SEO & AI search

Google moved Search Live to Gemini 3.8 Live on 15 September. Spoken answers now come back with links to web pages, and the model works across 97 languages.

Google has added a Collected Info tab to Business Profiles, showing what its automated assistant learned by calling or messaging the business.

Google's John Mueller said on 10 September that Search Console cannot map the old position 1 to 10 scale onto AI search results in a way that helps site owners.

Organic visibility at Germany\u2019s biggest online shops fell 16.7 percent in a year, according to a study by Sistrix and LEAP. The trade title etailment published the figures on 3 September 2026.

Relevance beat backlinks in the 2026 Google ranking factors survey, in which 131 practitioners scored 103 possible factors. Meta description came last.

Google DeepMind has published research on a new AI search ranking method that uses one model where systems today use two.

ChatGPT Shopping now takes about 65% of its product recommendations from merchant product feeds, up from 8.26% before July 10, 2026, according to Profound.

Google stopped showing flight and hotel prices in EU search results on 8 September, under the Digital Markets Act.

AlsoAsked studied 19.2 million English-language searches. In the first week of September, 97% of the answers in the People Also Ask box were written by AI.

Google announced WeatherNext 3 on 3 September and put it behind weather answers in Search, Maps and the Gemini app.

Google has added Gemini 3.8 Flash to AI Mode in Search. It is the third Flash model from Google in about six weeks.

Poland's regulator UKE will not decide until 26 December how much Google should pay press publishers. A second publishers' group has filed its own claim, worth about 514 million zloty a year.