AI Overviews, e-commerce site updates, and more! (July ‘24)

[MUSIC PLAYING]
JOHN MUELLER: Hello, everyone.
And welcome back to the "Google Search News."
I hope life is treating you reasonably well wherever
you are.
My name is John Mueller.
I'm your host today.
I'm a search advocate here at Google in Switzerland.
My team and I work together with Google Search teams
to bring you the news.
Today we have news about Search Console, structured
data, documentation, Search in general,
and who would have guessed, AI.
Time has flown, and I'm glad to be able to catch up with you.
So here we are.
Let's dive right in.
First up, we announced AI Overviews in Search
at Google I/O earlier this year.
You might have tried the experimental Search Labs
feature called Search Generative Experience, or SGE in short.
This feature has turned into AI Overviews
and is now available in some countries.
AI Overviews bring the world of generative AI into Google Search
when appropriate.
These are still quite new, and we've
been monitoring feedback and external reports
and improving when and how we show AI Overviews in Search.
Your feedback as a site owner is helpful to us
and welcome in the feedback links
on Search as well as in our Search Central Help Community
forums.
No action is needed for publishers
to be eligible for AI Overviews.
And, like other Search features, site owners
can use traditional snippet controls on a page
or on a section level if they wish
to limit the information that's shown in Search.
I'll link to our developer documentation in the description
if you're curious to delve in.
Up next, the artists known as Search Console
and structured data have dropped some hot new tracks.
In Search Console for e-commerce sites,
Google recently added merchant listings
that appear in Google Images into the Search performance
reports.
This makes it easy to check the visibility of your products
in Search.
And with structured data, Google just
added support for organization-level return policy
information.
Shoppers appreciate knowing these policies.
It helps them to pick where to buy products.
This markup makes it easy to specify the policies
organization-wide.
And while we're here, we also just recently launched
special markup for product variants.
Blue T-shirt or red, they're all variants.
The markup makes it easier to connect these variants.
And now, over to documentation.
First up, the updated SEO Starter Guide
launched earlier this year.
And it's now even shorter.
RECORDED VOICE: Whoo!
JOHN MUELLER: Four out of five dentists surveyed--
I mean, site owners, site owners--
found it more helpful.
The team working on the SEO Starter Guide
chatted with me about the process
in one of our recent podcast episodes,
if you're keen to listen in.
Then we announced the last stage of mobile indexing.
With mobile indexing, Google crawls and indexes
with a smartphone crawler.
We've now removed the last exceptions,
and we're crawling all sites like this for Search.
That said, many people also use laptops and desktops,
so don't neglect those, either.
Finally, we restructured the product structure data
documentation.
E-commerce is a big topic, so we split the information
into separate pages to make it more digestible.
I added the links to all of these in the description.
By the way, my team reads all the feedback
on our documentation, so let us know if something is unclear.
And also, tell us if something's good.
[PHONE RINGS]
Next up are some insightful pieces from outside of Google.
I love seeing the articles you all have been writing,
especially those which are easily accessible to a broader
audience.
Here are three that I really enjoyed.
First up, a guide to using sitemaps
to optimize an e-commerce site with over a million pages
written by Stevy.
Next up, Veniz created a guide to SEO for government websites.
It's a bit niche; I know, not everyone runs a government
agency website.
However, all of you probably know some government agencies
that could make a better website,
and you could send them this link.
And finally, Holly wrote a nice summary of a recent interview
with Elizabeth Tucker, a product manager on Google Search.
There are many more great articles,
so it's hard to pick just three.
Keep them coming.
You all are doing awesome things,
and I appreciate you sharing your work publicly.
[RECORDED APPLAUSE PLAYING]
Moving back to Search, here are a few short updates.
First, we recently launched the web filter
for simplified results.
Search results provide a lot of valuable information
in many formats, but sometimes you just want something simple.
The web filter does that for you, so try it out.
Next, we launched core and spam updates to Search ranking.
These are bigger updates to the core of Google Search.
We have some guidance on these updates,
and we let you know about them in our Search Status Dashboard
when they're launched.
With these updates, we collected feedback from site owners,
you all perhaps, which we've been reviewing with the search
quality and ranking teams.
Thank you to everyone who submitted feedback there.
It's been really helpful in evaluations and discussions.
And now over to some shorter updates.
Events, we love meeting folks from the world
of site owners and Search.
So we regularly run events, especially in places
that traditionally don't see a lot of SEO conferences
and especially for local folks there.
This year we've been to Brazil, Argentina, Romania, and Poland.
Additionally, we were at other conferences in the UK, Spain,
Slovenia, even Bulgaria.
Coming up, we have events planned
in Thailand and Indonesia.
On YouTube, we recently launched a cool new series
about how search works with Gary.
It's fun and informative.
Check it out.
Almost last, but not least, Google Search Central
is now on LinkedIn.
If you're active there, connect with us and stay up-to-date.
And, for those of you looking for cool trivia,
did you know that the e-book format EPUB is now
a supported format in Google Search?
Googlebot just discovered Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
on Project Gutenberg.
What will happen next?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Well, there you have it.
This episode of "Google Search News" is now complete.
Thank you for tuning in.
I hope this video was useful.
And please add feedback and comments here.
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Bye.