Only Google speaking for itself: posts from Google Search Central, the Search Status Dashboard, Google's Search product blog, the Search Central YouTube channel and the Search Off the Record podcast. When someone says "Google said", this is where to check.
Today, we're announcing our plans to support a shared AI training control in robots.txt. This will help websites express their AI training preferences across multiple AI providers in a single step and is based on work from the AIPREF working group at the…
Do 404 "Not Found" status codes trigger site wide disasters or haunt your crawl budget? Should you redirect every dead URL straight to your homepage? 👻 ...And the most terrifying question of all: where is Chicken? 🐔 Welcome back to The Non-Canonical Cabinet…
Watch the full episode 2 right now - https://youtu.be/-jHONLQgE-s 🤖
Should you publish your content as a PDF or stick strictly to standard HTML? Does Google treat PDF files differently when it comes to indexing, ranking, and AI search features? In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin Splitt and John Mueller from the…
Over the years, the Search Central YouTube channel has published hundreds of videos across various series, from Search for Beginners and Ask Googlebot to Search Console Training and Search Off the Record. While our series structure works well for deep dives…
Sitemaps have been a core element of web development and search engine optimization for two decades, yet Search Console warnings like "Couldn't fetch" continue to generate concern among site owners. Are XML sitemaps still necessary with modern search…
Is your website's internal search feature secretly acting as an open invitation for crawling lots and lots? In this episode of Search off the Record, Martin Splitt and John Mueller pull back the curtain on how internal search results pages can turn into…
Should you panic when your Search Console indexing report is showing pages that aren't indexed? Is a 404 error code always a sign of a broken website? In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin Splitt and John Mueller from the Google Search Relations…
In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin and Gary turn a simple robots.txt question into a data‑driven deep dive using HTTP Archive, WebPageTest, custom JavaScript metrics, and BigQuery. They explore how millions of real robots.txt files are actually…
Posts on Google's own channels only. Statements Googlers make on social media or at conferences are reported by the trade press and appear in the main news stream, not here — a quote passed along is not the same as a post Google published. Summaries are the first lines of each post; follow the link for the full text.
