Daily Search Forum Recap: April 13, 2026

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.

Catching up on the newsletter, there is a lot below - sorry about that.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Google Search Console Testing AI Contribution
It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.
New Study Points to Holes In AI Overviews
The NY Times commissioned a study that says AI Overviews have holes in both grounding and accuracy.
Google Still Processing Status To XML Sitemaps - Nothing To Announce
Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for "still processing." John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, "I've chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I've seen that it can be annoying." But he added he has nothing to announce.
Google May Ignore Links From Sites That Spam & Violate Policies
Google's John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.
Google AdSense Will Experiment With New Ad Technology Partners
Google announced that on August 20, 2026 it will experiment with an updated set of commonly used ad technology partners. If the experiments go well, Google will switch it "on or after June 5, 2026."
Google Discusses Page Weight, Average Mobile Homepage Size, and Googlebot File Size Limits
On the latest Search Off The Record Podcast, Martin Split and Gary Illyes discussed the growing page weight issue and how that impacts users and Googlebot crawling. This follows Google updating its documentation to clarify file size limits for Googlebot (and various versions of Googlebot).
Reusable "Skills" Are Coming To Gemini In Chrome
If you're using Gemini in Chrome (the sidebar you can summon via a button in Chrome), then you might be happy about the latest feature that showed up in Chrome Canary. After running a prompt...
Google's March 2026 Broad Core Update Has Completed Rolling Out
Google's March 2026 broad core update has officially completed rolling out. Google announced this via X this morning and the Search Status Dashboard has been updated to document the rollout. The update took 12 days and 4 hours to complete...
Google Testing Jumping To AI Mode Directly From AIOs ON DESKTOP
In January Google announced a change to how AI Overviews worked where clicking the "Show more" button at the end of an AIO would directly take you into AI Mode. But that was only on mobile. Now it seems Google is testing that functionality, but on desktop...
“Jarvis Approaching”: Google's Sundar Pichai Signals an Agentic, Multi-Threaded Future for Search
Google's Sundar Pichai was on the Cheeky Pint podcast and was asked about the future of Search. He basically laid out a future where Search is Jarvis-like where users will be completing tasks and have "many threads running"...
Google Ads Testing New Layouts for Multi-Location GBP Assets?
Spotted in the wild are what appear to be swipeable GBP location assets.
Programming Note: Offline For Last Days Of Passover Wednesday & Thursday
This is a programming note that I am completely offline for the last days of Passover holiday Wednesday and Thursday. I am likely not going to schedule any stories, I apologize (still in recovery mode). So I apologize for the lack of stories here. I hope to come back soon...
GSC Logging Error Yielded Inflated Impressions Since May 2025
Google announced a logging error on Friday, April 3rd in the data anomalies report and explained that error prevented the accurate logging of impressions in GSC since May of 2025. That's right, almost a full year of inaccurate impressions...
Grokipedia Continues To Drop in Search Visibility And AI Search Visibility
In February I shared how Grokipedia started dropping heavily in Google after initially surging. It became yet another example of what I call "Mt. AI". That's when sites scaling heavily with AI-generated content initially surge in Google, but then drop heavily as Google's systems...