Latest documentation updates

This page details the latest major updates made to the Google Search Central documentation.

To get the latest Search Central documentation updates delivered to you, add the URL of this page to your feed reader, or add the feed URL directly: https://developers.google.com/search/updates/search_docs_updates.rss.

September 2026

September 18

Added local business query support to the aggregator and supplier units

What: Updated the aggregator unit and supplier unit documentation to include support for local business queries.

Why: The aggregator unit and supplier unit now support local business queries.

September 16

Added documentation on adding a Search profile badge to your website

What: Added a new guide on how to add a Search profile badge to your website.

Why: To help site owners point their audience to their Search profile.

September 8

Added documentation about regional differences in Search experience

What: Added documentation about regional differences in Search experience, which includes information about search experiences available in certain countries, such as aggregator units, supplier units, and carousels.

Why: To help publishers, businesses, and aggregators learn about the different regional search features available and understand the eligibility criteria and how to participate.

August 2026

August 31

Updated the European Search Dataset Licensing Program page

What: Updated the Google European Search Dataset Licensing Program page.

Why: Refreshed the program overview, eligibility criteria, and application details.

August 28

Updated the favicon documentation

What: Updated the favicon documentation to specifically list out the supported favicon file formats.

Why: To be clearer about which favicon file formats are supported by Google Search. Previously, the documentation linked to an external reference that evolved over time and caused ambiguity about which favicon file formats are actually supported in Google Search. Google Search's supported file formats haven't changed; this update explicitly lists them in the documentation.

Updated the site reputation policy

What: Updated the site reputation policy.

Why: We've adjusted our enforcement approach within the European Economic Area (EEA). For more information, see our blog post.

August 20

New custom button for preferred sources

What: Updated the preferred sources documentation to include instructions on how to add the new custom, interactive button to your site.

Why: Site owners can now implement a custom, interactive button to guide their audience to set them as a preferred source, ensuring a seamless experience where users are brought right back to where they left off.

July 2026

July 29

Added guide on analyzing social and video platform content

What: Added a new guide on how to analyze your social and video platform content performance in Search Console.

Why: To help content creators, social media managers, and SEO professionals understand how their social and video platform content performs on Google Search.

July 24

Added a new review snippet guideline

What: Added a new guideline to the review snippet documentation about fake and undisclosed incentivized reviews.

Why: To improve user review transparency.

July 14

Updated the package tracking documentation

What: Updated the feature availability and eligibility requirements sections package tracking early adopters program documentation.

Why: The package tracking early adopters program is no longer accepting new partners.

July 10

Updated the canonicalization troubleshooting guide

What: Updated the canonicalization troubleshooting guide with clarifications on re-evaluation time.

Why: To provide better expectations about how long it takes for canonicalization changes to take effect.

July 7

Added category to merchant listing structured data

What: Updated the Merchant listing documentation to detail how the Product.category property can be used with both Text and CategoryCode types. This aligns with the Google Merchant Center feed specifications for the product_type and google_product_category attributes.

Why: To help merchants provide both merchant-defined and Google-defined category information within their schema.org markup, enhancing product information for Google Search and Shopping.

Clarified how to specify sale price effective dates in Product structured data

What: Added a new section on "Sale duration" to the Merchant listing guide. This explains how to use the validFrom, validThrough, and priceValidUntil schema.org properties to set the effective range for sale prices, including best practices and examples for placement on either Offer or PriceSpecification nodes.

Why: This aligns schema.org usage with the Merchant Center feed attribute sale_price_effective_date, providing clear instructions and best practices for merchants using structured data.

July 1

Updating our AMP documentation

What: Simplified our AMP documentation by removing outdated references to the AMP viewer, AMP Cache, and signed exchange.

Why: Starting today, Google Search is updating how it connects users to AMP pages, and will now take users directly to the publisher's AMP host pages. This change simplifies and reduces maintenance efforts for publishers who are creating AMP content, as they no longer need to update the AMP cache or configure signed exchanges. AMP content will continue to rank just like any other web page.

June 2026

June 17

Site move guidance now includes information on domain variants

What: The site move guide now includes information on using the Change of Address tool for all subdomain variants (including www and non-www) during domain migrations.

Why: The domain migrations work best when all variants of a site are migrated properly.

June 15

Clarifying guidance on llms.txt files

What: Added a note to the AI optimization guide clarifying Google Search's usage of llms.txt files.

Why: To address questions from the community and clarify that while these files aren't needed for Google Search (and won't negatively or positively impact your visibility or rankings), it's fine if you want to maintain these files for other services or systems that use them.

Removing documentation for the FAQ rich result feature

What: Removed documentation for the FAQ rich result feature.

Why: The FAQ rich result feature is no longer shown in Google Search results, as announced in the changelog entry in May 2026.

June 12

New article for small business owners in Tennessee

What: Created a new article explaining how small business owners in Tennessee can receive notifications from Google Search.

Why: To help small businesses in Tennessee learn how they can get notified if their web content is removed or restricted on Google Search (for example, signing up for Search Console, Business Profile, or Merchant Center).

June 5

Guidance on third-party SEO tools, services, and advice

What: Added Google Search's guidance on using third-party SEO tools, services, and advice. Also added guidance to the Do you need an SEO? page on evaluating your SEO's recommendations and tools, along with other minor updates to the page to simplify and modernize the content.

Why: To highlight important considerations when evaluating third-party SEO tools and advice, and to simplify some sections and remove outdated examples in existing documentation.

May 2026

May 27

Preferred sources is available in AI Mode and AI Overviews

What: Updated the feature availability section of the preferred sources documentation to include AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Why: The preferred sources feature is starting to roll out to AI Overviews and AI Mode.

May 20

What: Added the hasAdultConsideration property to the Merchant listing and Product variant documentation.

Why: This property brings parity with the Merchant Center feed specification for the adult property.

May 15

Adding a new guide on optimizing for generative AI features

What: Added a new guide on optimizing for generative AI features on Search. Notable new sections include guidance on the importance of providing non-commodity content, tips about providing local, shopping, image, and video content, mythbusting common "AEO/GEO" misconceptions, initial guidance on AI agents, and more information on why SEO best practices continue to be relevant for success in our generative AI features on Search.

Why: To help site owners, SEOs, and developers better understand how to optimize their content for appearance in generative AI features on Search, and what they can ignore.

What: Clarified that our spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Google Search.

Why: To make it clear that the spam policies apply to all of Google Search, including generative AI responses.

May 8

Deprecating the FAQ rich result feature

What: Added a deprecation notice to the FAQ rich result documentation.

Why: This feature will no longer appear in Google Search starting May 7, 2026.

April 2026

April 30

Expanding preferred sources to all languages where Google Search is available

What: Added that the preferred sources feature is now available in all languages where Google Search is available, including new translated downloadable button assets.

Why: The preferred sources feature is now available in all languages supported by Google Search.

April 23

Clarifying when and why we may take manual action based on spam reports

What: Further clarified when and why we may take manual action based on spam reports.

Why: To address feedback we received about the change on using spam reports to take manual action.

April 20

What: Added a new section on "read more" deep links to the snippet documentation.

Why: To explain how to increase the likelihood of your content appearing with a "read more" deeplink in Google Search results.

April 14

Clarifying the use of spam reports

What: Clarified that Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations.

Why: Google may now use spam report submissions to take manual action.

April 13

Introducing a new spam policy for "back button hijacking"

What: Added a new section to the malicious practices spam policy to address a deceptive practice known as "back button hijacking".

Why: Learn more about this update in our blog post on back button hijacking.

March 2026

March 24

Added new supported properties for Discussion Forum and QA Page markup

What: Added more supported properties for Discussion Forum and QA Page markup.

Why: For providing more clarity on comment thread structure to Google ingestion systems. This prevents misinterpretations in our handling of forum and Q&A content.

Added a note on the robots meta tags documentation

What: Added a note to the robots meta tags documentation on the way Google Search processes robots meta tags outside the HTML head.

Why: The behavior didn't change but was previously undocumented.

March 4

Removed outdated information about JavaScript and accessibility

What: Removed a section on accessibility from the JavaScript SEO basics documentation.

Why: The information was out of date and not as helpful as it used to be. Google Search has been rendering JavaScript for multiple years now, so using JavaScript to load content is not "making it harder for Google Search". Most assistive technologies are able to work with JavaScript now as well.

March 2

Added preferred image best practices

What: Added a new section on specifying a preferred image with metadata to the image SEO best practices and Discover documentation.

Why: Based on feedback, we're clarifying that Google uses both schema.org markup and the og:image meta tag as sources when determining image thumbnails in Google Search and Discover.

February 2026

February 5

Added information to the Get on Discover page for site owners

What: Added more information on how sites can increase the likelihood of their content appearing in Discover.

Why: We're rolling out the February 2026 Discover Core Update.

February 3

Clarified information about the default file size limits for Googlebot

What: While moving over the information about the default file size limits of Google's crawlers and fetchers to the crawler documentation, we also updated the Googlebot documentation about its own file size limits.

Why: The original location of the default file size limits was not the most logical place as it applies to all of Google's crawlers and fetchers, and the move enabled us to be more precise about Googlebot's limits.

January 2026

January 30

Adding preferred sources documentation

What: Added preferred sources documentation for website owners.

Why: To help publishers understand how to help their audience find their site as a preferred source.

January 21

Adding more supported query types to South African carousel documentation

What: Updated the structured data carousels (beta) documentation and the South African badges and refinement chips blog post to include additional query types.

Why: The South African carousel, badges, and refinement chips now support queries related to food delivery, car hire, and bus booking.

January 6

Removing documentation for the practice problem structured data type

What: Removed documentation for the practice problem structured data type.

Why: The practice problem structured data type is no longer shown in Google Search results. Learn more about this change in our blog post and changelog entry announced in November 2025.

2025 updates

December 2025

December 18

Clarifying JavaScript execution on non-200 HTTP status codes

What: We added a note on how Googlebot processes JavaScript.

Why: While pages with a 200 HTTP status code are sent to rendering, this might not be the case for pages with a non-200 HTTP status code.

Migrating more crawling documentation to a new location

What: Migrated the following documentation to Google's crawling infrastructure site. The functionality hasn't changed, only the location of the documentation and some minor wording changes to clarify that some guidance applies to both Google Search and other Google products.

Why: This documentation is more relevant to many Google products that use Google's crawlers, not just Search.

December 17

Clarifying canonicalization best practices for JavaScript

What: We added a section on canonicalization best practices for JavaScript to our JavaScript documentation and the best practices for consolidation of duplicate URLs.

Why: Canonicalization happens before and after rendering, so it's important to make the canonical URL as clear as possible. With JavaScript, this means setting the canonical URL to the same URL as in the original HTML or if that isn't possible, to leave the canonical URL out of the original HTML.

December 15

Clarifying noindex and JavaScript

What: Clarified in our JavaScript documentation how Google's crawler handles noindex tags in pages that use JavaScript.

Why: While Google may be able to render a page that uses JavaScript, the behavior of this is not well defined and might change. If there's a possibility that you do want the page indexed, don't use a noindex tag in the original page code.

December 9

Adding a section on smaller core updates

What: Added information to the core updates documentation about how Google continually makes updates to our search algorithms (including smaller core updates), and how that can affect your website.

Why: To clarify that site owners that make content improvements can see a rise in position in Google Search results without having to wait for the next major core update.

November 2025

November 20

Migrating Google's crawling documentation to a new location

What: Migrated the following crawling documentation to a new location, Google's crawling infrastructure documentation (the content hasn't changed, only the location). Notable moves include:

To subscribe to updates about Google's crawling infrastructure, add the URL of the new changelog page to your feed reader, or add the feed URL directly: https://developers.google.com/crawling/docs/changelog/crawling_docs_updates.rss.

Why: Google's crawling infrastructure is shared across a variety of Google products beyond Search, including Google Shopping, News, Gemini, AdSense, and more. The new site is a more logical home for this documentation and makes it easier to document new features and updates that are relevant to all of these products.

November 19

Removing guidance on the Follow feature in Discover

What: Removed guidance on the Follow feature from Google Discover documentation.

Why: The Follow feature is no longer shown in Google Discover.

November 12

Clarifying nesting in reviews and aggregate ratings

What: Clarified the review snippet documentation to explain that site owners should avoid using multiple ways of indicating what's being reviewed.

Why: To prevent ambiguity and make sure Google can better interpret your review and aggregate rating structured data.

Adding a new user-triggered fetcher

What: We added the Google-Pinpoint fetcher to the list of user-triggered fetchers.

Why: The Google-Pinpoint fetcher is used by the Pinpoint research tool.

Launching new merchant shipping policies documentation

What: Added documentation for shipping policies.

Why: We now support merchant-level shipping policy markup in Search.

November 5

Removing and clarifying documentation for some structured data types

What: Added a deprecation notice to the