A user asked John Mueller a question about GEO on Bluesky: are there any industries where GEO isn’t required? The user, @galloni.net, cited examples from industries like adult, gambling, and others where Google remains a major source of discovery. Here’s what the user asked: “are there industries where GEO simply doesn’t matter yet? I’m thinking […]

The post Google answers whether some industries don’t need GEO appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Every website peaks on launch day and slowly drifts from there, not because it breaks, but because nobody has time to keep it current. Autonomous websites, continuously optimized by agents after launch, aim to change that. Pierre Burgy shares what they learned building for full website autonomy and the deeper design problem they uncovered along the way.

Google is expanding AI Max for Search campaigns, giving advertisers new tools to test changes to budgets, ROI targets, and campaign settings before actually rolling them out. Google announced this update on its blog. There are three changes worth knowing about. 1. Test multiple campaigns at once Starting in September, advertisers will be able to […]

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Thirty years after a webmaster’s question became Search Engine Watch, the publication is under new independent ownership. Here is what we owe its history, and what we intend to build next. The first thing to say about relaunching Search Engine Watch is that this story does not begin with me. I did not create this […]

The post Search Engine Watch is back: a new independent chapter begins appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Seven and half years after blocks arrived in Core, WordPress introduces a way to build blocks without React annd build pipelines. All you need is PHP.

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WordPress PHP-Only Block Registration originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.

Google Search Console owners have been receiving emails from Google notifying them of a new owner on their Search Console accounts. Barry Schwartz received one of these emails and shared a screenshot along with an article on SER. Here is the screenshot of how it looks. Barry noted: “Again, it seems like these folks already […]

The post Google Search Console owners receive emails about new account owners appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Google has been sending emails to Merchant Center advertisers about a change coming to product image requirements. Starting January 31, 2027, Google will disapprove any product images smaller than 500×500 pixels. Adriaan Dekker posted this on LinkedIn and wrote “Google is sending out emails announcing that, effective January 31, 2027, all product images in Google […]

The post Google Merchant Center warns advertisers about image size requirements appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Google appears to be making more changes to its homepage design. A couple of weeks ago, we covered Google adding new buttons below the search bar, and Google confirmed this test pointed users toward AI Mode. At the time, there were four buttons: “Create images,” “Ask about files,” “Brainstorm,” and “I’m feeling lucky.” As a […]

The post Is Google changing its homepage buttons again? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Search Engine Watch was comparing online SEO training options back in 2008. At the time, paying roughly $150 for a beginner course could be the easiest way to get organized instruction and access to an expert. That is no longer the bargain it once was. Today, excellent explanations of crawling, search intent, keyword research and […]

The post 6 best SEO courses that are actually worth taking in 2026 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Google has rolled out several updates to its tagging tools, aimed at making it easier for advertisers to measure website performance and cutting down on the technical setup involved. Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Liaison, posted about this on X. She wrote: “What if building a strong data foundation didn’t require jumping through a ton of […]

The post Google rolls out updates to google tag and tag manager appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Google John Mueller has explained why Google announces spam updates, even though many of Google spam systems already update continuously on their own. Eli Schwartz posted a question on LinkedIn: “Why after 26 years does there need to be an update to get rid of spam instead of it just happening on its own with […]

The post Google explains why spam updates need to happen appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report is currently showing missing data for a couple of days in August. Barry Schwartz spotted this issue and posted on SER. Here is the screenshot of this. Glenn Gabe also posted this on X, wrote: “FYI, two days are missing from the Crawl Stats reporting in GSC. August 15 […]

The post Google search console crawl stats report shows data gap appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

A newly resolved proposal would allow us to select classes that are a prefix for variations with a wildcard, like .prefix-*.

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Resolved: CSS Class Prefix Selector originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.

Discover SMIL, the often-overlooked way to animate SVGs that works inside `` tags and can fully animate everything in an SVG without JavaScript.

Apply a style when someone navigates from one specific page to another. The idea being it'd make the sources for cross-document view transitions declarative in CSS rather than managing that stuff in JavaScript.

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CSS Navigation Matching, Early Days originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. You should really get the newsletter as well.