Google Search Updates & Release Notes

Content creators and publishers use many channels beyond their own websites to reach their audiences. As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives and different content formats, we want to make it easier for site owners and creators—even those without their own website—to get a consolidated view of how all of their content is getting discovered on Search.

Following an earlier experiment, we're thrilled to introduce platform properties, a new Search Console property type to help site owners and creators understand how their social and video posts perform on Google Search and Discover. Now, you can track which search terms lead people to your Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube content on Search, and see exactly how your audience is interacting with your posts.

To view Google Search information about your property, visit Search Console, where you can create a platform property and use the following reports:

• Performance report: View your total clicks, impressions, and additional metrics. Filter and sort this data to see which specific posts and queries are driving the most traffic. If you prefer to analyze your performance using another tool, you can export the data.
• Insights report: View a high-level overview of your recent traffic trends, your top-performing posts, and how people discover your account on Google.
• Achievements: Track your growth and celebrate milestones, such as reaching a new threshold for total clicks from Google Search in the last 28 days.

To add a platform property to your account:

• Open Search Console.
• Go to the Search Console verification page, or open the property selector drop-down anywhere in Search Console and click "Add property."
• Select one of the four available platforms: Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube.
• Follow the onscreen verification steps to securely authorize the connection.

The platform properties will become available gradually over the coming weeks. Learn more about platform properties and how to set them up in our help center documentation. We value your feedback: please let us know what you think using the "Submit feedback" link in Search Console or in the Google Search Central Community.

Posted by Moshe Samet, Product Manager Lead, Search Console

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

Just a short note this time!

Currently, you find the JSON files listing Google's IP ranges under the /search/apis/ipranges/ directory on developers.google.com. Since these ranges apply to more than just Google Search crawlers, we're moving them to a more general location: developers.google.com/crawling/ipranges/.

We've already updated our documentation to point to this new location. For the time being, the files will continue to be available at the old /search/ path as well to give everyone time to update their systems. However, we encourage you to switch to the new /crawling/ipranges/ path as soon as possible. We will eventually phase out the old locations and redirect them to the new ones within 6 months.

Posted by Gary.

Incident affecting Ranking

Incident began at 2026-02-05 09:00 and ended at 2026-02-27 02:00 (all times are US/Pacific).

DATE TIME DESCRIPTION

27 Feb 2026 02:02 PST The rollout was complete as of February 27, 2026.

5 Feb 2026 09:03 PST Released the February 2026 Discover core update for English language users in the US (will look to expand it to all countries and languages in the future). This update is designed to improve the quality of Discover overall. Our guidance about general core updates and Discover applies. The rollout may take up to 2 weeks to complete.

All times are US/Pacific

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