Google Search Central Blog
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/
Official news for web professionals about Google Search, related products, and events.Introducing the Google Trends API (alpha): a new way to access Search Trends data
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/07/trends-api
We're excited to announce the Google Trends API alpha test. This new API will help
Researchers, Journalists, and Developers to understand Search behaviors and patterns.
While Trends data is available through the Trends website, the API provides new ways to
use the data inside your organization in a scalable way.
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Thu, 24 Jul 2025 04:00:00 +0000The new Search Console Insights report is here
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/06/search-console-insights
We're excited to announce the launch of the new Search Console Insights report. The new report offers
even more insights and a deeper integration with Search Console's Performance report.
With this change, we aim to streamline your workflow, make it easier to find opportunities to improve your
site's performance, and provide more ways to explore specific areas of interest.
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Mon, 30 Jun 2025 05:00:00 +0000SCL Deep Dive APAC 2025: Community Speakers and a New Format
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/06/scl-dd-apac-2025-news
We hope you're as excited about
Search Central Live Deep Dive APAC
as we are! With just a few weeks to go, we wanted to share an exciting experiment that we're
planning to run at the event, and introduce our community speakers. Let's start with the
experiment.
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Mon, 23 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000Simplifying the search results page
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/06/simplifying-search-results
As part of our ongoing efforts to
simplify the Google Search results page, we will be phasing out support for a few
structured data features in
Search. We regularly evaluate the usefulness of Search features, both for users and website owners.
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Thu, 12 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000Adding markup support for loyalty programs
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/06/loyalty-program
Member benefits, such as lower prices and earning loyalty points are a major factor considered by
shoppers when buying products online. Today we're adding support for defining loyalty programs under
Organization structured data
combined with loyalty benefits under Product
structured data.
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Tue, 10 Jun 2025 10:00:00 +0000Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/05/succeeding-in-ai-search
As a site owner, publisher or creator, you may be wondering how to best succeed in our AI search
experiences, such as AI Overviews and our new AI Mode.
The underpinnings of what Google has long advised carries across to these new experiences. Focus
on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content. Then you should be well
positioned as Google Search evolves, as our core goal remains the same: to help people find
outstanding, original content that adds unique value. With that in mind, here are some things to
consider for success in Google Search all around, including our AI experiences.
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Wed, 21 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000App deep links: connecting your website and app
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/05/app-deep-links
Since 2013, Search has recognized the importance of app deep links in a mobile-centric world.
In this post, we'll review the current state of app deep links — take a look at what they
are, the benefits of using them, and how to implement them effectively.
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Fri, 02 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000Register now for Search Central Live Deep Dive 2025
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/04/search-central-live-deep-dive-2025
We're ready to open registrations for the first ever Search Central Live Deep Dive, a 3-day event
that will be held in Bangkok, Thailand this year on July 23-25!
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Tue, 29 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000The Search Analytics API now supports hourly data
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/04/san-hourly-data
A few months ago, we announced an improved way to view
recent performance data in Search Console.
The "24 hours" view includes data from the last available 24 hours and appears with a delay of
only a few hours. This view can help you find information about which pages and queries are
performing in this recent timeframe and how content you recently published is picking up.
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Wed, 9 Apr 2025 10:00:00 +0000Robots Refresher: Future-proof Robots Exclusion Protocol
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/03/robots-future
In the previous posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) we explored what's already
possible to do with its various components — namely robots.txt and the URI level controls.
In this post we will explore how the REP can play a supporting role in the ever-evolving relation
between automatic clients and the human web.
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Fri, 28 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000Get Ready for Search Central Live Asia Pacific 2025
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/03/search-central-live-deep-dive-apac-2025
Hello 2025! (Yeah, we know, time flies!) We've had some exciting plans in the works for
Search Central Live (SCL) Asia Pacific this year, and we're super excited to let you in on what
we've been up to. We've been listening closely to your feedback, and we're cooking up
something different than what we usually do–something bigger, deeper, and more tailored to
you!
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Mon, 17 Mar 2025 05:30:00 +0000Robots Refresher: page-level granularity
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/03/robots-refresher-page-level
With the robots.txt file, site owners
have a simple way to control which parts of a website are accessible by crawlers.
To help site owners further express how search engines and web
crawlers can use their pages, the web standards group came
up with robots meta tags in 1996, just a few months after meta tags
were proposed for HTML (and anecdotally, also before Google
was founded). Later, X-Robots-Tag HTTP response headers were added.
These instructions are sent together with a URL, so crawlers can only take them into account
if they're not disallowed from crawling the URL through the robots.txt file. Together, they
form the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).
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Fri, 14 Mar 2025 14:30:00 +0000Robots Refresher: robots.txt - a flexible way to control how machines explore your website
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/03/robotstxt-flexible-way-to-control
A long-standing tool for website owners, robots.txt has been in active use for over 30 years and
is broadly supported by crawler operators (such as tools for site owners, services, and search
engines). In this edition of the robots refresher series,
we'll take a closer look at robots.txt as a flexible way to tell robots what you want them to do
(or not do) on your website.
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Fri, 7 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000Search Central Live is going to Madrid
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/03/search-central-live-madrid
We're very excited to announce that Search Central Live is going to Madrid for the first time on April 9!
The event will have a mix of presenters from the Google Search, News, and Partnerships teams and the content
will be delivered in English and Spanish, but we'll have live translation.
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Wed, 5 Mar 2025 06:00:00 +0000First Search Central Live in South Africa
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/03/first-search-central-live-south-africa
On April 2, 2025 we'll be in Johannesburg, South Africa for the very first Search Central Live event in Africa!
We're excited to welcome you at Search Central Live South Africa and talk about all things Google Search!
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Mon, 3 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000Robots Refresher: introducing a new series
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/02/intro-robots-refresher
Every now and then we get questions about robots.txt, robots meta tags, and the control
functionality that they offer. Following our December series on crawling,
we thought this would be the perfect time to put together a light refresher. So, if you're curious
about these controls, follow along in this new blog post series!
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Mon, 24 Feb 2025 10:00:00 +0000Search Central Live is going to New York City
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/02/search-central-live-nyc
We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is coming to New York City for the first time on March 20, 2025.
The Google Search team has organized events in the city several times, but this time we're bringing our main Search event to the city that never sleeps.
Come and join us for a day of discussion, listening, and meeting new people.
Thu, 13 Feb 2025 04:00:00 +0000Simplifying the visible URL element on mobile search results
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/01/simplifying-breadcrumbs
Mobile searchers will soon see a cleaner, more streamlined look for how URLs appear in search
results. Initially introduced as part of the "site hierarchy" feature,
we've found that the breadcrumb element isn't as useful to people who are searching on mobile
devices, as it gets cut off on smaller screens. Starting today, we'll no longer show breadcrumbs
on mobile search results in all languages and regions where Google Search is available (they
continue to appear on desktop search results).
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Wed, 15 Jan 2025 04:00:00 +0000Search Central Live is returning to Brazil
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2025/01/search-central-live-brazil
We're excited to announce that Search Central Live is returning to São Paulo in 2025. Following our
successful events in 2023 and 2024, we're continuing our mission to help Brazilian businesses enhance
their site's performance in Google Search. And this year we're visiting Recife for the first time.
Wed, 15 Jan 2025 04:00:00 +0000Crawling out of December: the 2024 recap
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/crawling-out-of-december
It might happen that by the end of this post you're going to try to decide who wrote this blog
post, a large language model (LLM) or Gary. And you'd be right to ponder that and delve into the
intricacies of the language used that gives away LLMs, for this is the time of the year when we
can get away with publishing a blog post with barely any review (future Gary will deal with the
potential, nay, likely fallout I guess). As we often do in the last post of a year, we're looking
at what happened on Google Search Central in 2024 according to an LLM (or Gary), and maybe hinting
at what might be coming in 2025 (but maybe this is just a hook to keep you reading...).
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Tue, 31 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000Crawling December: CDNs and crawling
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/crawling-december-cdns
Content delivery networks (CDNs) are particularly well suited for decreasing latency of your
website and in general keeping web traffic-related headaches away. This is their primary purpose
after all: speedy delivery of your content even if your site is getting loads of traffic. The "D"
in CDN is for delivering or distributing the content across the world, so transfer times to your
users is also lower than just hosting in one data center somewhere. In this post we're going to
explore how to make use of CDNs in a way that improves crawling and users' experience on your
site, and we also look at some nuances of crawling CDN-backed sites.
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Tue, 24 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000Crawling December: Faceted navigation
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/crawling-december-faceted-nav
Faceted navigation is a great way to help users find what they need on your site, but it can
create an SEO nightmare if not implemented carefully. Why? Because it can generate a near-infinite
number of URLs, which causes all sorts of crawling problems.
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Tue, 17 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000Search Central Live Kuala Lumpur and Taipei 2024: Recap
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/scl-asia-h2-recap
The Search Central Live events in Kuala Lumpur and Taipei were nothing short of amazing, in large
thanks to the over 600 people who attended the events! We were thrilled to see the level of
enthusiasm and engagement from attendees even if, on the day prior to the Taipei event, we
collectively had to deal with
typhoon Kong Rey,
the first supertyphoon in Taiwan's history to make landfall after mid-October. Here's a deeper
dive into what made these events so special and what's next.
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Fri, 13 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000An improved way to view your recent performance data in Search Console
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/recent-data-search-console
To better help you monitor the recent performance of your content, we're launching the '24 hours'
view to the SC performance reports and improving the freshness of the data. We're rolling out
these changes to all properties gradually over the next few months, so you might not see changes
right away.
Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000Crawling December: HTTP caching
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/crawling-december-caching
Allow us to cache, pretty please.
As the internet grew over the years, so did how much Google crawls. While Google's crawling
infrastructure supports heuristic caching mechanisms, in fact always had, the number of requests
that can be returned from local caches has decreased: 10 years ago about 0.026% of the total
fetches were cacheable, which is already not that impressive; today that number is 0.017%.
Mon, 09 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000Crawling December: The how and why of Googlebot crawling
https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/12/crawling-december-resources
You may have heard that Google Search needs to do a bit of work before a web page can show up in
Google Search results. One of these steps is called crawling. Crawling for Google Search is done
by Googlebot, a program running on Google servers that retrieves a URL and handles things like
network errors, redirects, and other small complications that it might encounter as it works its
way through the web. But there are a few details that aren't often talked about. Each week this
month we're going to explore some of those details as they may have a significant effect on how
your sites are crawled.
Tue, 03 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000