Archive of February, 2026

February, 13 2026

The latest jobs in search marketing Land your next job in SEO or PPC. These brands and agencies are hiring to fill open search [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Ads Recommended Experiments Google Ads now has a new recommended experiments box in the Experiments page. This should offer you [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Why creative, not bidding, is limiting PPC performance Smart Bidding and Meta’s delivery systems have leveled the field. To scale PPC, fix creative [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Ads Product Eligibility View Across Campaigns Google Ads added to the Products section of your ads account the ability to see product eligibility [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
SEO leaders: stop chasing rankings, start building visibility systems Learn how to build visibility gates, embed shared OKRs, and align product, PR, and content teams [...] - Search Engine Land
Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Volatility, Bing AI Performance Reports, New AI Mode Retail Ads, UCP Checkout & ChatGPT Ads Go Live This week in search we have more ongoing Google search ranking volatility. Bing Webmaster Tools [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Cloudflare’s New Markdown for AI Bots: What You Need To Know via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Cloudflare launched Markdown for Agents, converting HTML pages to markdown automatically when AI [...] - Search Engine Journal

February, 12 2026

If SEO is rocket science, AI SEO is astrophysics AI search runs on entity mass, not surface signals. See how citations and extractability shape AI [...] - Search Engine Land
The real story behind the 53% drop in SaaS AI traffic AI traffic isn’t collapsing — it’s concentrating. Copilot surges in-workflow, 41% [...] - Search Engine Land
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 12, 2026 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
OpenAI Wants Advertisers To Prompt To Create Ads & Skip Agencies Asad Awan, who is in charge of monetization at OpenAI was interviewed by his own company on [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Local SEO sprints: A 90-day plan for service businesses in 2026 From GBP fundamentals to reviews and service pages, this framework helps you turn local visibility [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Releases Early Preview Of WebMCP The Google Chrome team announced its early preview of WebMCP, "a standard way for exposing [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google AdSense Adds New Triggers For Vignette Ads Google AdSense has added additional triggers for vignette ads. There are now a total of six [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

February, 11 2026

Generative Engine Optimization: The Patterns Behind AI Visibility Understand what GEO is, how it's revolutionizing digital marketing and key strategies to optimize [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Clarifies Google's Crawler File Size Limits Doc Again Earlier this month, we reported that Google updated two of its help documents around Google's [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
What to expect in digital advertising and commerce in 2026 Google VP Vidhya Srinivasan shares how Google is reimagining commercial experiences to be fluid, [...] - Inside Adwords
How AI-driven shopping discovery changes product page optimization Product pages supply the data AI uses to recommend products. Learn which details matter most for AI [...] - Search Engine Land
Google releases preview of WebMCP – how AI agents interact with websites Is this the new technical SEO frontier? - Search Engine Land
Is your campaign structure holding you back in the era of AI? For years, the gold standard in Search ads was granularity. Advertisers built elaborate, [...] - Inside Adwords
Google Ads simplifies product campaign tracking Google Ads now shows per-product campaign eligibility, making gaps and overlaps easier to spot. - Search Engine Land
Hidden HTTP Page Can Cause Site Name Problems In Google via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google's John Mueller explains how a leftover HTTP homepage invisible to Chrome users can cause [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Business Short Names Being Removed From Business Profiles Google will stop showing the business short names on Google Business Profiles in Search and Google [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Webmaster Tools Rolls Out AI Performance Report (With New Design) A couple of weeks ago I reported Bing was beta testing a new AI performance report within Bing [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Why video is the canonical source of truth for AI and your brand’s best defense A five-minute video provides more data for an LLM than most blog posts. Here’s how to [...] - Search Engine Land
How to reduce low-quality leads from Performance Max campaigns Performance Max often optimizes for cheap conversions by default. Learn how guardrails and better [...] - Search Engine Land
Would You Give Google Your ID Numbers To Remove Results About You Google announced a number of updates to help people find and remove personal information and [...] - Search Engine Roundtable

February, 10 2026

Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview Now in public preview, AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools shows when your site is cited in [...] - Bing Webmaster
New Data Shows Googlebot’s 2 MB Crawl Limit Is Enough via @sejournal, @martinibuster New data shows that most web pages fall well below Googlebot's two-megabyte crawl limit. - Search Engine Journal
Bing Webmaster Tools officially adds AI Performance report New insights include total citations, average cited pages, grounding queries, page-level citation [...] - Search Engine Land
How SEO leaders can explain agentic AI to ecommerce executives Agentic AI is entering executive conversations. Here's how to explain what's changing, what isn't, [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Search Ranking Volatility Gets Heated Again February 10th I am seeing some early signs of yet another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update with more [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
OpenAI ChatGPT Ads Go Live With User Ad Controls OpenAI has officially launched ads in ChatGPT yesterday. The company announced, "Today, we're [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Tests Dynamic Results Count Under Search Box Microsoft Bing is testing a dynamically loading results count under the search box. So when you [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Ads Performance Max A/B Experiments In The Wild A month ago, we reported on a new help document on Google Ads for Performance Max optimization [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Grokipedia Seeing Decline In Google Search Visibility There are some reports coming out that Grokipedia, the AI-based Wikipedia, is now showing a decline [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Can Now Monitor Search For Your Government IDs via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google's Results about you tool now monitors Search results for government-issued IDs like [...] - Search Engine Journal
A simpler way to remove explicit images from Search There’s a new, simpler way for people to request the removal of non-consensual explicit [...] - Inside Search
Google pushes AI Max tool with in-app ads Google is now advertising its AI Max feature inside Google Ads campaign settings, promoting its own [...] - Search Engine Land
What repeated ChatGPT runs reveal about brand visibility Running the same 12 prompts 100 times shows how inconsistent ChatGPT brand recommendations are [...] - Search Engine Land
Google AI Mode Tests Citation Icons At Bottom Of Answers Google appears to be testing showing the citation favicon site icons at the bottom of the answer in [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Stay in control of your personal information online Results about you tool now helps you find and request the removal of Search results containing your [...] - Inside Search
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 10, 2026 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today... - Search Engine Roundtable
Introducing AI Performance in Bing Webmaster Tools Public Preview AI - Bing Webmaster

February, 9 2026

Google AI Overviews Tests Contextual Overlay Link Cards Over the past week or so, Google has been testing a new format for link cards in the AI Overviews [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google On If A Younger Web Site Can Beat An Older Website In Search A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
What Google and Microsoft patents teach us about GEO Search patents reveal how AI search systems interpret intent, evaluate content passages, and build [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Preferred Sources Deeplink Button Is Broken The Google preferred sources deeplink button feature is broken and has been since at least last [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Ads API Developer Token Access Applications Delayed Google announced on Friday that there is a delay with the Google Ads team reviewing and thus [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Reddit On Google & ChatGPT AI Responses Citations & Lack Of Links On the Reddit Q4 2025 Earnings Call (see transcript here), Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, was [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Reddit says 80 million people now use its search weekly Reddit is unifying search with its AI Q&A. It's goal: to become an end-to-end discovery engine [...] - Search Engine Land
7 Insights From Washington Post’s Strategy To Win Back Traffic via @sejournal, @martinibuster The Washington Post's controversial strategy begins with a foundation, then adjusts based on what [...] - Search Engine Journal

February, 7 2026

Amanda Farley talks broken pixels and calm leadership Amanda Farley shares lessons on overcoming setbacks and balancing AI with human insight in modern [...] - Search Engine Land

February, 6 2026

Google Revises Discover Guidelines Alongside Core Update via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google updated its "Get on Discover" docs, adding page experience guidance and naming [...] - Search Engine Journal
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 6, 2026 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Ads adds a diagnostics hub for data connections Google Ads’ new diagnostics tool helps advertisers catch data connection issues early, [...] - Search Engine Land
Report: ChatGPT & Perplexity Treat Structured Data As Text On A Page To fuel the debate in the SEO world of the topic of structured data and LLMs and AI engines, we are [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
How PR teams can measure real impact with SEO, PPC, and GEO A practical approach for tying earned media to search behavior, downstream conversions, and [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Ads Mixed Campaign Type Experiments Live For Some The Google Ads mixed campaign type experiment beta, which we covered the help document last month, [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google & Bing don’t recommend seperate markdown pages for LLMs This is a heated debate now, but it seems that the major search engines are not recommending this [...] - Search Engine Land
Search News Buzz Video Recap: Google Discover Core Update, Listicles Hit, Google Ads, ChatGPT Ads Ready & Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace This week, we covered the first core update of 2026, the February 2026 Discover core update. [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google AI Mode Follow Up Search Suggestions We saw Google test follow up questions below the AI Mode responses back in July. Now Google is [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Bing Unshipping Frankenstein Recipes In Search We covered how horrific the AI-based Frankenstein recipes can be in Google Search, where it mashes [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Why most B2B buying decisions happen on Day 1 – and what video has to do with it 86% of buyers pre-select vendors on Day 1. Learn how a three-play video strategy reaches buying [...] - Search Engine Land
Why content that ranks can still fail AI retrieval AI systems don’t evaluate pages the way search engines do. Learn how extraction, embeddings, [...] - Search Engine Land
Performance Max built-in A/B testing for creative assets spotted Performance Max now supports built-in A/B testing for creative assets, giving advertisers a clearer [...] - Search Engine Land

February, 5 2026

Google's February 2026 Discover Core Update Today we've released the February 2026 Discover core update. This is a broad update to our [...] - Google Webmaster Central
February 2026 Google Discover Core Update Rolling Out - Local Impact Google has released its first core update of 2026, which is focused on just Google Discover. Google [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Your local rankings look fine. So why are calls disappearing? AI local packs and ads are shrinking organic space. New data shows why calls drop even when 3-pack [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Ads no longer runs on keywords. It runs on intent. If you’re still building Google Ads around keywords, you’re behind. Here's what that [...] - Search Engine Land
Google releases Discover core update – February 2026 This Discover update will show more locally relevant content based on the users country. - Search Engine Land
Google Shows How To Check Passage Indexing via @sejournal, @martinibuster Google's John Mueller offered a simple solution to the question of whether a passage is indexed and [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google Search Hits $63B, Details AI Mode Ad Tests via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google is testing ads in AI Mode as Search revenue grew 17% to $63 billion. AI Mode queries run 3x [...] - Search Engine Journal
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 5, 2026 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today... - Search Engine Roundtable
Why SEO teams need to ask ‘should we use AI?’ not just ‘can we?’ Automation can save SEO teams time—but at what cost? Explore where AI boosts speed, where it [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Releases Core Update Targeting Discover Feed via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google has started a Discover core update. The rollout may take up to two weeks, with expansion to [...] - Search Engine Journal
Microsoft Advertising Tests Magazine Answer Card Ad Format Microsoft Advertising is testing a new ad format within its newish Answer Card format called a [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
How AI is reshaping local search and what enterprises must do now AI now mediates how customers discover and choose local services. Learn how AI systems evaluate [...] - Search Engine Land

February, 4 2026

Why Google’s Performance Max advice often fails new advertisers Early Performance Max adoption often reduces insight and control. Shopping campaigns provide [...] - Search Engine Land
Google's First 2026 Winter Olympics Doodle: Curling Google posted its first Winter Olympics Doodle, special logo, for the 2026 Winter Olympics. The [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
The latest AI news we announced in January Google AI announcements from January - Inside Search
Google Ads adds a second set of eyes for high-risk account changes Google Ads’ new multi-party approval feature adds an extra safeguard against unauthorized or [...] - Search Engine Land
Google On Serving Markdown Pages To LLM Crawlers Google's John Mueller responded to a question on the pros and cons of serving raw markdown pages to [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace - Pay For AI To License Content Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft Publisher Content Marketplace. This marketplace [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Googlebot File Limit Is 15MB But 64MB For PDF & 2MB For Other File Types We have known for a long time that Google can crawl web pages up to the first 15MB but now Google [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Ranking Volatility Heats Up Big Time Starting On February 2nd I was hoping, well, not really, that Google would calm down a bit since we had such a volatile [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
What higher ed data shows about SEO visibility and AI search Search behavior has evolved, but many SEO strategies have not. New research reveals what’s [...] - Search Engine Land
Anthropic says Claude will remain ad-free as ChatGPT tests ads Anthropic argues ads inside AI chats would erode trust, warp incentives, and clash with how people [...] - Search Engine Land

February, 3 2026

Here’s how to tune into the Winter Olympics with Google Learn more about using Google tools to stay in the know on the 2026 Winter Olympics. - Inside Search
Google: Search Algorithms, Spam Detections & Policies Don't Fundamentally Change With AI Search Google's John Mueller said that when it comes to AI Search and the changes that come with that, [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google’s biggest crawling challenges are faceted navigation, action parameters and more Crawlers can cause your site to load slowly if you do not manage the URLs on your website properly. - Search Engine Land
Google Updates Googlebot File Size Limit Docs via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google updated its Googlebot documentation to clarify file size limits, separating default limits [...] - Search Engine Journal
Google: Don't Spend Too Much Time On Redirects Analysis For SEO Google's John Mueller said he would "caution against assuming that you need to do this level [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Why most SEO failures are organizational, not technical SEO performance often degrades months before traffic drops. The cause is usually hidden in decision [...] - Search Engine Land
Are we ready for the agentic web? The agentic web is emerging fast. Definitions, practical applications, and pros and cons help [...] - Search Engine Land
Bing Multi-Turn Search Rolls Out Worldwide Bing Search has rolled out what it calls multi-turn search in Bing globally. This is something we [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google’s Crawl Team Filed Bugs Against WordPress Plugins via @sejournal, @MattGSouthern Google's crawl team filed a bug against WooCommerce for add-to-cart parameters wasting crawl [...] - Search Engine Journal
Inspiring examples of responsible and realistic vibe coding for SEO Learn vibe coding: Use AI tools to build apps without coding. This guide covers setup, limits, [...] - Search Engine Land
Google's Top Crawling Challenges In 2025 Gary Illyes, along with Martin Splitt, of Google posted a podcast explaining the top crawling [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
7 digital PR secrets behind strong SEO performance As informational search declines, digital PR is driving authority, relevance, and high-intent [...] - Search Engine Land
LinkedIn: AI-powered search cut traffic by up to 60% LinkedIn says Google’s AI Overviews cut non-brand B2B awareness traffic, forcing a rethink of [...] - Search Engine Land

February, 2 2026

Advanced ways to use competitive research in SEO and AEO Learn how to combine SEO and AEO competitive research to uncover demand, shape positioning, and [...] - Search Engine Land
OpenAI Prepares ChatGPT Code To Allow Ads? If you look at the source code in some of the responses OpenAI's ChatGPT gives you, you may now see [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Shows How To Get More Traffic From Top Stories Feature via @sejournal, @martinibuster Google's new documentation shows how to get traffic from their Top Stories search feature. - Search Engine Journal
Google On Recent Google Search Ranking Volatility - No Insights To Share As you know, January was an incredibly intense month of Google Search ranking volatility. It [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Daily Search Forum Recap: February 2, 2026 Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today... - Search Engine Roundtable
Controversial Proposal To Label Sections Of AI Generated Content via @sejournal, @martinibuster A new proposal suggests using semantic HTML to label sections of a page that are AI generated to [...] - Search Engine Journal
Human experience optimization: Why experience now shapes search visibility Search performance is shaped by engagement, trust, and post-click behavior. HXO connects SEO with [...] - Search Engine Land
Google Ads Replacing Support Form With AI Agent Google seems to be replacing its Google Ads support form with an AI agent, maybe from its Ads [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
Google Search Console Adding AI Visibility Reporting? John Mueller from Google dropped a very John-like hint that maybe, just maybe, Google Search [...] - Search Engine Roundtable
How to build a modern Google Ads targeting strategy like a pro Learn a practical PPC framework that predicts intent, reaches beyond search, and connects the right [...] - Search Engine Land