "startDate": "2024-08-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Search Console began surfacing automated, property-specific recommendations for improvements and unused features.", "description": "Google added a recommendations surface to Search Console that generates timely, actionable suggestions based on a property's own data, such as unfixed structured data errors or eligible features not being used. The recommendations appear on the overview page and can be dismissed. Google described them as opportunistic hints rather than a prioritised audit. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "tooling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-explicit-fake-content-2024", "slug": "google-explicit-fake-content-2024", "name": "Explicit fake content ranking updates", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2024-07-31", "startDate": "2024-07-31", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google made removal of non-consensual explicit imagery easier and demoted sites that receive many such removal requests.", "description": "Google announced ranking and removal changes aimed at synthetic explicit imagery, including automatically removing duplicates once a successful request is filed, filtering explicit results for queries about named individuals, and demoting sites that accumulate a high volume of valid removals. It also demoted sites whose business model centres on producing such content. The approach mirrored the earlier DMCA-based demotion signal, using removal request volume as a site-level quality proxy.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "policy", "removals", "adult content" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "perplexity-publishers-program-2024", "slug": "perplexity-publishers-program-2024", "name": "Perplexity Publishers Program", "engine": "Perplexity", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-07-30", "startDate": "2024-07-30", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Perplexity launched revenue sharing with publishers whose content is cited in its answers, following plagiarism accusations.", "description": "After public criticism from Forbes and Wired in June 2024 over uncredited use of their reporting, Perplexity announced a programme sharing advertising revenue with partner publishers whose articles are referenced in answers. Launch partners included several large news and magazine brands. The programme is one of the earliest examples of an AI answer engine paying for the content it summarises, and it set a template later followed by other licensing deals.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "content licensing", "publishers", "citations" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "openai-searchgpt-prototype-2024", "slug": "openai-searchgpt-prototype-2024", "name": "SearchGPT prototype and OAI-SearchBot", "engine": "OpenAI", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2024-07-25", "startDate": "2024-07-25", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "OpenAI announced a search prototype with publisher controls and introduced OAI-SearchBot as a separate crawler for search indexing.", "description": "OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT as a limited prototype combining generated answers with in-line source attribution and publisher-facing controls. Crucially it introduced OAI-SearchBot as a distinct user agent from the training crawler GPTBot, so publishers could allow search indexing while refusing training use. OpenAI stated that sites opting out of OAI-SearchBot would not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though they could still appear as navigational links. The prototype became ChatGPT search three months later.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "crawlers", "robots.txt", "citations" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "bing-generative-search-2024", "slug": "bing-generative-search-2024", "name": "Bing generative search", "engine": "Bing", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2024-07-24", "startDate": "2024-07-24", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Microsoft began testing a fully AI-generated Bing results page that reorganises web content into a synthesised layout with citations.", "description": "Bing generative search replaces the conventional list of results with an AI-composed page that summarises and reorganises information drawn from the web, with source links throughout. Microsoft rolled it out gradually to a small share of queries and said it was monitoring click-through to publishers closely. It represented a more aggressive redesign than an answer box above ordinary results, and raised the same publisher traffic questions as Google's AI Overviews.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "serp layout", "referral traffic" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-mobile-indexing-requirement-2024", "slug": "google-mobile-indexing-requirement-2024", "name": "Mobile accessibility required for indexing", "engine": "Google", "type": "infrastructure", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2024-07-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google completed the mobile-first transition: from July 2024 a page must be accessible to a mobile device to be indexed at all.", "description": "Google announced the final step of the mobile-first indexing programme, stating that from 5 July 2024 it would only index pages that could be loaded by a mobile user agent. Sites that served content exclusively to desktop browsers, a very small residual population, risked losing indexing entirely. Google noted that no responsive-design requirement was being imposed and that pages simply had to be reachable and renderable on mobile.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "mobile", "indexing", "crawling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "cloudflare-block-ai-scrapers-2024", "slug": "cloudflare-block-ai-scrapers-2024", "name": "Cloudflare one-click AI crawler blocking", "engine": "Other", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-07-03", "startDate": "2024-07-03", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Cloudflare gave all customers, including free plans, a single toggle to block AI training crawlers at the network edge.", "description": "Cloudflare shipped a feature that blocks known AI crawlers regardless of robots.txt compliance, enforcing the choice at the network layer rather than relying on voluntary respect for directives. It also published bot-behaviour fingerprinting to catch crawlers that disguise themselves. Because Cloudflare fronts a very large share of the web, the change materially altered what AI companies could access. It was the first step toward the default-block and paid-access model Cloudflare introduced a year later.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "crawlers", "ai training", "content licensing", "infrastructure" ], "officialUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-no-ai-crawl-without-compensation/", "sourceUrl": "https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-no-ai-crawl-without-compensation/", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-shipping-returns-search-console-2024", "slug": "google-shipping-returns-search-console-2024", "name": "Shipping and returns policy configuration in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2024-07-01", "startDate": "2024-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google let retailers declare shipping and return policies directly in Search Console instead of only through structured data.", "description": "Google added organisation-level shipping and returns settings in Search Console, giving retailers without a Merchant Center account a way to supply the policy data used in product listings and free listings. Corresponding organisation-level structured data support was added in the same period. Accurate policy data affects how product results are annotated in search. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "ecommerce", "search console", "structured data" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "yandex-russian-assets-sale-2024", "slug": "yandex-russian-assets-sale-2024", "name": "Yandex Russian assets sold and separated from Nebius", "engine": "Yandex", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-07-01", "startDate": "2024-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Yandex's Russian businesses, including its search engine, were sold to Russian investors and split from the Dutch parent company.", "description": "In July 2024 the Dutch-listed parent, renamed Nebius Group, completed the sale of Yandex's Russian assets to a consortium of Russian investors for a heavily discounted USD 5.3 billion, under pressure from sanctions and Russian ownership rules. Yandex Search continued to operate in Russia under the new ownership, while the international entity pivoted away from search. For international SEO the practical effect was that Yandex became a purely domestic Russian search platform. Only the month is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "international", "ownership", "market structure" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-spam-update-june-2024", "slug": "google-spam-update-june-2024", "name": "June 2024 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2024-06-20", "startDate": "2024-06-20", "endDate": "2024-06-27", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Week-long spam update enforcing Google's published spam policies across all languages.", "description": "Google ran a spam update from 20 to 27 June 2024. As with previous releases, Google did not name a specific technique and referred publishers to its spam policies documentation. Volatility was moderate compared with the March 2024 spam update.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 7 }, { "id": "google-continuous-scroll-removed-2024", "slug": "google-continuous-scroll-removed-2024", "name": "Continuous scroll removed from search results", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2024-06-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google reversed continuous scrolling and restored pagination, first on desktop and then on mobile.", "description": "Less than two years after extending continuous scroll to desktop, Google confirmed it was removing the feature and returning to a paginated results page with a next-page control. Google said the change made results load faster and that continuous scroll had not improved satisfaction as expected. Desktop reverted first, with mobile following over subsequent weeks. Search Console impression counts for deeper positions fell as a result, which affected year-on-year reporting. Only the month is documented here, so the start date is set to the first of the month.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "serp layout", "impressions", "click-through rate" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-api-content-warehouse-leak-2024", "slug": "google-api-content-warehouse-leak-2024", "name": "Google Content Warehouse API documentation leak", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2024-05-27", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Thousands of internal Google Search API documentation modules leaked, listing over 14,000 ranking-related attributes.", "description": "In late May 2024 internal documentation for Google's Content Warehouse API was published after being briefly exposed in a public code repository, and was analysed by the SEO industry. It described more than 2,500 modules and roughly 14,000 attributes covering concepts such as site-level authority scores, click and hover metrics, Chrome-derived data and content freshness. Google confirmed the documents were authentic but cautioned strongly against drawing conclusions about ranking from out-of-context, potentially outdated or unused fields. This was revealed through a leak rather than announced by Google, and none of it constitutes official guidance.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ranking factors", "research", "transparency" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-ai-overviews-launch-2024", "slug": "google-ai-overviews-launch-2024", "name": "AI Overviews launch", "engine": "Google", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2024-05-14", "startDate": "2024-05-14", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google graduated SGE into AI Overviews and rolled it out to all US users by default, with international expansion following.", "description": "At Google I/O 2024 Google announced that AI Overviews would begin appearing for all users in the United States without opting in, powered by a custom Gemini model, and said it expected to reach over a billion people by the end of the year. The feature places a generated summary with source links above conventional results for many informational queries. Early rollout produced widely publicised incorrect answers, and Google subsequently restricted the feature for some query classes and added quality safeguards. Publishers have reported reduced click-through rates on queries where an overview appears, and Google has said content policies and technical eligibility follow ordinary Search indexing rules.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "serp layout", "referral traffic", "citations" ], "officialUrl": "https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/", "sourceUrl": "https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-site-reputation-abuse-policy-2024", "slug": "google-site-reputation-abuse-policy-2024", "name": "Site reputation abuse spam policy", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-03-05", "startDate": "2024-05-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google banned publishing third-party content on an established site mainly to exploit that site's ranking signals, widely known as parasite SEO.", "description": "The policy targets arrangements where a reputable publisher hosts unrelated third-party pages — typically coupon, casino or loan content — with little oversight, in order to trade on the host domain's authority. Google gave two months' notice before enforcement began on 5 May 2024 so publishers could wind down such arrangements. Initial enforcement was through manual actions against major news and education sites, and Google published examples distinguishing legitimate syndicated or sponsored content from abuse.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "parasite seo", "third-party content", "publishers", "spam" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-inp-core-web-vital-2024", "slug": "google-inp-core-web-vital-2024", "name": "INP replaces FID as a Core Web Vital", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2023-05-10", "startDate": "2024-03-12", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Interaction to Next Paint became an official Core Web Vital on 12 March 2024, and First Input Delay was retired.", "description": "As announced ten months earlier, Google swapped First Input Delay for Interaction to Next Paint in the Core Web Vitals set. INP measures the latency of all page interactions through to the next paint, with 200ms or less rated good and above 500ms rated poor, and is a much harder metric to pass than FID. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome UX Report switched over on the same date, and FID was fully removed from tooling in September 2024.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "core web vitals", "performance", "page experience" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-eea-dma-search-changes-2024", "slug": "google-eea-dma-search-changes-2024", "name": "EU Digital Markets Act compliance changes to Google Search", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2024-03-06", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google reworked search results in the European Economic Area to comply with the DMA's ban on self-preferencing, adding aggregator units and refinement chips.", "description": "The Digital Markets Act's obligations became enforceable for designated gatekeepers on 7 March 2024, requiring Google to rank third-party services fairly and not favour its own. Google introduced new EEA-only result formats including dedicated units for comparison sites and aggregators, refinement chips for switching between result types, and changes to hotel, flight and local units. Comparison shopping services and airlines reported large but uneven traffic shifts, and the Commission opened non-compliance proceedings shortly afterwards. Google announced the changes ahead of the deadline but staged them across the EEA rather than on a single date.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "regulation", "serp features", "comparison sites", "local" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-expired-domain-abuse-policy-2024", "slug": "google-expired-domain-abuse-policy-2024", "name": "Expired domain abuse spam policy", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-03-05", "startDate": "2024-03-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google prohibited buying expired domains and repurposing them with unrelated content in order to inherit their historical ranking signals.", "description": "The policy targets the practice of acquiring a lapsed domain that carries reputation and links, then publishing low-value or unrelated content on it to exploit those signals. Google said the practice offers no value to users searching for the site they expect to find. Enforcement began immediately on announcement and was applied both algorithmically and through manual actions.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam", "domains", "links" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-helpful-content-into-core-2024", "slug": "google-helpful-content-into-core-2024", "name": "Helpful content system folded into core ranking", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2024-03-05", "startDate": "2024-03-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google retired the standalone helpful content classifier and moved its signals into multiple core ranking systems.", "description": "Alongside the March 2024 core update Google announced that the helpful content system was no longer a discrete site-wide classifier and that assessing whether content is helpful was now handled by several signals within core ranking. Google removed the separate helpful content documentation and merged the guidance into its creating helpful content page. In practice this meant the effects could update continuously rather than requiring a periodic release, and Google stopped issuing helpful content update announcements.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "core ranking", "site-wide signals" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-march-2024", "slug": "google-core-update-march-2024", "name": "March 2024 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2024-03-05", "startDate": "2024-03-05", "endDate": "2024-04-19", "confirmed": true, "summary": "The longest and most complex core update Google had run, taking 45 days and folding the helpful content system into core ranking.", "description": "Google described the March 2024 core update as more complex than usual, involving changes to multiple core ranking systems working together rather than a single signal. It ran for 45 days, from 5 March to 19 April 2024, and Google said it expected a 40% reduction in unhelpful, unoriginal content in results. The helpful content system ceased to exist as a separate classifier and its signals became part of core ranking. Google warned that ranking could fluctuate more than usual during the unusually long rollout.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "helpful content", "core ranking", "publishers" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 45 }, { "id": "google-spam-update-march-2024", "slug": "google-spam-update-march-2024", "name": "March 2024 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2024-03-05", "startDate": "2024-03-05", "endDate": "2024-03-19", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Spam update released alongside three new spam policies covering scaled content abuse, site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse.", "description": "Google ran a spam update from 5 to 19 March 2024 that enforced newly published policies as well as improving detection of existing spam types. Large numbers of sites were deindexed during the rollout, particularly those publishing bulk automatically generated content. The update was announced in the same post as the March 2024 core update, and Google noted that manual actions would also be applied.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "spam", "scaled content", "deindexing" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": 14 }, { "id": "google-scaled-content-abuse-policy-2024", "slug": "google-scaled-content-abuse-policy-2024", "name": "Scaled content abuse spam policy", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2024-03-05", "startDate": "2024-03-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google replaced its automatically generated content policy with one covering content produced at scale to manipulate rankings, regardless of production method.", "description": "The new policy prohibits generating many pages primarily to manipulate search rankings and provide little value to users, explicitly stating that it applies whether the content is produced by automation, by humans or by a combination of both. This closed the loophole where publishers argued that human editing of AI output exempted them. Google said it enforces the policy both algorithmically and through manual actions. It formed part of the same announcement as the March 2024 core and spam updates.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai generated content", "spam", "content quality" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-cached-links-removed-2024", "slug": "google-cached-links-removed-2024", "name": "Cached links removed from search results", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2024-02-01", "startDate": "2024-02-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google removed the cached page link from search results, later retiring the cache: search operator as well.", "description": "Google confirmed it had dropped the \"Cached\" link that had appeared alongside results since the early years of the engine, saying it was originally added because pages often failed to load and was no longer needed. Practitioners had used it to inspect what Google had indexed and to check for cloaking. Google later pointed users at the Wayback Machine and retired the cache: search operator in September 2024.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "serp features", "diagnostics", "indexing" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-eea-rich-results-refinement-chips-2024", "slug": "google-eea-rich-results-refinement-chips-2024", "name": "EEA rich results, aggregator units and refinement chips", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2024-02-01", "startDate": "2024-02-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google introduced European Economic Area-only search formats to satisfy Digital Markets Act obligations on fair ranking.", "description": "Ahead of the DMA compliance deadline Google shipped EEA-specific result formats, including dedicated units surfacing comparison sites and aggregators, new rich result types for suppliers such as hotels and airlines, and refinement chips letting users switch between categories of result. The changes produced measurably different results pages inside and outside the EEA for the same queries, and both aggregators and direct suppliers reported significant traffic shifts. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "regulation", "serp features", "comparison sites", "travel" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-product-variants-structured-data-2024", "slug": "google-product-variants-structured-data-2024", "name": "Product variant structured data support", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2024-02-01", "startDate": "2024-02-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google added structured data support for describing product variants such as size and colour on a single product page.", "description": "Google introduced markup allowing a single page to describe multiple variants of a product with their own prices, availability and identifiers, using ProductGroup and variesBy properties. It addressed a long-standing mismatch between how ecommerce sites structure variant pages and how Google indexed them. Correct implementation affects eligibility for product rich results and merchant listings. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "structured data", "ecommerce", "rich results" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": true, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-crawl-rate-limiter-removed-2024", "slug": "google-crawl-rate-limiter-removed-2024", "name": "Crawl rate limiter tool removed from Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2023-11-01", "startDate": "2024-01-08", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google withdrew the legacy Search Console tool that let site owners cap Googlebot's crawl rate.", "description": "Google deprecated the crawl rate limiter, saying Googlebot had become good enough at responding to server signals that manual limits were rarely needed and were often set and then forgotten. It advised site owners to return HTTP 500, 503 or 429 responses to signal that crawling should slow down, and said Googlebot reacts within minutes. The tool was withdrawn on 8 January 2024. Only the month of the announcement is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "crawling", "crawl budget" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog", "verified": false, "year": 2024, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "microsoft-copilot-rebrand-2023", "slug": "microsoft-copilot-rebrand-2023", "name": "Bing Chat rebranded as Copilot", "engine": "Bing", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2023-11-15", "startDate": "2023-11-15", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Microsoft renamed Bing Chat to Copilot and began separating the assistant from the Bing search brand.", "description": "Microsoft announced that Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise would be rebranded under the Copilot name, and moved the assistant to its own destination as well as keeping it inside Bing. For publishers this meant AI answers derived from Bing's index appearing in an increasing number of surfaces, including Windows and Microsoft 365. Microsoft later introduced Copilot Search within Bing in April 2025, blending conventional results with generated answers.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "branding", "referral traffic" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Copilot", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-reviews-update-november-2023", "slug": "google-reviews-update-november-2023", "name": "November 2023 reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2023-11-08", "startDate": "2023-11-08", "endDate": "2023-12-07", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Final announced reviews update before Google made the reviews system continuous and stopped announcing releases.", "description": "Google ran a reviews update from 8 November to 7 December 2023, overlapping with the November core update. At the same time Google said the reviews system would move to regular, ongoing improvement and that it would no longer publish announcements for individual reviews updates. From that point review content quality was assessed continuously rather than in discrete releases.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "reviews", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 29 }, { "id": "google-core-update-november-2023", "slug": "google-core-update-november-2023", "name": "November 2023 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2023-11-02", "startDate": "2023-11-02", "endDate": "2023-11-27", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Fourth core update of 2023, running for nearly four weeks and using a different core ranking system from the October release.", "description": "Google launched the November 2023 core update on 2 November and confirmed completion on 27 November. Google said explicitly that it used a different core ranking system from the October 2023 core update, which was an unusual level of detail. Trackers recorded strong volatility, particularly for publishers and review content.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 25 }, { "id": "google-page-experience-report-changes-2023", "slug": "google-page-experience-report-changes-2023", "name": "Page experience report simplified in Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2023-11-01", "startDate": "2023-11-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google removed the combined page experience score view from Search Console, keeping Core Web Vitals and HTTPS as separate reports.", "description": "Google replaced the aggregated page experience report with a simpler overview linking to the individual Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports, and removed the mobile usability report and the mobile-friendly test around the same period. Google said page experience is not a single score or ranking system but a set of signals and concepts. The change reduced the tendency to treat page experience as a pass-or-fail ranking gate. Only the month is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "search console", "page experience", "core web vitals" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-october-2023", "slug": "google-core-update-october-2023", "name": "October 2023 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2023-10-05", "startDate": "2023-10-05", "endDate": "2023-10-18", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Third core update of 2023, launched a day after a spam update and completed in under two weeks.", "description": "Google ran the October 2023 core update from 5 to 18 October, immediately after the September helpful content update and simultaneously with the October spam update. The overlap made it difficult for publishers to attribute changes to a specific system, a point Google acknowledged. Guidance remained the standard core update documentation.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 13 }, { "id": "google-spam-update-october-2023", "slug": "google-spam-update-october-2023", "name": "October 2023 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2023-10-04", "startDate": "2023-10-04", "endDate": "2023-10-19", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Spam update focused on cloaking, hacked content, auto-generated spam and scraped content in several under-served languages.", "description": "Google announced a spam update targeting spam types including cloaking, hacked pages, auto-generated content and scraping, with a particular focus on Turkish, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Hindi, Chinese and other languages where spam had been especially prevalent. It ran from 4 to 19 October 2023 and overlapped with the October 2023 core update. Google pointed publishers at its spam policies documentation.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam", "cloaking", "hacked content", "international" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 15 }, { "id": "google-navboost-revealed-2023", "slug": "google-navboost-revealed-2023", "name": "Navboost and click-based ranking signals revealed", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2023-10-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "US antitrust trial testimony revealed Navboost, a long-running Google system that uses aggregated click and query data to re-rank results.", "description": "During the US Department of Justice antitrust trial in the autumn of 2023, testimony from Google's head of search ranking described Navboost, a system dating to around 2005 that memorises aggregated user click behaviour on query-document pairs and uses it to adjust rankings. Related systems including Glue and slice-based navigation signals were also described. This was revealed through litigation rather than announced by Google, and Google has never published documentation on it. The disclosure changed the industry's understanding of how directly user interaction data feeds ranking, after years of Google publicly downplaying clicks as a ranking factor. Only the month of the key testimony is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ranking factors", "click data", "user behaviour" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_(2020)", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-google-extended-2023", "slug": "google-google-extended-2023", "name": "Google-Extended crawler control introduced", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2023-09-28", "startDate": "2023-09-28", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google introduced a robots.txt token letting publishers opt out of having crawled content used to train Gemini and Vertex AI generative models.", "description": "Google-Extended is a robots.txt user-agent token rather than a distinct crawler: blocking it stops content Googlebot has already fetched from being used to train and ground Google's generative AI models. Google was explicit that it has no effect on inclusion or ranking in Google Search. Publishers noted the asymmetry, since opting out of AI training did not at that point allow opting out of AI Overviews, which are generated from search-indexed content.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "crawlers", "robots.txt", "ai training", "content licensing" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "openai-chatgpt-browsing-bing-2023", "slug": "openai-chatgpt-browsing-bing-2023", "name": "ChatGPT browsing with Bing", "engine": "OpenAI", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2023-09-27", "startDate": "2023-09-27", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "OpenAI re-enabled live web browsing in ChatGPT using Bing as the retrieval layer, with citations back to source pages.", "description": "After withdrawing an earlier browsing beta over paywall-bypass concerns, OpenAI relaunched browsing in ChatGPT backed by Bing search, giving the assistant access to current web content with source links. Sites could control access through robots.txt directives for OpenAI's user agents. It marked the beginning of measurable referral traffic from an AI assistant, and a new class of visibility that conventional rank tracking did not capture.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "citations", "referral traffic" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-helpful-content-september-2023", "slug": "google-helpful-content-september-2023", "name": "September 2023 helpful content update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2023-09-14", "startDate": "2023-09-14", "endDate": "2023-09-27", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Third and most severe helpful content update, accompanied by revised guidance on AI-generated and hosted third-party content.", "description": "Google ran the helpful content update from 14 to 27 September 2023 and simultaneously revised the accompanying documentation: it removed the phrase \"written by people\", softened the position on how content is produced, and added guidance on hosting third-party content on subdomains and on removing unhelpful content. Many independent sites reported sudden and durable traffic losses, making it one of the most contested updates of the decade. Google later acknowledged, when releasing the August 2024 core update, that it was working to surface more content from smaller independent sites.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers", "ai generated content", "site-wide signals" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 13 }, { "id": "naver-cue-search-2023", "slug": "naver-cue-search-2023", "name": "Naver Cue: generative search", "engine": "Other", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2023-09-01", "startDate": "2023-09-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "South Korea's Naver launched a generative search service built on its HyperCLOVA X model, integrated into its dominant domestic portal.", "description": "Naver introduced Cue:, a conversational search experience built on its own Korean-language large language model, and began integrating it into the main Naver search experience. Because Naver combines search with owned content properties such as blogs, cafés and shopping, the generative layer draws heavily on first-party content, which shapes how external publishers gain visibility in Korea. Only the month of launch is documented here.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "ai answers", "international", "serp layout" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-august-2023", "slug": "google-core-update-august-2023", "name": "August 2023 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2023-08-22", "startDate": "2023-08-22", "endDate": "2023-09-07", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second core update of 2023, rolling out over sixteen days with significant movement for independent publishers.", "description": "Google ran the August 2023 core update from 22 August to 7 September. It was a large release by third-party measures and drew particular attention from small independent publishers reporting sustained losses. Google issued its standard core update guidance and made no policy changes alongside the release.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "publishers" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 16 }, { "id": "google-howto-faq-deprecation-2023", "slug": "google-howto-faq-deprecation-2023", "name": "HowTo and FAQ rich result deprecation", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2023-08-08", "startDate": "2023-08-08", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google removed HowTo rich results entirely and restricted FAQ rich results to authoritative government and health sites.", "description": "Google announced it was reducing the visibility of two widely used structured data types as part of a drive to simplify the results page. FAQ rich results were limited to well-known authoritative government and health websites, and HowTo rich results were dropped from desktop as well as mobile. Google said the markup could remain in place without causing problems but would no longer generate enhanced listings for most sites, and the corresponding Search Console reports were removed. Many publishers had adopted the markup specifically for the extra SERP real estate it provided.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "structured data", "rich results", "serp features" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2023/08/howto-faq-changes", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "openai-gptbot-2023", "slug": "openai-gptbot-2023", "name": "GPTBot crawler introduced", "engine": "OpenAI", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2023-08-07", "startDate": "2023-08-07", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "OpenAI published a named crawler and robots.txt token so publishers could opt out of having their content used for model training.", "description": "OpenAI documented GPTBot as the user agent used to gather web content for training generative models, and published IP ranges plus robots.txt guidance for blocking it. Disallowing GPTBot signals that a site's content should not be used in foundation model training. It was the first widely adopted opt-out mechanism for AI training crawls and prompted large numbers of publishers to add AI-specific robots.txt rules. OpenAI later added separate agents for search indexing and user-initiated fetches.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "crawlers", "robots.txt", "ai training", "content licensing" ], "officialUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "sourceUrl": "https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-inp-announced-2023", "slug": "google-inp-announced-2023", "name": "INP announced as replacement for FID", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2023-05-10", "startDate": "2023-05-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google announced that Interaction to Next Paint would replace First Input Delay as the Core Web Vitals responsiveness metric in March 2024.", "description": "Google gave ten months' notice that Interaction to Next Paint would become a Core Web Vital, replacing First Input Delay, because FID measured only input delay on the first interaction and most pages passed it trivially. INP measures the full latency of all interactions through to the next visual update, with a good threshold of 200 milliseconds. Google added INP to Search Console, PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome UX Report during the transition period.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "core web vitals", "performance", "page experience" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-perspectives-2023", "slug": "google-perspectives-2023", "name": "Perspectives filter and discussions and forums", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2023-05-10", "startDate": "2023-05-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google introduced surfaces that promoted first-hand opinion from forums, social video and Q&A communities alongside conventional results.", "description": "Announced at Google I/O 2023, Perspectives was a search filter showing long and short-form videos, images and posts from discussion boards and social platforms, alongside a \"discussions and forums\" block within ordinary results. The features responded to users appending community site names to queries in order to find first-hand experience, and drove large referral gains for forums. Google later retired the standalone Perspectives filter while retaining forum content within core results. Google announced the features without giving a precise general-availability date.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "serp features", "forums", "user generated content" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-sge-launch-2023", "slug": "google-sge-launch-2023", "name": "Search Generative Experience (SGE) launch", "engine": "Google", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2023-05-10", "startDate": "2023-05-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google launched a generative AI answer layer above search results as an opt-in Search Labs experiment in the United States.", "description": "Announced at Google I/O 2023, the Search Generative Experience placed an AI-written summary with supporting links above the conventional results for many queries. It was opt-in through Search Labs and limited to the United States at launch, expanding to more countries and languages over the following year. Publishers raised early concerns about the effect on click-through rates because the summary often answered the query in place. SGE was the direct predecessor of AI Overviews.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "serp layout", "referral traffic" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-reviews-update-april-2023", "slug": "google-reviews-update-april-2023", "name": "April 2023 reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2023-04-12", "startDate": "2023-04-12", "endDate": "2023-04-25", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Product reviews system was broadened to cover reviews of services, businesses, destinations and media, and renamed the reviews system.", "description": "Google expanded the scope of the system from product reviews to reviews of any subject — services, businesses, destinations, games and media — and renamed it accordingly. The update ran from 12 to 25 April 2023. Google's guidance was rewritten to apply to reviewers generally, retaining the emphasis on demonstrated first-hand experience, evidence and comparison against alternatives.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "reviews", "affiliate", "content quality" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 13 }, { "id": "baidu-ernie-bot-2023", "slug": "baidu-ernie-bot-2023", "name": "Baidu ERNIE Bot and AI search integration", "engine": "Baidu", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2023-03-16", "startDate": "2023-03-16", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Baidu launched its ERNIE large language model assistant and began integrating generated answers into Chinese search results.", "description": "Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot on 16 March 2023 as China's first major domestic answer to ChatGPT, and subsequently began surfacing generated responses within Baidu Search. The integration followed the same pattern as Western engines, placing synthesised answers above conventional listings for many informational queries. Chinese-market SEO consequently shifted toward being cited in generated answers as well as ranking in the conventional index.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ai answers", "international", "serp layout" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-march-2023", "slug": "google-core-update-march-2023", "name": "March 2023 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2023-03-15", "startDate": "2023-03-15", "endDate": "2023-03-28", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First core update of 2023, rolled out over two weeks with wide volatility across content categories.", "description": "Google ran the March 2023 core update from 15 to 28 March. It was widely reported as one of the more forceful core updates of the period, with major swings in health, ecommerce and publisher categories. Google's guidance was its standard core update advice and it published no new documentation alongside the release.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 13 }, { "id": "google-product-reviews-february-2023", "slug": "google-product-reviews-february-2023", "name": "February 2023 product reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2023-02-21", "startDate": "2023-02-21", "endDate": "2023-03-07", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Product reviews update expanded beyond English to Spanish, German, French, Italian, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Polish and more.", "description": "Google ran a product reviews update from 21 February to 7 March 2023 and, for the first time, extended the system beyond English to eleven additional languages. Review publishers in those markets experienced the system's effects for the first time. Google's reviewer guidance was translated accordingly but not otherwise changed.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "product reviews", "international", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": 14 }, { "id": "bing-chat-launch-2023", "slug": "bing-chat-launch-2023", "name": "Bing Chat launch (the new Bing)", "engine": "Bing", "type": "ai-feature", "announcedDate": "2023-02-07", "startDate": "2023-02-07", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Microsoft rebuilt Bing around an OpenAI-powered chat experience, the first generative answer layer shipped by a major search engine.", "description": "On 7 February 2023 Microsoft launched a substantially rewritten Bing that paired conventional results with a GPT-based chat assistant capable of synthesising answers with citations. Access was initially waitlisted and moved to open preview on 4 May 2023. For publishers it introduced the first mainstream search interface where an engine answered directly from crawled content, with link attribution rather than blue links as the primary route to a site. Microsoft later rebranded the experience as Copilot.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ai answers", "citations", "referral traffic" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Copilot", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "yandex-source-code-leak-2023", "slug": "yandex-source-code-leak-2023", "name": "Yandex source code leak", "engine": "Yandex", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2023-01-25", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "A 44GB archive of Yandex source code leaked publicly, exposing roughly 1,900 ranking factors from a major search engine.", "description": "On 25 January 2023 an archive of about 44GB of Yandex source code was published on a hacking forum by a former employee. It included the ranking codebase, and analysts extracted a list of approximately 1,900 named ranking factors covering link, behavioural, host-level and freshness signals. Yandex confirmed the code was genuine but said it was an outdated repository snapshot rather than current production code. It remains the only large-scale public exposure of a commercial web search engine's ranking factor list, and although Yandex is not Google, several concepts in it matched long-standing industry hypotheses.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ranking factors", "research", "transparency" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex", "verified": true, "year": 2023, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-eeat-experience-2022", "slug": "google-eeat-experience-2022", "name": "E-E-A-T: Experience added to quality rater guidelines", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2022-12-15", "startDate": "2022-12-15", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google added Experience to Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness in its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.", "description": "Google revised its Search Quality Rater Guidelines to add an extra E for Experience, asking raters to consider whether content shows first-hand or life experience of the subject. Trust was described as the most important member of the family, with the other three supporting it. The guidelines govern human evaluation of search quality rather than ranking directly, but they signal what Google's systems aim to reward.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "quality raters", "e-e-a-t" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2022, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-link-spam-december-2022", "slug": "google-link-spam-december-2022", "name": "December 2022 link spam update (SpamBrain)", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2022-12-14", "startDate": "2022-12-14", "endDate": "2023-01-12", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Link spam update powered by SpamBrain that neutralised both unnatural outbound links and links to spam sites.", "description": "Google announced that SpamBrain, its AI-based spam prevention system, had been extended to detect sites buying links and sites used for passing outgoing links. The update ran from 14 December 2022 to 12 January 2023 in all languages. Google said affected links would be neutralised rather than counted, so sites relying on them could see ranking drops, and pointed to its link spam policy documentation.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "link schemes", "spambrain" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 29 }, { "id": "google-continuous-scroll-desktop-2022", "slug": "google-continuous-scroll-desktop-2022", "name": "Continuous scroll on desktop", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2022-12-05", "startDate": "2022-12-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google brought continuous scrolling to desktop search results in US English, replacing the traditional pagination control.", "description": "Following the 2021 mobile launch, Google extended continuous scroll to desktop search in the United States, loading up to about six pages of results before offering a \"more results\" button. Publishers reported that impressions rose for deeper positions while click-through rates fell. The feature was withdrawn in 2024.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "serp layout", "desktop", "click-through rate" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2022, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-helpful-content-december-2022", "slug": "google-helpful-content-december-2022", "name": "December 2022 helpful content update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2022-12-05", "startDate": "2022-12-05", "endDate": "2023-01-12", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second helpful content update, extended to all languages and taking almost six weeks to complete.", "description": "Google released the second helpful content update on 5 December 2022 and confirmed completion on 12 January 2023. The most significant change was that the system now applied globally in every language rather than only English. Google also said its classifier had been improved, and the rollout ran across the holiday period alongside a link spam update.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "international", "site-wide signals" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 38 }, { "id": "google-spam-update-october-2022", "slug": "google-spam-update-october-2022", "name": "October 2022 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2022-10-19", "startDate": "2022-10-19", "endDate": "2022-10-21", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Fast global spam update completing in two days, applying to all languages.", "description": "Google released a spam update on 19 October 2022 that completed on 21 October and applied across all languages. Google described it as improving detection of spam covered by its published spam policies rather than introducing a new policy. No separate guidance accompanied it.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 2 }, { "id": "google-product-reviews-september-2022", "slug": "google-product-reviews-september-2022", "name": "September 2022 product reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2022-09-20", "startDate": "2022-09-20", "endDate": "2022-09-26", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Product reviews update that ran concurrently with the September 2022 core update, complicating attribution.", "description": "Google launched a product reviews update on 20 September 2022 while the September core update was still rolling out, and both finished on 26 September. Publishers with review content therefore saw combined effects that were difficult to separate. Google acknowledged the overlap but did not stagger the releases.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "product reviews", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 6 }, { "id": "google-core-update-september-2022", "slug": "google-core-update-september-2022", "name": "September 2022 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2022-09-12", "startDate": "2022-09-12", "endDate": "2022-09-26", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second core update of 2022, arriving days after the first helpful content update finished rolling out.", "description": "Google ran the September 2022 core update from 12 to 26 September, overlapping in the public mind with the recently completed helpful content update. Volatility was moderate compared with the May 2022 release. Google reiterated that core updates and the helpful content system were separate mechanisms with separate timelines.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 14 }, { "id": "google-helpful-content-system-2022", "slug": "google-helpful-content-system-2022", "name": "August 2022 helpful content update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2022-08-18", "startDate": "2022-08-25", "endDate": "2022-09-09", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Launch of the helpful content system, a site-wide signal demoting content made mainly for search engines rather than people.", "description": "Google announced a new automated, site-wide classifier that identified sites with a high proportion of unhelpful, search-first content and reduced the ranking of the whole site, including its genuinely useful pages. It rolled out from 25 August to 9 September 2022 and initially applied only to English-language content globally. Google published a self-assessment questionnaire framed around people-first content and said the signal was weighted and would reverse over a period of months once unhelpful content was removed. The system was later folded into core ranking in March 2024.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "site-wide signals", "ai generated content" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 15 }, { "id": "google-product-reviews-july-2022", "slug": "google-product-reviews-july-2022", "name": "July 2022 product reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2022-07-27", "startDate": "2022-07-27", "endDate": "2022-08-02", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Fifth product reviews update, completing in under a week.", "description": "Google rolled out a product reviews update between 27 July and 2 August 2022, still limited to English-language content. It was the fastest product reviews rollout to that date. Google made no changes to its published reviewer guidance alongside it.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "product reviews", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 6 }, { "id": "google-core-update-may-2022", "slug": "google-core-update-may-2022", "name": "May 2022 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2022-05-25", "startDate": "2022-05-25", "endDate": "2022-06-09", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First core update of 2022, rolled out over roughly two weeks with substantial volatility across news and health.", "description": "Google ran the May 2022 core update from 25 May to 9 June. Data providers ranked it among the larger core updates since 2020, with pronounced movement in news, health and entertainment. Google's guidance was unchanged and pointed to its long-standing core update documentation.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "news", "health" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 15 }, { "id": "google-url-parameters-tool-removed-2022", "slug": "google-url-parameters-tool-removed-2022", "name": "URL Parameters tool removed from Search Console", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2022-03-24", "startDate": "2022-04-26", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google retired the Search Console URL Parameters tool, saying its crawling systems no longer needed the manual hints.", "description": "Google announced that the legacy URL Parameters tool, which let site owners tell Google how to treat query-string parameters, would be removed. It said the tool had lost value because Googlebot had become much better at inferring which parameters were useful, and that only about 1% of configurations were still useful. Publishers were pointed at canonical tags, robots.txt and clean URL design instead. The tool was withdrawn on 26 April 2022.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "search console", "crawling", "faceted navigation" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2022, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-product-reviews-march-2022", "slug": "google-product-reviews-march-2022", "name": "March 2022 product reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2022-03-23", "startDate": "2022-03-23", "endDate": "2022-04-06", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Fourth product reviews update, rolled out over two weeks with expanded guidance for reviewers.", "description": "Google ran a product reviews update from 23 March to 6 April 2022, again targeting English-language review content. Alongside it Google reiterated its guidance that useful reviews show evidence of the product being used, cover how it compares with alternatives and explain what it does less well. Affiliate-heavy sites reported some of the largest swings of the year.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "product reviews", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 14 }, { "id": "google-page-experience-desktop-2022", "slug": "google-page-experience-desktop-2022", "name": "February 2022 page experience update (desktop)", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2022-02-22", "startDate": "2022-02-22", "endDate": "2022-03-03", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Page experience signals, including Core Web Vitals, were extended from mobile to desktop search results.", "description": "Google extended the page experience signal to desktop search between 22 February and 3 March 2022, applying the same Core Web Vitals metrics along with HTTPS and absence of intrusive interstitials. Mobile-specific criteria such as mobile-friendliness were not part of the desktop version. Google again described the signal as modest relative to content relevance, and added a desktop page experience report in Search Console.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "page experience", "core web vitals", "desktop" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2022, "durationDays": 9 }, { "id": "google-product-reviews-december-2021", "slug": "google-product-reviews-december-2021", "name": "December 2021 product reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2021-12-01", "startDate": "2021-12-01", "endDate": "2021-12-21", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Third product reviews update, adding guidance on multi-retailer links and evidence of hands-on testing.", "description": "Google rolled out a product reviews update between 1 and 21 December 2021 and expanded its guidance for reviewers, adding recommendations to link to multiple sellers and to provide evidence such as original images, audio or video demonstrating hands-on experience. English-language review sites were the primary population affected. The rollout is recorded on Google's Search Status Dashboard.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "product reviews", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 20 }, { "id": "google-local-vicinity-update-2021", "slug": "google-local-vicinity-update-2021", "name": "Vicinity local search update", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2021-12-16", "startDate": "2021-11-30", "endDate": "2021-12-08", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Local ranking change that increased the weight of proximity, reducing visibility for businesses far from the searcher.", "description": "Google confirmed in mid-December 2021 that a local search ranking update had rolled out between 30 November and 8 December. Practitioners observed that proximity to the searcher became a much stronger factor, shrinking the effective radius over which a business could rank and reducing the benefit of keyword-stuffed business names. The industry named it Vicinity; Google acknowledged the update but did not publish detailed guidance.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "local", "maps", "proximity" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 8 }, { "id": "google-core-update-november-2021", "slug": "google-core-update-november-2021", "name": "November 2021 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2021-11-17", "startDate": "2021-11-17", "endDate": "2021-11-30", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Core update released two weeks before the holiday peak, completing on 30 November after a fast, volatile start.", "description": "Google began the November 2021 core update on 17 November and confirmed completion on 30 November. Data providers recorded a very sharp initial spike in volatility, and the timing before Black Friday again drew criticism from retailers. Google issued no new guidance beyond its standard core update advice.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "ecommerce" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 13 }, { "id": "google-spam-update-november-2021", "slug": "google-spam-update-november-2021", "name": "November 2021 spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2021-11-03", "startDate": "2021-11-03", "endDate": "2021-11-11", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Broad spam update rolled out over about a week, listed on Google's official ranking updates dashboard.", "description": "Google announced a spam update on 3 November 2021 that finished rolling out on 11 November. It targeted general web spam rather than a specific technique, and Google referred publishers to its spam policies rather than issuing separate guidance. It is one of the earliest entries recorded on Google's Search Status Dashboard.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 8 }, { "id": "bing-indexnow-2021", "slug": "bing-indexnow-2021", "name": "IndexNow protocol launched", "engine": "Bing", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2021-10-18", "startDate": "2021-10-18", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Microsoft and Yandex launched an open push protocol letting sites notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted.", "description": "IndexNow lets a site ping a single endpoint when content changes, and participating engines share the notification with each other, replacing repeated speculative crawling with publisher-initiated push. Bing and Yandex were the founding participants, with Seznam and Naver joining later, and CDN and platform integrations from Cloudflare, Akamai, Duda and others followed. Google has said it is evaluating the protocol but has never adopted it. Adoption grew substantially as AI answer engines increased the value of fast content discovery.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "crawling", "indexing", "protocols" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-continuous-scroll-mobile-2021", "slug": "google-continuous-scroll-mobile-2021", "name": "Continuous scroll on mobile", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2021-10-14", "startDate": "2021-10-14", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google replaced mobile pagination with continuous scrolling through roughly four pages of results in US English.", "description": "Google removed the traditional next-page control on mobile search in the United States, loading further results automatically as the user scrolled through about four pages. The change blurred the meaning of page-two rankings and altered click distribution on lower positions. It was extended to desktop in December 2022 and then reversed in 2024.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "serp layout", "mobile", "click-through rate" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-title-links-2021", "slug": "google-title-links-2021", "name": "Title link generation change", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2021-08-24", "startDate": "2021-08-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google began rewriting search result titles using on-page text such as H1s rather than relying on the title element.", "description": "In August 2021 Google changed how it generates the clickable title in search results, drawing more often on main headings, anchor text and other visible page text instead of the title element. After publisher complaints Google published an explanation and later said the original title tag was still used in the large majority of cases. The change made title elements a strong hint rather than a guaranteed output. The rewrite was noticed in mid-August; Google's explanatory post followed on 24 August.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "titles", "serp features", "click-through rate" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-link-spam-update-july-2021", "slug": "google-link-spam-update-july-2021", "name": "July 2021 link spam update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2021-07-26", "startDate": "2021-07-26", "endDate": "2021-08-24", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Month-long link spam update that nullified manipulative links, with particular attention to affiliate and sponsored content.", "description": "Google announced a link spam update designed to identify and nullify link spam more broadly across languages, taking a month to roll out. It published accompanying guidance reminding publishers to qualify affiliate links with rel=\"sponsored\" and to mark guest post and sponsored links appropriately. Google framed the effect as devaluing the offending links rather than penalising sites, though sites relying on them lost rankings as a result.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "affiliate", "sponsored content", "guest posts" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 29 }, { "id": "google-core-update-july-2021", "slug": "google-core-update-july-2021", "name": "July 2021 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2021-07-01", "startDate": "2021-07-01", "endDate": "2021-07-12", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second half of the split 2021 core update, completing the changes Google could not ship in June.", "description": "Google released the promised second part of the split core update on 1 July 2021, completing it on 12 July. Sites that had moved in June sometimes saw partial reversals, exactly as Google had warned. Guidance was unchanged from the standard core update advice.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 11 }, { "id": "google-structured-data-testing-tool-retired", "slug": "google-structured-data-testing-tool-retired", "name": "Structured Data Testing Tool retired", "engine": "Google", "type": "deprecation", "announcedDate": "2020-07-01", "startDate": "2021-07-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google retired its Structured Data Testing Tool in favour of the Rich Results Test and handed the generic validator to Schema.org.", "description": "Google announced in July 2020 that the Structured Data Testing Tool would be deprecated once the Rich Results Test left beta, because the older tool validated markup generically rather than showing what Google would actually use. The generic validation function was migrated to the Schema.org-hosted validator, and the Google-hosted tool was withdrawn during 2021. Practitioners lost a single tool that both validated syntax and previewed eligibility, and now use the two separately. Only month-level precision is documented for both dates.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "structured data", "tooling", "rich results" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-spam-updates-june-2021", "slug": "google-spam-updates-june-2021", "name": "June 2021 spam updates", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2021-06-23", "startDate": "2021-06-23", "endDate": "2021-06-28", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Two rapid spam updates released within a week, overlapping with the June 2021 core update.", "description": "Google announced a spam update on 23 June 2021 followed by a second part on 28 June, both completing within a day of release. They targeted web spam broadly rather than a named tactic, and Google pointed publishers at its webmaster guidelines rather than issuing new advice. Their overlap with the June core update made attribution of ranking changes difficult during that period.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 5 }, { "id": "google-page-experience-rollout-2021", "slug": "google-page-experience-rollout-2021", "name": "Page experience update (mobile) rollout", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2021-04-19", "startDate": "2021-06-15", "endDate": "2021-08-31", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Core Web Vitals and other page experience signals began affecting mobile ranking, rolled out gradually over two and a half months.", "description": "After a delay from the original May target, Google began using page experience — Core Web Vitals plus mobile-friendliness, HTTPS and absence of intrusive interstitials — as a mobile ranking signal from mid-June 2021, completing at the end of August. Google described the effect as a tiebreaker between pages of similar relevance rather than a strong signal, and the measured impact on rankings was modest. The AMP requirement for the top stories carousel was dropped at the same time.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "page experience", "core web vitals", "mobile", "amp" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 77 }, { "id": "google-core-update-june-2021", "slug": "google-core-update-june-2021", "name": "June 2021 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2021-06-02", "startDate": "2021-06-02", "endDate": "2021-06-12", "confirmed": true, "summary": "First half of a split core update, with Google saying some planned components were not ready and would follow in July.", "description": "Google announced an unusual two-part core update, explaining that not all of the intended improvements were ready in June so a second release would follow in July. It warned that some sites might see a change in June that partly reversed in July. The June portion completed on 12 June 2021.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": 10 }, { "id": "google-mum-2021", "slug": "google-mum-2021", "name": "MUM (Multitask Unified Model)", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2021-05-18", "startDate": "2021-05-18", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Multimodal, multilingual model announced at Google I/O 2021 and first applied to complex informational queries.", "description": "Google announced MUM as a model trained across 75 languages and multiple content types, described as far more capable than BERT at answering complex, multi-part questions. Its first production use was surfacing information about COVID-19 vaccine names across languages, and it later powered features such as \"things to know\" panels and refinement chips. Google said MUM was not used as a general ranking signal in the way BERT was, and it is listed among Google's ranking systems.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "query understanding", "multimodal", "international" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-product-reviews-april-2021", "slug": "google-product-reviews-april-2021", "name": "April 2021 product reviews update", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2021-04-08", "startDate": "2021-04-08", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "First release of the product reviews system, rewarding in-depth reviews with original research over thin round-ups.", "description": "Google launched a system that specifically evaluated product review content in English, favouring reviews demonstrating expert knowledge, original measurement or testing, and evidence such as first-hand photography. It published a set of questions for reviewers covering things like quantitative measurements, comparison against competitors and explanation of trade-offs. Thin affiliate round-ups that summarised manufacturer copy were the main losers. Google did not announce a completion date for this first release.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "product reviews", "affiliate", "content quality" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-spambrain-system", "slug": "google-spambrain-system", "name": "SpamBrain", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2021-04-01", "startDate": "2021-04-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google's machine-learning spam prevention system, first named publicly in its 2020 webspam report and used to power later spam and link spam updates.", "description": "SpamBrain is the AI system Google uses to detect spam at crawl time and within ranking, first named in the annual webspam report published in April 2021. Google has credited it with large year-on-year reductions in spam detected and has explicitly built later releases — including the December 2022 link spam update and subsequent spam updates — on top of it. Google publishes aggregate effectiveness figures each year but no technical detail. Only the month of the first public reference is documented, so the announcement date is set to the first of that month.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam", "links", "machine learning" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://status.search.google.com/products/rGHU1u87FJnkP6W2GwMi/history", "verified": false, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-passage-ranking-launch-2021", "slug": "google-passage-ranking-launch-2021", "name": "Passage ranking launches", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2021-02-10", "startDate": "2021-02-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Passage-level ranking went live for US English queries, later expanding to other languages and markets.", "description": "Google confirmed that passage ranking had launched for English-language queries in the United States, roughly four months after being announced. It said the system would surface a relevant section from a page even when the page as a whole was not strongly focused on the query. Google reiterated that publishers should not attempt to restructure content specifically for it. Wider language and market rollout followed later in 2021.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "query understanding", "long form content" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2021, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-december-2020", "slug": "google-core-update-december-2020", "name": "December 2020 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2020-12-03", "startDate": "2020-12-03", "endDate": "2020-12-16", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Large core update released in the middle of the holiday retail season, completing after about two weeks.", "description": "Google announced the December 2020 core update on the day of release and confirmed roughly two weeks later that the rollout was complete. Trackers recorded it as one of the largest updates of the year, with strong movement across health, finance, retail and news. Its timing in the peak shopping period drew criticism from ecommerce publishers.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "ecommerce", "news" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2020, "durationDays": 13 }, { "id": "google-page-experience-announced-2020", "slug": "google-page-experience-announced-2020", "name": "Page experience ranking signal announced", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2020-11-10", "startDate": "2020-11-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google confirmed page experience, including Core Web Vitals, would become a ranking signal from May 2021, later delayed to June.", "description": "Google combined Core Web Vitals with existing signals for mobile-friendliness, HTTPS and intrusive interstitial avoidance into a single page experience signal, and gave six months' notice before it would be used in ranking. It also said the top stories carousel would drop its AMP requirement at the same time. The launch date was subsequently moved from May to a gradual rollout beginning in mid-June 2021.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "page experience", "core web vitals", "amp" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-subtopics-ranking-2020", "slug": "google-subtopics-ranking-2020", "name": "Subtopics ranking", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2020-10-15", "startDate": "2020-11-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Neural system that identifies subtopics within a broad query so results cover a wider range of angles.", "description": "Google announced a system that recognises subtopics inside broad queries — for example different equipment types within a general hobby query — and diversifies results to cover them. It went live in November 2020 and is listed among Google's ranking systems. Only the month of launch is documented, so the start date is set to the first of the month.", "impact": "low", "affects": [ "query understanding", "topical coverage" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "yandex-yati-2020", "slug": "yandex-yati-2020", "name": "Yandex YATI", "engine": "Yandex", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2020-11-01", "startDate": "2020-11-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Transformer-based relevance model that Yandex described as its biggest ranking improvement in ten years.", "description": "YATI, or Yet Another Transformer with Improvements, applied transformer architectures to matching queries against documents, analogous in role to Google's BERT deployment. Yandex said it produced the largest single relevance gain in a decade for Russian-language search. It shifted Russian-market SEO toward semantic coverage and away from exact keyword matching. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "query understanding", "neural networks", "international" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex", "verified": false, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-passage-ranking-announced-2020", "slug": "google-passage-ranking-announced-2020", "name": "Passage ranking announced", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2020-10-15", "startDate": "2020-10-15", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google announced it would index and rank individual passages within a page, not just whole pages.", "description": "At its Search On event Google said it would begin ranking specific passages from a page, so a single relevant section of a long, loosely organised document could surface for a niche query. Google said it expected the change to affect about 7% of queries in all languages once fully rolled out. It stressed that pages were still indexed as wholes and that passage ranking was an additional retrieval signal, not a replacement.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "query understanding", "long form content", "featured snippets" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-web-vitals-announced-2020", "slug": "google-core-web-vitals-announced-2020", "name": "Core Web Vitals introduced", "engine": "Google", "type": "documentation", "announcedDate": "2020-05-05", "startDate": "2020-05-05", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google defined a standard set of user-experience metrics — LCP, FID and CLS — as the Core Web Vitals.", "description": "Google published Core Web Vitals as a common set of field metrics covering loading, interactivity and visual stability: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay and Cumulative Layout Shift. Thresholds were defined for good, needs improvement and poor, and the metrics were wired into Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, the Chrome UX Report and Search Console. The set was explicitly designed to evolve annually, which it later did when INP replaced FID.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "page experience", "performance", "core web vitals" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-may-2020", "slug": "google-core-update-may-2020", "name": "May 2020 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2020-05-04", "startDate": "2020-05-04", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Unusually large core update released during the pandemic, with heavy movement in travel, events and local queries.", "description": "Google announced the May 2020 core update on the day it began and said the rollout would take one to two weeks. Third-party trackers recorded it as one of the largest core updates measured to that point, with pronounced swings in travel, real estate, health and pet care. Search behaviour was also being distorted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made attribution unusually difficult.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "travel", "local" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-featured-snippet-dedup-2020", "slug": "google-featured-snippet-dedup-2020", "name": "Featured snippet deduplication", "engine": "Google", "type": "data-change", "announcedDate": "2020-01-22", "startDate": "2020-01-22", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "A page promoted into a featured snippet stopped also appearing as a regular result on page one, removing the double listing.", "description": "Google confirmed that a URL shown in a featured snippet would no longer be repeated in the standard ten organic results on the first page, treating the snippet as the site's position-one listing. Publishers that had previously occupied both slots lost the second appearance, and click-through patterns changed accordingly. Google presented the change as decluttering rather than a ranking change.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "featured snippets", "serp features", "click-through rate" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-january-2020", "slug": "google-core-update-january-2020", "name": "January 2020 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2020-01-13", "startDate": "2020-01-13", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Broad core update announced on the day of release, reported as relatively mild outside your-money-or-your-life topics.", "description": "Google announced the January 2020 core update on the day it began rolling out and said the rollout would take about a week or two. Tracking tools recorded moderate volatility, concentrated again in health, finance and other consequential categories. Google issued no new guidance and referred publishers to its 2019 core update blog post. No completion date was announced.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "ymyl" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2020, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-bert-multilingual-2019", "slug": "google-bert-multilingual-2019", "name": "BERT expands to 70+ languages", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2019-12-09", "startDate": "2019-12-09", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google extended BERT-based query understanding from US English to more than 70 languages worldwide.", "description": "Six weeks after the English launch, Google announced that BERT was being applied to searches in over seventy languages, making it a global ranking component. The rollout used a single multilingual model, and Google said improvements learned in one language transferred to others. Non-English markets recorded ranking movement in the same period.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "query understanding", "international" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "yandex-vega-2019", "slug": "yandex-vega-2019", "name": "Yandex Vega", "engine": "Yandex", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2019-12-01", "startDate": "2019-12-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Major Yandex ranking release that added neural pre-ranking, expert content assessment and faster index freshness.", "description": "Vega introduced neural network pre-ranking of documents, a large expert assessor programme for evaluating specialist content, and infrastructure changes that reduced the time between crawl and availability in results. Yandex presented it as its most significant ranking change of the decade for the Russian-language web. Only the month of announcement is documented here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ranking", "neural networks", "freshness" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yandex", "verified": false, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-bert-2019", "slug": "google-bert-2019", "name": "BERT", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2019-10-25", "startDate": "2019-10-25", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Transformer-based language model applied to ranking and featured snippets, affecting around 10% of English queries at launch.", "description": "BERT let Google interpret the role of prepositions and word order in a query rather than treating it as a bag of keywords, which mattered most for long conversational searches. Google described it as the biggest leap forward in query understanding in five years and said it affected about one in ten US English searches, plus featured snippets in two dozen countries. It expanded to more than 70 languages in December 2019. Google said explicitly that there is no way to optimise for BERT.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "query understanding", "featured snippets", "long tail" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-september-2019", "slug": "google-core-update-september-2019", "name": "September 2019 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2019-09-24", "startDate": "2019-09-24", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Broad core update that Google pre-announced and that tracking tools recorded as milder than the March and June 2019 releases.", "description": "Google announced the September 2019 core update on the day of release and pointed publishers to its existing guidance rather than issuing anything new. Third-party volatility trackers recorded a smaller spike than for the two previous 2019 core updates, and some sites affected in earlier updates recovered. No completion date was announced.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-site-diversity-2019", "slug": "google-site-diversity-2019", "name": "Site diversity change", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2019-06-06", "startDate": "2019-06-06", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google limited how many results from the same domain could appear in the top results, generally to two per query.", "description": "Google announced a change intended to increase the diversity of domains shown for a query, typically capping a single site at two listings in the top results. Subdomains were usually treated as part of the parent domain, though Google said they could be treated separately when it made sense. The change did not apply to all queries and left features such as top stories outside its scope.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "serp features", "domain diversity" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-june-2019", "slug": "google-core-update-june-2019", "name": "June 2019 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2019-06-02", "startDate": "2019-06-03", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "First core update Google pre-announced, giving publishers a day's notice before the rollout began.", "description": "Google announced on 2 June 2019 that a broad core update would launch the next day, the first time it had given advance notice. News publishers reported significant swings, and Google separately released a site diversity change in the same week, which complicated attribution. Google published a detailed blog post on what site owners should know about core updates shortly afterwards, which remains the canonical guidance.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "news", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-march-2019", "slug": "google-core-update-march-2019", "name": "March 2019 core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2019-03-12", "startDate": "2019-03-12", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Broad core update that Google retroactively named after the industry had already labelled it Florida 2, standardising month-based naming.", "description": "Google released a broad core update on 12 March 2019 without an advance name, prompting the industry to call it Florida 2 before Google asked that it be referred to as the March 2019 Core Update. Many sites that had lost visibility in the August 2018 update saw partial reversals. Google's guidance was unchanged: core updates reassess content broadly and there is no specific fix. No completion date was announced.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "ymyl" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2019, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-neural-matching-2018", "slug": "google-neural-matching-2018", "name": "Neural matching", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2018-09-24", "startDate": "2018-09-24", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "AI system that connects words in a query to concepts in documents, revealed as affecting about 30% of queries.", "description": "Google disclosed neural matching at its twentieth-anniversary event, describing it as a way to relate words to concepts so that pages using different vocabulary from the query can still be matched. It said the system was already affecting roughly 30% of queries. Google has repeatedly distinguished neural matching, which is about concept matching, from RankBrain and BERT, and has said there is nothing to optimise for it directly. It remains listed among Google's ranking systems.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "query understanding", "semantic search" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2018, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-august-2018", "slug": "google-core-update-august-2018", "name": "August 2018 broad core update (Medic)", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2018-08-01", "startDate": "2018-08-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Large core update that disproportionately affected health, medical and other your-money-or-your-life sites, nicknamed Medic.", "description": "Google confirmed a broad core update on 1 August 2018 that produced unusually large swings, concentrated in health, medical, finance and other consequential topics. Because of that concentration the industry named it Medic and linked it to the expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness concepts in Google's Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Google itself said there was no fix, that the update was not aimed at any single sector, and that publishers should read the rater guidelines to understand what raters are asked to assess.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "ymyl", "health", "expertise", "content quality" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2018, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-speed-update-2018", "slug": "google-speed-update-2018", "name": "Speed Update", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2018-01-17", "startDate": "2018-07-09", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Page speed became a ranking factor for mobile search, affecting only the slowest pages.", "description": "Google announced in January 2018 that from July page speed would be used as a ranking factor for mobile searches, and said the change would affect only pages delivering the slowest experience to users. It emphasised that relevant content could still rank well despite slow loading, and pointed publishers at Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome User Experience Report. The update prefigured the later Core Web Vitals programme.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "page speed", "mobile", "performance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2018, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-april-2018", "slug": "google-core-update-april-2018", "name": "April 2018 broad core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2018-04-20", "startDate": "2018-04-20", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second broad core update of 2018, confirmed by Google only after the industry noticed widespread ranking movement.", "description": "Google confirmed on 20 April 2018 that it had rolled out a broad core search algorithm update aimed at surfacing the most relevant content for queries. The confirmation came after several days of speculation rather than as a pre-announcement, and Google gave no precise start date or completion date. Guidance repeated the March framing: no specific fix exists, and content quality is the durable answer.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "relevance", "content quality" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2018, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-mobile-first-indexing-rollout-2018", "slug": "google-mobile-first-indexing-rollout-2018", "name": "Mobile-first indexing rollout begins", "engine": "Google", "type": "infrastructure", "announcedDate": "2018-03-26", "startDate": "2018-03-26", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google began migrating sites to mobile-first indexing, notifying each site through Search Console as it switched.", "description": "After eighteen months of experimentation, Google started moving sites to mobile-first indexing, using the mobile rendering of a page as the primary version for indexing and ranking. Migration was gradual and site by site, with notifications sent in Search Console, and Google stressed that mobile-first indexing was not itself a ranking boost. Sites with mobile content that omitted text, images or structured data present on desktop were most exposed.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "mobile", "indexing", "crawling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2018, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-core-update-march-2018", "slug": "google-core-update-march-2018", "name": "March 2018 broad core update", "engine": "Google", "type": "core-update", "announcedDate": "2018-03-12", "startDate": "2018-03-12", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google publicly confirmed a broad core algorithm update, establishing the naming convention used for every core update since.", "description": "Google confirmed on 12 March 2018 that a broad core algorithm update had rolled out during the previous week, affecting the appearance and ranking of some sites. It said there was no fix for pages that dropped, that the change was about better rewarding previously under-rewarded pages, and that publishers should keep focusing on strong content. Google did not give a precise start date, so the confirmation date is used here. This is generally treated as the first update of the modern core-update era.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "relevance" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2018, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-maccabees-2017", "slug": "google-maccabees-2017", "name": "Maccabees", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2017-12-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Unconfirmed December 2017 update reported to affect sites built on large numbers of keyword-permutation landing pages.", "description": "In mid-December 2017 the industry recorded significant volatility affecting sites that had generated many near-duplicate landing pages from keyword permutations. Google confirmed that several minor changes had gone out during the period but did not describe a named update or publish guidance. It is included as a documented but unconfirmed volatility event; only month-level precision is used here.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "doorway pages", "thin content" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2017, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-fred-2017", "slug": "google-fred-2017", "name": "Fred", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2017-03-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Unconfirmed March 2017 quality update associated with heavy losses at ad-dense, thin affiliate and low-value content sites.", "description": "In early March 2017 tracking tools recorded a sharp volatility spike concentrated on sites with thin content and aggressive monetisation through display advertising and affiliate links. Google acknowledged that updates had happened but declined to confirm a distinct system, and a Google engineer's joking suggestion that all unnamed updates be called \"Fred\" became the industry name. Only month-level precision is documented, so the date here is the first of the month.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "affiliate", "ads" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2017, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-intrusive-interstitials-2017", "slug": "google-intrusive-interstitials-2017", "name": "Intrusive interstitials penalty", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2016-08-23", "startDate": "2017-01-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Mobile pages that hid content behind intrusive pop-ups or interstitials could rank lower, announced five months before launch.", "description": "Google announced in August 2016 that from 10 January 2017 mobile pages showing intrusive interstitials immediately on arrival from search might not rank as highly. Legally required notices such as cookie or age gates, and reasonably sized banners, were explicitly excluded. Google described the signal as one of many and said good content could still outrank a page that failed it.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "mobile", "user experience", "interstitials" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2017, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-mobile-first-indexing-announced-2016", "slug": "google-mobile-first-indexing-announced-2016", "name": "Mobile-first indexing announced", "engine": "Google", "type": "infrastructure", "announcedDate": "2016-11-04", "startDate": "2016-11-04", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google announced it would begin using the mobile version of a page as the primary basis for indexing and ranking.", "description": "Google said that because most searches came from mobile devices, its index would move to using the mobile rendering of a page as the canonical version for indexing and ranking. It advised sites with separate mobile URLs or reduced mobile content that parity of content and structured data between versions would matter. Experimentation began immediately, with broad rollout starting in March 2018.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "mobile", "indexing", "crawling" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2016, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-penguin-4-2016", "slug": "google-penguin-4-2016", "name": "Penguin 4.0 (real-time, into core)", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2016-09-23", "startDate": "2016-09-23", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Penguin became part of the core algorithm, ran in real time and moved from demoting sites to devaluing spammy links.", "description": "Google announced that Penguin now operated continuously within core ranking, so changes were reflected as pages were recrawled rather than waiting for a refresh. It also became more granular, adjusting rankings for affected sections rather than whole sites, and Google said it now discounted spam links rather than penalising the target. Google stopped announcing Penguin updates from this point.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "link schemes", "core ranking" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2016, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-possum-2016", "slug": "google-possum-2016", "name": "Possum", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2016-09-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Unconfirmed local ranking change that altered filtering by physical address and expanded results for businesses outside city limits.", "description": "In early September 2016 local pack results shifted substantially: businesses located just outside city boundaries began ranking for city queries, and listings sharing an address or phone number were more aggressively filtered. The searcher's precise location also became a stronger factor. Google never confirmed the change or published guidance; the name was coined by the local search community, and only month-level precision is documented.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "local", "maps", "filtering" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2016, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-mobile-friendly-2-2016", "slug": "google-mobile-friendly-2-2016", "name": "Mobile-friendly update 2", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2016-03-16", "startDate": "2016-05-12", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google increased the weight of the mobile-friendly ranking signal in mobile search results.", "description": "Google announced in March 2016 that it would boost the effect of mobile-friendliness in mobile search from May, and said sites already mobile-friendly would need to do nothing. The change was smaller in practice than the 2015 launch because most large sites had already adapted. It reinforced the direction of travel that culminated in mobile-first indexing.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "mobile", "usability" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2016, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-panda-into-core-2016", "slug": "google-panda-into-core-2016", "name": "Panda folded into core ranking", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2016-01-11", "startDate": "2016-01-11", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google confirmed Panda had become part of its core ranking algorithm, ending separate named refreshes.", "description": "Google confirmed that the Panda quality classifier was now one of the core ranking signals rather than a periodically applied filter. In practice this meant quality assessments updated continuously and Google stopped announcing Panda refreshes. Google noted that Panda was still a signal among hundreds and was not applied in real time in the way Penguin later would be.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality", "core ranking" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2016, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-rankbrain-2015", "slug": "google-rankbrain-2015", "name": "RankBrain", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2015-10-26", "startDate": "2015-10-26", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Machine-learning system that interprets unfamiliar queries by relating them to concepts Google already understands.", "description": "RankBrain was revealed in an October 2015 interview rather than a formal announcement, and Google said it had already been running for months and was among the top three ranking signals. Its role is to map never-before-seen queries, then roughly 15% of daily searches, onto known concepts so that relevant documents can be retrieved. Google has consistently said there is nothing to optimise for RankBrain specifically. It remains listed among Google's ranking systems.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "query understanding", "machine learning", "long tail" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2015, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-panda-4-2-2015", "slug": "google-panda-4-2-2015", "name": "Panda 4.2", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2015-07-17", "startDate": "2015-07-17", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Final standalone Panda refresh, rolled out deliberately slowly over several months so no completion date was declared.", "description": "Google confirmed a Panda refresh affecting roughly 2–3% of English queries, but said it would propagate very slowly across the index over a period of months. Because of the pace, most sites saw gradual drift rather than a single movement, and Google never announced a completion date. It was the last named Panda refresh before the system was absorbed into core ranking.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2015, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-mobile-friendly-2015", "slug": "google-mobile-friendly-2015", "name": "Mobile-friendly update (Mobilegeddon)", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2015-02-26", "startDate": "2015-04-21", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Mobile-friendliness became a ranking signal for mobile searches, announced almost two months ahead of launch.", "description": "Google gave unusual advance notice that from 21 April 2015 mobile-friendliness would be used as a ranking signal on mobile searches, evaluated page by page and applied in real time. It provided a mobile-friendly test tool and a Search Console mobile usability report so publishers could prepare. The measured impact was smaller than the pre-launch coverage suggested, but the announcement drove a wave of responsive redesigns. A strengthened second version followed in May 2016.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "mobile", "usability", "technical seo" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2015, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-penguin-3-0-2014", "slug": "google-penguin-3-0-2014", "name": "Penguin 3.0", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2014-10-17", "startDate": "2014-10-17", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Long-delayed Penguin refresh, the first in more than a year, which let sites that had cleaned up their links recover.", "description": "Penguin 3.0 was primarily a data refresh rather than a new algorithm, and arrived after a gap of about twelve months during which affected sites had no route to recovery. Google said it affected under 1% of US English queries and that the rollout would continue for several weeks. The long wait between refreshes was a major driver of the decision to make Penguin continuous in 2016.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "links", "link schemes" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2014, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-panda-4-1-2014", "slug": "google-panda-4-1-2014", "name": "Panda 4.1", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2014-09-25", "startDate": "2014-09-23", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Panda refresh and algorithm tweak that Google said affected 3–5% of queries and was designed to help small, high-quality sites.", "description": "Google confirmed a Panda refresh with additional signal changes intended to identify low-quality content more precisely. It said 3–5% of queries were affected depending on locale, and that some small and medium sites producing good content should benefit. The rollout took roughly a week to propagate.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "content quality" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2014, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-https-ranking-signal-2014", "slug": "google-https-ranking-signal-2014", "name": "HTTPS as a ranking signal", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2014-08-06", "startDate": "2014-08-06", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google announced that serving a site over HTTPS would be used as a lightweight positive ranking signal.", "description": "As part of a wider security push, Google said encrypted connections would count as a ranking signal, describing it as very lightweight and affecting fewer than 1% of global queries at launch. Google said it might strengthen the signal over time to encourage migration. The announcement, combined with later browser interstitial warnings for HTTP pages, drove near-universal HTTPS adoption over the following years.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "security", "https", "technical seo" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2014, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-pigeon-2014", "slug": "google-pigeon-2014", "name": "Pigeon (local search update)", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2014-07-24", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Rebuilt local ranking so that traditional web ranking signals, including links and on-page factors, applied more directly to local results.", "description": "Pigeon tied the local results stack more closely to Google's core web ranking signals and changed distance and location handling, which shifted many local packs and shrank the geographic radius for some queries. Directories such as Yelp and TripAdvisor gained visibility, while some small local sites lost it. Google confirmed a local change had happened but did not publish a name or detailed guidance; the name was coined by Search Engine Land. It rolled out in US English first and reached other English markets in December 2014.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "local", "maps", "directories" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2014, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-panda-4-0-2014", "slug": "google-panda-4-0-2014", "name": "Panda 4.0", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2014-05-20", "startDate": "2014-05-20", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Major Panda algorithm revision, not just a data refresh, which Google said affected about 7.5% of English queries.", "description": "Panda 4.0 changed the underlying quality algorithm rather than simply rerunning it over new data, and Google said roughly 7.5% of English-language queries were affected. Several large content and press-release sites recorded steep visibility losses. Google also said the revision was intended to be gentler on smaller sites that produced genuinely useful content.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "thin content" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2014, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-hummingbird-2013", "slug": "google-hummingbird-2013", "name": "Hummingbird", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2013-09-26", "startDate": "2013-09-26", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Rewrite of Google's core query-processing engine to interpret the meaning of a whole query rather than matching individual keywords.", "description": "Hummingbird replaced the ranking engine's query-understanding layer so that conversational and long questions could be matched to documents on meaning rather than literal keywords. Google announced it at a press event on 26 September 2013 and said it had already been live for about a month, so no precise launch date exists. It underpinned the Knowledge Graph era and voice search, and it is the platform on which later language systems such as RankBrain and BERT were built.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "query understanding", "semantic search", "long tail" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2013, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-payday-loan-2013", "slug": "google-payday-loan-2013", "name": "Payday Loan update", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2013-06-11", "startDate": "2013-06-11", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Targeted heavily spammed query classes such as payday loans, pharmaceuticals, gambling and adult search.", "description": "Rather than applying broadly, this update focused on query spaces where aggressive spam was concentrated, including short-term loans, pharmaceuticals, gambling and pornographic queries. Google described it as affecting about 0.3% of US queries but much larger proportions in some other markets. Two further versions followed in May and June 2014, the second of which extended the approach to spammy queries as well as spammy sites.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "spam", "ymyl", "query spam" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2013, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-penguin-2-0-2013", "slug": "google-penguin-2-0-2013", "name": "Penguin 2.0", "engine": "Google", "type": "spam-update", "announcedDate": "2013-05-22", "startDate": "2013-05-22", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Second-generation Penguin that looked beyond home pages and analysed link spam at the level of individual pages across a site.", "description": "Penguin 2.0 extended link spam analysis deeper into site architecture rather than concentrating on home pages and top-level sections. Google said it affected roughly 2.3% of English queries. Sites that had cleaned up after the 2012 release but retained manipulative links to inner pages were affected for the first time.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "link schemes" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2013, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-emd-update-2012", "slug": "google-emd-update-2012", "name": "Exact Match Domain (EMD) update", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2012-09-28", "startDate": "2012-09-28", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Removed the ranking advantage of low-quality domains whose names exactly matched a commercial search phrase.", "description": "Google announced a change that stopped rewarding thin sites purely because their domain name matched a keyword phrase. Only low-quality exact-match domains were targeted; Google said strong brands on exact-match domains were unaffected. The update ended a widespread domain-buying tactic in affiliate and lead-generation niches.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "domains", "thin content", "affiliate" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2012, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-pirate-2012", "slug": "google-pirate-2012", "name": "Pirate (DMCA demotion signal)", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2012-08-10", "startDate": "2012-08-10", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Ranking demotion for sites with large numbers of valid copyright removal notices, aimed at piracy portals.", "description": "Google announced that the number of valid DMCA removal notices received for a site would become a ranking signal, demoting sites with many confirmed complaints. The change was aimed at torrent and streaming portals rather than mainstream publishers. A substantially strengthened version, generally called Pirate 2.0, followed in October 2014 and removed many piracy sites from the visible results altogether.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "copyright", "piracy", "dmca" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2012, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-penguin-2012", "slug": "google-penguin-2012", "name": "Penguin link spam system", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2012-04-24", "startDate": "2012-04-24", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Webspam algorithm targeting manipulative link building and over-optimised anchor text; launched April 2012 and later made real-time inside core ranking.", "description": "Penguin algorithmically demoted sites whose backlink profiles showed paid links, link networks, article-directory spam or heavily repeated commercial anchor text. Google said the first release affected around 3% of English queries and framed it as an anti-webspam measure rather than a quality measure. Recovery required refreshes of the algorithm, which made the early versions notoriously slow to escape. From Penguin 4.0 in September 2016 it ran continuously as part of core ranking and devalued bad links rather than demoting whole sites.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "anchor text", "link schemes" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2012, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-venice-2012", "slug": "google-venice-2012", "name": "Venice", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2012-02-27", "startDate": "2012-02-27", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Localised ordinary web results by the searcher's inferred location, making local intent apply to queries without an explicit place name.", "description": "Venice was disclosed in one of Google's monthly lists of search quality changes and made organic web results sensitive to the searcher's location even when the query contained no city or neighbourhood. This meant a query such as \"plumber\" began returning geographically relevant organic listings, not just map results. It substantially expanded the surface area of local SEO for service businesses and multi-location brands.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "local", "personalization", "query intent" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2012, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-page-layout-2012", "slug": "google-page-layout-2012", "name": "Page Layout (Top Heavy)", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2012-01-19", "startDate": "2012-01-19", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Demotion for pages that pushed content below the fold with excessive above-the-fold advertising.", "description": "Google began demoting pages where a user had to scroll past a heavy block of advertising before reaching any real content. The change was announced publicly and refreshed periodically over the following years. Google's guidance pointed site owners at browser-size testing tools and advised that reasonable ad density above the fold was not a problem.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "ads", "page layout", "user experience" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2012, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-freshness-update-2011", "slug": "google-freshness-update-2011", "name": "Freshness update", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2011-11-03", "startDate": "2011-11-03", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Query deserves freshness change that Google said affected around 35% of searches by favouring recent content for time-sensitive queries.", "description": "Building on the Caffeine indexing system, Google adjusted ranking so that recency mattered more for queries about current events, recurring events and frequently updated topics. Google said roughly 35% of searches were affected to some degree, though only a small share noticeably. Evergreen informational queries were largely unaffected, and Google cautioned against republishing content simply to appear fresh.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "freshness", "news", "query intent" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2011, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-panda-2-0-2011", "slug": "google-panda-2-0-2011", "name": "Panda 2.0 (international rollout)", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": "2011-04-11", "startDate": "2011-04-11", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Panda extended beyond the United States to all English-language queries worldwide, with user blocking data incorporated as a signal.", "description": "The second Panda release applied the quality classifier to English-language searches globally rather than only google.com, and Google said it began incorporating data from users who had blocked sites in search results. Many non-US publishers experienced their first Panda impact at this point. Google's guidance remained unchanged: improve overall site quality rather than target individual pages.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "international" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2011, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-panda-system-2011", "slug": "google-panda-system-2011", "name": "Panda content quality system", "engine": "Google", "type": "system", "announcedDate": "2011-02-24", "startDate": "2011-02-24", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Site-wide content quality classifier that demoted thin, duplicated and low-value pages; launched February 2011 and later folded into core ranking.", "description": "Panda applied a machine-learned quality score at site level, so a large share of low-value pages could suppress rankings across an entire domain. The first release affected roughly 12% of US English queries and hit content farms, scraper sites and thin aggregators hardest. Google published a list of questions site owners should ask about content quality as its official guidance. Panda ran as a separate periodically refreshed filter until it was incorporated into the core ranking algorithm in January 2016.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "content quality", "thin content", "duplicate content", "content farms" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2011, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-caffeine-2010", "slug": "google-caffeine-2010", "name": "Caffeine indexing system", "engine": "Google", "type": "infrastructure", "announcedDate": "2009-08-10", "startDate": "2010-06-08", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Rebuilt indexing infrastructure that indexed pages continuously instead of in batches, producing an index Google described as 50% fresher.", "description": "Caffeine replaced Google's batch-oriented indexing pipeline with an incremental system that could analyse and publish pages as they were crawled. Google previewed it for developer testing in August 2009 and completed the switchover in June 2010. It did not change ranking factors directly, but it made freshness a practical ranking input and greatly shortened the time between publication and indexing.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "indexing", "crawling", "freshness" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2010, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-may-day-2010", "slug": "google-may-day-2010", "name": "May Day", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2010-05-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Change to how Google assessed long-tail queries that cut traffic to thin, template-generated category and tag pages.", "description": "Around the turn of April and May 2010 sites with large numbers of thin, automatically generated pages lost traffic on long-tail queries while head-term rankings were largely unaffected. Google confirmed it was an algorithmic change to long-tail results and framed it as a quality judgement rather than a penalty. It is often read as a precursor to Panda. Only month-level precision is documented, so the start date is set to the first of the month.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "long tail", "thin content", "ecommerce" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2010, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-vince-2009", "slug": "google-vince-2009", "name": "Vince", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2009-02-20", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Change that gave large, well-known brands substantially more visibility for generic head terms.", "description": "In February 2009 broad commercial queries such as generic product terms began returning large brand domains where smaller affiliate and niche sites had previously ranked. Google described the change as an adjustment that weighted trust, authority and reputation more heavily rather than a brand bonus as such. The name comes from the engineer credited with the change in Google's own commentary at the time.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "brands", "head terms", "authority" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2009, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-rel-canonical-2009", "slug": "google-rel-canonical-2009", "name": "rel=\"canonical\" introduced", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2009-02-12", "startDate": "2009-02-12", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google, Yahoo and Microsoft introduced the canonical link element so publishers could consolidate duplicate URLs onto a preferred version.", "description": "The canonical link element gave site owners a way to tell search engines which of several near-identical URLs should be indexed and receive consolidated ranking signals. It was announced jointly by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and immediately became a core technical SEO control for faceted navigation, tracking parameters and syndicated content. Google's guidance has always treated it as a hint rather than a directive.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "duplicate content", "indexing", "canonicalization" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2009, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-dewey-2008", "slug": "google-dewey-2008", "name": "Dewey", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2008-03-31", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Large but never-explained spring 2008 reshuffle of results, reported by the industry as a broad ranking change.", "description": "At the end of March 2008 the industry recorded a substantial reshuffle of results across many query classes, nicknamed Dewey after a Google engineer's forum post. Google acknowledged that something had changed but never described the mechanism or published guidance. It is included here as a well-documented but unconfirmed volatility event.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "rankings" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2008, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-paid-links-pagerank-2007", "slug": "google-paid-links-pagerank-2007", "name": "Paid link PageRank penalties", "engine": "Google", "type": "penalty-action", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2007-10-07", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google visibly reduced toolbar PageRank for sites judged to be selling links, signalling enforcement against the paid-link market.", "description": "In October 2007 a large number of sites known to sell links saw their publicly displayed toolbar PageRank cut, in some cases by several points. Google representatives confirmed the reductions were deliberate and tied to link selling rather than a data glitch. The action marked the start of sustained public enforcement against paid links, which was later codified in the link spam policies.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "paid links", "links" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2007, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-universal-search-2007", "slug": "google-universal-search-2007", "name": "Universal Search", "engine": "Google", "type": "product-launch", "announcedDate": "2007-05-16", "startDate": "2007-05-16", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google began blending news, images, video, local and book results into the main results page, ending the era of ten uniform blue links.", "description": "Universal Search merged Google's vertical indexes into a single ranked results page, so an ordinary query could return images, video, news or map results interleaved with web pages. It created the first real distinction between ranking a web page and owning a SERP feature, and made vertical optimisation part of mainstream SEO. The change was announced publicly by Google and rolled out over the following weeks.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "serp features", "verticals", "images", "video", "local" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2007, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-big-daddy-2006", "slug": "google-big-daddy-2006", "name": "Big Daddy", "engine": "Google", "type": "infrastructure", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2005-12-01", "endDate": "2006-03-01", "confirmed": true, "summary": "Infrastructure rebuild of Google's crawling and indexing stack that changed how redirects, canonicalisation and URL handling were processed.", "description": "Big Daddy replaced the data-centre software behind crawling and indexing rather than changing ranking factors directly. It altered how Google handled 301/302 redirects, URL canonicalisation and duplicate content, and reduced crawl allocation to sites Google judged to have poor link profiles. Google engineers discussed the rollout publicly as it moved across data centres between December 2005 and March 2006; only month-level precision is documented.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "crawling", "indexing", "redirects", "canonicalization" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2005, "durationDays": 90 }, { "id": "google-jagger-2005", "slug": "google-jagger-2005", "name": "Jagger", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2005-10-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "Multi-phase autumn 2005 update aimed at reciprocal links, paid links and link farms, rolled out in roughly three stages.", "description": "Jagger rolled out in several distinct phases through the autumn of 2005 and mainly devalued manipulative link patterns: reciprocal link schemes, purchased links and low-quality directories. Because it landed in waves, sites saw repeated shifts over several weeks rather than a single drop. Google did not announce it; only the month range is documented, so the start date is set to the first of October 2005.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "link farms", "paid links" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2005, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-nofollow-attribute-2005", "slug": "google-nofollow-attribute-2005", "name": "rel=\"nofollow\" link attribute introduced", "engine": "Google", "type": "policy", "announcedDate": "2005-01-18", "startDate": "2005-01-18", "endDate": null, "confirmed": true, "summary": "Google, Yahoo and MSN jointly introduced rel=\"nofollow\" so that publishers could mark links that should not pass ranking credit.", "description": "Facing large-scale comment spam on blogs and forums, Google announced a shared link attribute that told crawlers a link should not be treated as an endorsement. The three major engines of the time adopted it simultaneously, which made it an effective de facto standard within weeks. It became the foundation of later link-hygiene guidance and was extended in 2019 with the rel=\"sponsored\" and rel=\"ugc\" values.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "links", "comment spam", "user generated content" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2005, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-austin-2004", "slug": "google-austin-2004", "name": "Austin", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2004-01-01", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "January 2004 follow-up to Florida that further targeted hidden text, meta-tag stuffing and other on-page manipulation.", "description": "Austin continued the cleanup Florida began, focusing on invisible text, meta-tag keyword stuffing and deceptive on-page techniques that had survived the November 2003 change. Sites that had partially recovered after Florida were hit again. Google never announced or named the update; only the month is documented, so the date here is set to the first of that month.", "impact": "medium", "affects": [ "on-page spam", "hidden text", "meta tags" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-algorithm-history/", "verified": false, "year": 2004, "durationDays": null }, { "id": "google-florida-2003", "slug": "google-florida-2003", "name": "Florida", "engine": "Google", "type": "algorithm", "announcedDate": null, "startDate": "2003-11-15", "endDate": null, "confirmed": false, "summary": "The first update to cause mass ranking loss for commercial sites, targeting keyword stuffing and early link manipulation just before the 2003 holiday season.", "description": "Rolled out in mid-November 2003, Florida devalued the keyword-stuffing and low-quality inbound-link tactics that dominated early SEO, and removed large numbers of commercial sites from page one. It is widely regarded as the first update to make search rankings a mainstream business risk, in part because of its timing before the holiday shopping period. Google did not publish an announcement or a name; the name and date come from contemporaneous industry reporting.", "impact": "high", "affects": [ "keyword stuffing", "commercial queries", "link manipulation" ], "officialUrl": null, "sourceUrl": "https://searchengineland.com/library/platforms/google/google-algorithm-updates", "verified": true, "year": 2003, "durationDays": null } ] }