A summary of what actually happened in search during this period, ranked by likely impact on a single site rather than by publication time. Built from our own archive of 1,106 stories.
Ranked by estimated impact on a single site, not by publication time.
Incident began at 2026-09-24 09:15 and ended at 2026-10-08 01:00 (all times are US/Pacific).The rollout was complete as of October 8, 2026. Affected products: Ranking
Ranking & Algorithms
I know I just reported on an unconfirmed Google Search ranking update from this past Saturday, October 24th. But I am now seeing a larger spike in volatility, along with an increase in SEO community…
Ranking & Algorithms
This past Saturday, October 24th, we saw some significant ranking volatility captured by many of the third-party Google tracking tools. There was also some heavy chatter within the SEO industry about…
Ranking & Algorithms
Google recently made substantial updates to my favorite piece of search documentation: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. For years, this has been my favourite Google documentation…
Content & Quality Policy & Penalties
Rajan Patel wrote on X that disabled source clicks on Google Discover AI summaries were a bug in an experiment that has been turned off.
SERP Features
You can now create a link to share a Duck.ai chat! Anyone who receives the link can read the chat, continue it, or save it. No account required.
WordPress announced security release version 7.1.4 that fixes 22 vulnerabilities, including one that affects its updater.
From Apple's repeatedly delayed Siri AI to OpenAI's messy "super app" launch, here's a look at the AI projects that shut down or missed expectations.
We’re updating AI Mode and AI Overviews to include clearer links, context about sources, and more.
AI Search & Visibility
Universal Cart helps make holiday shopping easier. It’s now available in the U.S. across Search and the Gemini app.
E-commerce
Over the years, the Search Central YouTube channel has published hundreds of videos across various series, from Search for Beginners and Ask Googlebot to Search Console Training and Search Off the…
Crawling & Indexing
Google seems to be rolling out access to the Google Business Profile AI-powered messaging feature to more businesses. I believe we covered this in June of this year, but since then, Google made some…
Local SEO
Assembled from our own archive of 1,106 stories, which currently runs from 4 October 2023. Ranking is by the impact score described on the front page — an estimate of how much a story is likely to affect one website, not a measure of how much attention it got.
The archive only holds what it has seen. Periods before it started are empty rather than quiet, and it gets more complete every week it runs.
