Users can now choose to share their device location so ChatGPT can provide more relevant information, such as local recommendations, news, and weather. Sharing your device location is completely optional and off until you choose to enable it.
If there is a system-wide Search issue, you can refer to our public channels as these will be the first and only place that engineering posts updates. Please check the Search Liaison social posts for updates or check our support documentation.
For most of the last two decades, SEO mostly meant one thing, where you ranked on Google (and occasionally Bing). The customer journey was familiar. Someone searched, scanned a list of links, clicked and explored. Now the journey is increasingly 'ask, get an answer, take action.' And the platforms shaping that journey include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google itself, which is inserting AI summaries, what Google calls AI Overviews, into search results.
Several weeks after Google rolled out support for Preferred Sources globally, Google added official help documentation for site owners to use to help them understand what it is all about and how to encourage their readers to subscribe to your site as a preferred source. In December, Google rolled out Preferred sources globally after rolling it out in the US and India in August and beta testing it in June. Now the new help documentation is available here if you need it.
Just a couple of months ago, Google had ads on the local pack for less than 3% of tracked keywords; now it's up to about 22% of tracked keywords. This was data posted by Joy Hawkins on X she got from Places Scout. Joy wrote, "Just had Places Scout re-run the data to see how this looks in January so far (we're tracking across 1200 mobile ranking reports). The increase isn't slowing down yet."
When AI tools started taking off, Google faced a serious problem: the risk of its search results being flooded with AI-generated spam. If left unchecked, the world's most-used search engine would lose trust - and with it, revenue. Search drives almost 57% of Alphabet's income, totaling over $198bn annually. And that revenue was at risk. AI spam isn't like old-school SEO spam. It's better written, harder to detect, and convincing enough to fool algorithms.
Google's selection of an image preview is completely automated and takes into account a number of different sources to select which image on a given page is shown on Google (for example, a text result image or the preview image in Discover). You can influence which image gets selected by providing your preferred image through one of the following metadata sources: Specify the schema.org primaryImageOfPage property with a URL or ImageObject, or specify an image URL or ImageObject property and attach it to the main entity, or specify the og:image meta tag.
There has been an uptick in complaints from businesses around Google local reviews disappearing or being removed. We had something similar last October and it was fixed in December and now I am seeing more complaints about reviews going missing. There are many many threads with complaints about this across the Google forums and in the Local Search Forums - I'll embed them below.
What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots? What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing? What happens if they continue crawling those pages but actually toss them out before using the content to form a response? ...And we keep conflating "bot crawling activity" with "the bots are using/liking my markdown content?" How will we know if they're actually using the .md files or not?
