📈

​AI Overviews coverage increased by 58% in the last 12 months. This growth was primarily driven by increases in the healthcare (88% of queries), B2B tech (82% of queries) and education industries (83% of queries).

📊

​Google's February 2026 Discover core update completes its rollout. The rollout completed on 27 February and took 22 days in total. This update was focused on highlighting relevant local content in Discover.

⭕

​Google's Circle to Search can now identify multiple objects from the entire image. The query fan-out technique analyses the full frame to get extra context and provide more visually relevant results.

💬

​Google tests a more prominent way to feature AI chat in knowledge panels. This button, labelled 'Ask [brand name]', leads to the relevant branded AI sales assistant and replaces the previous 'Chat' and 'Shop' buttons.

🤖

​A Google patent describes replacing search results with AI-generated landing pages. This does sound very ominous but, as always, this is just a patent and not a clear indication of the future of Google Search.

🧑‍⚖️

​Google tests new search formats and results structure to comply with DMA regulations. Google has already proposed other changes but they had been rejected because their adjustments were not significant enough.

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End of blocking bots, crumbling away

Important reminder: Cloudflare's *default* settings for new setups is to block all AI crawlers 🤖 🛑

Blocking AI crawlers will of course mean limiting your website's visibility on interfaces such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the like. 📉

While I agree that should happen, I'm not sure that many organisations will want to risk traffic for the "greater good". It's a discussion you need to be having with your clients.

You can control this setting in (Log in → Security → Bots → "Block AI Bots")

I'm your source of redirection

Should you use a 301 redirect or a canonical tag? 🤔

I've seen this question a few times and I'm surprised by the lack of clarity within the answers as it's fairly straightforward. ☝️

If you have a completely duplicated page on a different URL and that additional URL serves no value, such a URL with and without a trailing slash:

/product-category1/my-product

/product-category1/my-product/

then you should use a 301 redirect and make sure your internal links to a single URL.

Canonical tags should be used in cases where the additional URLs need to exist because they provide value, such as filtering, sorting, or tracking, such as:

/product-category1/

/product-category1/?sort=byprice

/product-category1/?utm_source=trackinginfo

In these cases you simply use a canonical tag to link to your primary URL and even more importantly, you make sure internal links go to that canonical URL. Canonical tags are hints, not directives so these other contributing factors are vital for Google selecting the correct URL.

Super simple! Hope this clears up some issues for people. 😀

Annotate GA, never you betray

It's a good time to annotate your GA/GSC. Google is rolling out contextual overlays in AI Mode which may impact CTR.

Your ranking becoming clearer

Trying to work backwards to "ranking factors" is almost impossible in many cases, therefore it is important to consider:
​
✅ Does the factor make sense for users?
✅ Does the factor align with Google's goals? (making ungodly amounts of money)
✅ Are there tests/data that can support it?
✅ Is there other evidence (patents, Googler's statements etc) which indicate it might be true?
​
​Chris Green did an amazing study showing how answering more PAAs can correlate to better rankings, and goes into more depth about what these findings mean on video with AlsoAsked.

Master of domains, using TLDs

If you have a ccTLD (e.g co.uk, .fr, .de) and you want to target multiple countries, you will find it harder if you just use subfolders as your top-level domain is already country-coded.

Either use separate ccTLDs or move to a gTLD and use subfolders.

Usual hreflang rules apply.

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