Google Search Updates & Release Notes

Today, we're excited to announce the launch of new Search Generative AI performance reports in Search Console, including dedicated reports for Search and Discover, to help you understand your site's visibility within generative AI features on Search.

The new Search Console reports are designed to give you dedicated views of your impressions within generative AI features on Search, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode, as well as generative AI features in Discover. This data is included in the overall performance report, where it will continue to be tracked to give site owners an overview of the overall visibility of their site in Google Search. Today, we are launching a separate view dedicated to visibility from generative AI features.

We are rolling these reports out to a subset of websites, allowing us to thoroughly test them and receive feedback before making them widely available.

To help you understand how pages from your site are shown, our new reports show the following information:

• Impressions: How often URLs from your site appeared in generative AI features in Search and Discover.
• Pages: Check which URLs appeared within AI features.
• Countries: Understand your visibility on a country basis.
• Devices: Identify the devices people are using when seeing your website (available for Search results).
• Dates: Monitor your performance over time with hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly granularity.

Learn more about the data available in our help center documentation on the generative AI performance reports.

As always, we value your feedback: please let us know what you think using the "Submit feedback" link in Search Console, with the dedicated feedback form for these reports, or in the Google Search Central Community. We're continuing to work with website owners to understand what insights and data would be most helpful to inform their strategies, such as adding additional metrics over time.

Posted by Hillel Maoz, Search Ecosystem Engineering Manager and Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead, Search Console

Today we've released the February 2026 Discover core update. This is a broad update to our systems that surface articles in Discover. Our testing shows that people find the Discover experience more useful and worthwhile with this update.

This update will improve the experience in a few key ways:

• Showing users more locally relevant content from websites based in their country
• Reducing sensational content and clickbait in Discover
• Showing more in-depth, original, and timely content from websites with expertise in a given area, based on our systems' understanding of a site's content

Since many sites demonstrate deep knowledge across a wide range of subjects, our systems are designed to identify expertise on a topic-by-topic basis. So whether a site has expertise in multiple areas or has a deep focus on a single topic, there's equal opportunity to show up in Discover. For example, a local news site with a dedicated gardening section could have established expertise in gardening, even though it covers other topics. In contrast, a movie review site that wrote a single article about gardening would likely not.

We'll continue to show content that's personalized based on people's creator and source preferences.

As with all core updates, this change may lead to fluctuations in Discover traffic. Some sites might see increases or decreases; many sites may see no change at all. We're releasing this update to English language users in the US, and will expand it to all countries and languages in the months ahead.

For site owners seeking guidance, our general guidance about core updates applies, as does our Get on Discover help page.

Should you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn, or join our Search Central help community to discuss among peers.

Posted by John Mueller, Search Advocate, Google

Analyzing search traffic trends is a core part of SEO. While granular, daily data is essential for spotting immediate issues or spikes, it can sometimes be harder to understand the bigger picture. Daily fluctuations can make it hard to see if your site is truly growing or declining over time.

Until now, the Performance report charts displayed data on a daily basis. Today, we are excited to introduce a new feature in the Search Console Performance report: weekly and monthly Views. This new functionality lets you adjust the time aggregation of any of the performance charts, helping you smooth out daily changes and focus on the overall trend of traffic to your website.

Activating weekly / monthly aggregations

You will find the new granularity selector in the chart area within the Performance report (both for Search results, Google News, and Discover). Click the drop-down that says "Daily" (the default) and select your preferred view. The chart will update to reflect the new view.

This feature is particularly powerful when comparing date ranges. If you have ever tried to compare "Last 3 months" to "Previous 3 months," you know that misaligned weekends can make the daily comparison chart difficult to interpret. By switching to weekly or monthly granularity, the chart becomes much cleaner, allowing you to compare performance between two periods without getting distracted by day-of-the-week mismatches.

Note that with this change we're also changing the export file structure slightly. If you export your data, you might see changes to file and tab names, some column headers, and the sort order to align with the chosen granularity.

The new granularity options are rolling out globally to all Search Console properties starting today. We hope this update helps you uncover clearer insights and tell a better story with your data.

As always, if you have any feedback, share your comments on LinkedIn or post in the Google Search Central Community.

Posted by Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead, Search Console

Many companies and organizations manage their digital presence using different platforms, including social media websites, in addition to their own websites. This aligns well with users who are increasingly drawn to different types of content formats and social media platforms.

Today, we are excited to announce a new experiment in Search Console that offers site owners a unified view of their Google Search performance across their websites and social channels. With this update, we are expanding the Search Console Insights report to include performance data not only for your website, but also for some of your social channels. This new integration lets you review Search performance of social channels associated with your website directly within Search Console.

The new view will display familiar performance insights for each channel, including:

• Total reach: total clicks and impressions driving traffic from Google to your social channel.
• Content performance: top social channel pages, as well as those trending up or down.
• Search queries: top and trending queries leading users to your social profiles.
• Audience location: top countries where users are clicking on your social channel in Search results.
• Additional traffic sources: total clicks your site receives from additional sources such as Image Search, Video Search, News Search, and Discover.

We are rolling out these new insights for a limited set of websites. At this first stage, the insights are available only for sites and channels that Search Console has identified automatically. On the Search Console Insights report, you will be prompted to add the social channels that Search Console has automatically identified and associated with your website.

We hope these insights will give you a better understanding of your combined performance in the insights report. We're excited about this early experiment, and are looking forward to your feedback, which you can share through the thumbs up / down buttons available in the cards, or through the "Submit feedback" link. You can also share your comments on LinkedIn or post in the Google Search Central Community.

Posted by Hillel Maoz, Search Ecosystem Engineering Manager

Shipping speed, cost, and return policies are critical factors for online shoppers. When customers have clear information on fulfillment, it builds trust and improves their shopping experience.

Last year, we launched shipping and return policies in Search Console for merchants with a configured Merchant Center account. We also enabled all merchants to add organization-level return policies with structured data for the first time.

We're excited to announce that we're now expanding the options for merchants to provide shipping and returns information, even if they don't have a Merchant Center account. Merchants can now tell Google about their shipping and returns policies in two distinct ways: by configuring them directly in Search Console or by using new organization-level structured data.

Configure policies directly in Search Console

We're expanding the "Shipping and returns" feature in Search Console settings to be available to all websites that have been identified by Google as online merchants.

Previously, this feature was only available to merchants with a configured Merchant Center account. Now, if Google identifies your website as an online merchant, you can set up your shipping and returns policies directly within Search Console. This provides a UI-based method to share your information with Google.

This is an alternative to providing this information with structured data. It's important to note that settings configured in Search Console will take precedence over structured data on your site.

The "Shipping and returns" configuration will be rolling out gradually over the coming weeks for all countries and languages.

Add organization-level shipping policy markup

If you prefer to manage this information with code, we're introducing organization-level shipping policy structured data.

This new markup support complements last year's launch of organization-level return policies. Instead of adding shipping markup to every single product, you can now specify a general, site-wide shipping policy. This is ideal when your shipping policies apply to the majority of your products, as it reduces the amount of markup you need to manage. Shipping policies specified for individual products will still take priority over this general, organization-level policy for those specific items.

We recommend placing shipping structured data (nested under Organization) on the page where you describe your shipping policy. You can then test your markup using the Rich Results Test by submitting the URL of the page with shipping markup or pasting the code snippet with shipping markup. Using the tool, you can confirm whether or not your markup is valid. For example, here is a test for shipping policy markup:

If your site is an online or local business, we recommend using one of the OnlineStore or LocalBusiness subtypes of Organization.

We continue to recommend adding shipping policies for individual products to override your organization-level shipping policy or when you don't have a general shipping policy that applies to the majority of your products. If you're already specifying product-level shipping policies, you can continue to use them while also adding an organization-level shipping policy, if applicable.

By providing your shipping and returns information through either of these methods, your fulfillment policies may appear in more search results, including knowledge panels, brand profiles, and product search results. This can improve your visibility, showcase fulfillment services like free and fast shipping, and ultimately attract more customers.

We hope these new options make it easier for all merchants to showcase their fulfillment policies and optimize their appearance in search results. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us in the Google Search Central Community.

Posted by Pascal Fleury and Irina Tuduce, Google Shopping software engineers, and Jay Rana, Product Manager

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.

We're phasing out these specific structured data types because our analysis shows that they're not commonly used in Search, and we found that these specific displays are no longer providing significant additional value for users. Removing them will help streamline the results page and focus on other experiences that are more useful and widely used.

This update won't affect how pages are ranked. This simplification means that for some results, the specific visual enhancements powered by these lesser-used markups will no longer appear, leading to a more streamlined presentation. The use of these structured data types outside of Google Search (and dependent features) is not affected.

The following structured data types will no longer be supported in Google Search results and will be phased out over the coming weeks and months:

• Book Actions
• Course Info
• Claim Review
• Estimated Salary
• Learning Video
• Special Announcement
• Vehicle Listing

Structured data can be a valuable way for website owners to describe their content and enable helpful Search features. While we're retiring some lesser-used displays, we'll continue to actively support a range of structured data types that users find helpful when evaluating content to visit.

We believe this change contributes to a cleaner, more focused Search results page for everyone. We'll keep looking for ways to simplify the Search results page to provide the best experience for users and website owners, and we'll share updates as we continue this work. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us in the Google Search Central Community or on LinkedIn.

Posted by Henry Hsu, Product Manager, Google Search

Updates

Update on September 8, 2025

We are removing support in Search Console for the following structured data types, as these types have been phased out from Search results: Course Info, Claim Review, Estimated Salary, Learning Video, Special Announcement, and Vehicle Listing. Starting on September 9, these types will be removed from Search Console rich result reporting, the Rich Result Test, and the list of Search appearance filters (if applicable for the type). The Search Console API will continue to support these types through December 2025.

For bulk data export users, keep in mind that the deprecated search appearance fields will be reported as NULL by October 1, 2025. If your queries have conditions, you may need to update them.

For example, the following query should be updated, as it doesn't account for the possibility of a deprecated search appearance:

SELECT data_date, SUM(clicks) FROM `myproject.searchconsole.searchdata_url_impressions` WHERE data_date > DATE('2025-09-01') AND NOT is_learning_videos -- skips rows where is_learning_videos is NULL GROUP BY 1;

Instead, we recommend using the IS operator to write future-proof queries that will continue to work even if an appearance becomes NULL.

SELECT data_date, SUM(clicks) FROM `myproject.searchconsole.searchdata_url_impressions` WHERE data_date > DATE('2025-09-01') AND is_learning_videos IS NOT TRUE -- works whether is_learning_videos is false or NULL GROUP BY 1;

For more information, refer to Google Cloud's BigQuery documentation on the IS operator.

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.

When you add loyalty structured data, your business becomes eligible to appear with loyalty benefits on your product search results.

Adding a loyalty program under your Organization structured data is especially important if you don't have a Merchant Center account and want the ability to provide a loyalty program for your business. Merchant Center already lets you provide a loyalty program for your business, so if you have a Merchant Center account we recommend defining your loyalty program there instead.

Testing with Rich Results Test

After adding a loyalty program to your Organization structured data and loyalty benefits to your Product structured data you can test your markup using the Rich Results Test by submitting the URL of a page with loyalty markup or a code snippet. Using the tool, you can confirm whether or not your markup is valid. For example, here is a test for loyalty program markup:

We hope this addition makes it easier for you to add loyalty programs and benefits for your business, and enable them to be shown across Google shopping experiences. If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us in the Google Search Central Community or on LinkedIn.

Posted by Irina Tuduce and Pascal Fleury, Google Shopping software engineers

Today, we launched our August 2024 core update to Google Search. This update is designed to continue our work to improve the quality of our search results by showing more content that people find genuinely useful and less content that feels like it was made just to perform well on Search.

This latest update takes into account the feedback we've heard from some creators and others over the past few months. As always, we aim to connect people with a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users' searches. This is an area we'll continue to address in future updates. This update also aims to better capture improvements that sites may have made, so we can continue to show the best of the web.

We've also updated our help page about core updates, which includes more in-depth guidance for those who may see changes after an update.

Posted by John Mueller, Search Advocate, Google Switzerland

A better responsiveness metric

In early 2020, Google's Chrome Team introduced the Core Web Vitals to provide a suite of quality signals for web pages. Today, the Google Chrome team announced an upcoming change in the metrics for the Core Web Vitals to better evaluate the quality of a webpage's user experience. In this article, we'll explore this change and what it means for Google Search and site owners.

One of the Core Web Vitals metrics, First Input Delay (FID), measures responsiveness, but there are known limitations of FID. This led the Chrome team to explore and seek feedback on a (then) experimental metric that addresses these limitations more effectively. In 2022, they announced Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as that new metric and started working with the community to test its efficacy.

After another year of testing and gathering feedback from the community, the Chrome team decided to promote INP as the new Core Web Vitals metric for responsiveness, effective March 2024, replacing FID. The Chrome team's blog post explains this change and the reasoning behind the new metric in more detail.

What this means for Google Search Console

The new metric, INP, will replace FID as part of the Core Web Vitals in March 2024. To help site owners and developers to take the necessary steps and evaluate their pages for the new metric, Search Console will include INP in the Core Web Vitals report later this year. When INP replaces FID in March 2024, the Search Console report will stop showing FID metrics and use INP as the new metric for responsiveness.

What this means for site owners

If you have been following our guidance to improve Core Web Vitals, you will have considered the responsiveness of your pages already. The improvements made for FID are a good foundation to improve INP and the responsiveness of your pages.

We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. However, great page experience involves more than Core Web Vitals. Good stats within the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console or third-party Core Web Vitals reports don't guarantee good rankings.

To learn more about how Core Web Vitals fits into a holistic approach to page experience, see our guidance on understanding and thinking about page experience in Google Search results.

You can find more information about the new metric in the Chrome team's blog post and guidance on how to optimize your pages with regards to INP in this guide on optimizing INP.

Posted by Martin Splitt, Developer Relations Engineer, Google Search Relations team

Updates

• Update on January 31, 2024: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace FID as a part of Core Web Vitals on March 12, 2024.
• Update on March 12, 2024: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has replaced FID as a part of Core Web Vitals.

It's been a while since we published this blog post. Some of the information may be outdated (for example, some images may be missing, and some links may not work anymore). Check out our updated documentation on page experience.

Helpful content generally offers a good page experience. That's why today, we've added a section on page experience to our guidance on creating helpful content and revised our help page about page experience. We think this all will help site owners consider page experience more holistically as part of the content creation process.

We haven't introduced any major new aspects of page experience to consider versus our previous guidance. If you've been paying attention to things we've talked about in the past, such as Core Web Vitals, all that remains as before.

Streamlining our page experience guidance

For years, our core ranking systems have sought to reward content providing a good page experience, as covered in guidance we gave in 2011, updated in 2019 and made part of our Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help page last year.

That help page is a key resource for our Search Essentials. We regularly refer anyone seeking to be successful with Google Search to read through the self-assessment questions and other guidance on it. But while some aspects of page experience were covered in the page's "Presentation and production questions" section, others were not. We've now improved this by adding a section on providing a great page experience, to explain how those hoping to be successful in Search should be considering this.

In turn, that section links over to our revised Understanding page experience in Google Search results help page, which explains the role of page experience in more detail, along with self-assessment questions and resources. That page brings together in one place some key aspects of page experience to consider, aspects that are unchanged from what we've talked about in recent years.

Search Console reports

In the coming months, the Page Experience report within Search Console will transform into a new page that links to our general guidance about page experience, along with a dashboard-view of the individual Core Web Vitals and HTTPS reports that will remain in Search Console.

Also starting December 1, 2023, we'll be retiring Search Console's "Mobile Usability" report, the Mobile-Friendly Test tool and Mobile-Friendly Test API. This doesn't mean that mobile usability isn't important for success with Google Search. It remains critical for users, who are using mobile devices more than ever, and as such, it remains a part of our page experience guidance. But in the nearly ten years since we initially launched this report, many other robust resources for evaluating mobile usability have emerged, including Lighthouse from Chrome.

Overall, we hope this work will help creators and site owners continue to succeed with their visitors by providing a great page experience and by doing so, also succeed in Google Search.

FAQ

Without the Page Experience report, how do I know if my site provides a great page experience?

The page experience report was intended as a general guidepost of some metrics that aligned with good page experience, not as a comprehensive assessment of all the different aspects. Those seeking to provide a good page experience should take an holistic approach, including following some of our self-assessment questions covered on our Understanding page experience in Google Search results page.

Is there a single "page experience signal" that Google Search uses for ranking?

There is no single signal. Our core ranking systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience.

Page experience signals had been listed as Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendly, HTTPS and no intrusive interstitials. Are these signals still used in search rankings?

While not all of these may be directly used to inform ranking, we do find that all of these aspects of page experience align with success in search ranking, and are worth attention.

Are Core Web Vitals still important?

We highly recommend site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals for success with Search and to ensure a great user experience generally. However, great page experience involves more than Core Web Vitals. Good stats within the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console or third-party Core Web Vitals reports don't guarantee good rankings.

What does this mean for the "page experience update"?

The page experience update was a concept to describe a set of key page experience aspects for site owners to focus on. In particular, it introduced Core Web Vitals as a new signal that our core ranking systems considered, along with other page experience signals such as HTTPS that they'd already been considering. It was not a separate ranking system, and it did not combine all these signals into one single "page experience" signal.

Is good page experience required to appear in the "Top stories" carousel on mobile?

Page experience is not an eligibility requirement to appear anywhere in the "Top stories" section. As long as content meets Google News best practices and Google News policies, our automated systems may consider it.

Is page experience evaluated on a site-wide or page-specific basis?

Our core ranking systems generally evaluate content on a page-specific basis, including when understanding aspects related to page experience. However, we do have some site-wide assessments.

Does page experience factor into the helpful content system?

The helpful content system is primarily focused on signals related to content, rather than presentation and page experience. However, just as our core ranking systems consider signals that align with good page experience, so does the helpful content system, to a degree.

How important is page experience to ranking success?

Google Search always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par. But for many queries, there is lots of helpful content available. Having a great page experience can contribute to success in Search, in such cases.

Updates

• Update on January 31, 2024: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace FID as a part of Core Web Vitals on March 12, 2024.
• Update on November 8, 2023: We're also retiring the Good page experience search appearance filter from the Performance report, as page experience has evolved to include more aspects than just Core Web Vitals and HTTPS. To allow time for adjusting your API calls, support for this search appearance filter in the Search Console API will be removed in 180 days.
• Update on March 12, 2024: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has replaced FID as a part of Core Web Vitals.

At I/O 2021, we previewed our plans to bring page experience ranking to desktop. Today we're announcing more details, including the timeline for these changes. This work builds on top of the page experience update we rolled out on mobile between June and August 2021.

Rollout will begin in February 2022

We'll begin using page experience as part of our desktop ranking systems beginning in February 2022. The rollout will be complete by the end of March 2022. This ranking launch will be based on the same page experience signals that we rolled out for mobile earlier this year. We are also planning to help site owners understand how their desktop pages are performing with regards to page experience using a Search Console report which will launch before desktop becomes a ranking signal.

This means the same three Core Web Vitals metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS, and their associated thresholds will apply for desktop ranking. Other aspects of page experience signals, such as HTTPS security and absence of intrusive interstitials, will remain the same as well. While the mobile-friendliness signal continues to be a part of mobile ranking, it won't be a factor for desktop. When a site has separate desktop and mobile URLs with an appropriate configuration, the desktop signal is based on the URLs that desktop users see.

We hope this blog post provides you with details for you to understand and optimize your page experience in preparation for the upcoming changes, and in turn help you build better websites.

If you have questions or feedback, please visit our help forums or let us know through Twitter.

Posted by Jeffrey Jose, Product Manager on Search

Updates

• Update on January 17, 2022: Search Console now has a dedicated 'Desktop' section in the Page Experience report.
• Update on February 22, 2022: The page experience update is now slowly rolling out for desktop. It will be completed by the end of March 2022.
• Update on January 31, 2024: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) will replace FID as a part of Core Web Vitals on March 12, 2024.
• Update on March 12, 2024: Interaction to Next Paint (INP) has replaced FID as a part of Core Web Vitals.