Industry News

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Google Discover seems to show X posts way too often and some searchers don't like it...

It is January 2026, and it is now time for the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I recap the most important Google organic stories of the past month. Obviously, the Google December 2025 core update was the big one, it ran for 18 days and it really had a large impact on many sites.

Google has been showing social media posts in Google Discover, including posts from X for a while now, and Google may even show more posts from those you follow. But is Google showing too many social media posts from X in your Google Discover feed?

Google is working on fixing an issue where some searchers are seeing squished images within the Google Search knowledge panels. I personally cannot replicate this but it seems to be happening for a number of searchers.

Google Search Console's link report seems to be either missing data or is now showing fewer links. I suspect it is a bug but I also don't think Google spends too much time monitoring this report within Search Console.

Google added a new button to the Google Ads Change history report that lets advertisers quickly jump to different campaigns and ad groups in this report. It should be a big time saver for some advertisers.

I’m late to this one, but I like Liz Pelly’s take on Spotify Wrapped. It’s not just about music—it’s about what happens when we let corporations automate our memories:

Spotify Wrapped now feels like just another example of something personal and precious that is being automated away from us; another example of a supposedly unbearable task of thinking and writing being “offloaded” in order to make life more frictionless.

The post is essentially about friction—and why we need it. She...

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google completed the December 2025 core update this week and it hit some news publishers incredibly hard. I posted the annual Google algorithm update infographic. Google's Frankenstein AI-recipes are a complete horror. Google questioned the need for ccTLDs for international SEO...

Now that the December 2025 core update is officially done, some are looking at the damage it caused. A number of very visible news publishers saw some significant declines in Google Search visibility with this latest core update.