We hope you are in good health. Here are some of the major SEO news updates of the week that you need to know:
Search Related News and Updates from Major Search Engine
John Mueller Explains How to Check If Google Has Indexed an Entire Webpage
Google’s John Mueller has explained how website owners can check whether a full document is indexed, clearing up confusion around passage-based ranking. He reiterated that Google indexes pages as a whole, while passages are only used to surface relevant sections in search results, helping SEOs better understand how content visibility works.
Google Begins Rolling Out February 2026 Discover-Focused Core Update
Google has launched a Discover-focused core update named the February 2026 Discover core update, initially for English-language users in the United States, with broader international rollout planned over the next two weeks. The update aims to improve the content that appears in the Discover feed by enhancing local relevance, reducing sensational clickbait, and prioritizing original, in-depth, expert content — and website owners should monitor Discover traffic separately from Search traffic during this period.
Google Updates Googlebot File Size Limit Documentation
Google has updated its Googlebot documentation to clarify how file size limits are presented — moving the default limits for all crawlers into the broader crawling infrastructure docs and specifying Googlebot-specific limits separately. The change lists a 15 MB default limit for crawlers broadly, while the Googlebot page now notes a 2 MB cap for HTML/text and 64 MB for PDFs, but Google says this is purely a documentation reorganization, not a behavioral change in crawling.
Google Shows How Publishers Can Get More Traffic From the Top Stories Feature
Google published new documentation explaining how publishers can improve visibility and drive more traffic from its Top Stories feature by leveraging the Preferred Sources program, which allows users to select favorite news sources that may influence their personalized Top Stories results. The guidance highlights that while Top Stories prioritizes freshness and quality, adding Schema.org Article structured data and encouraging readers to add your site as a preferred source can help increase exposure — and it’s currently available for English-language pages globally.
Google Tests “Good to Know” AI Labels for Local Hotel Photos
Google is experimenting with adding AI-generated “Good to Know” labels to some hotel photos in local hotel listings, providing short summaries that describe what the photo (and associated reviews) convey about specific aspects of the property. This new label format appears on both owner and visitor photos in the hotel results, though it isn’t shown on all images and was spotted in early tests shared on social media.
PPC Related News and Updates from Major Search Engine
Google Ads Adds Multi-Party Approval to Protect Accounts From Hijacking
Google Ads has introduced a Multi-Party Approval (MPA) security feature that requires a second administrator to approve high-risk changes — such as adding/removing users or changing roles — before they take effect, helping prevent unauthorized or malicious account modifications. When an admin initiates one of these sensitive actions, other eligible admins receive an in-product notification and have 20 days to approve or reject the request, or it expires and the change is blocked.
Microsoft Advertising Tests New “Magazine” Answer Card Ad Format
Microsoft Advertising is experimenting with a magazine-style layout within its Answer Card ad format that appears at the top of Bing search results, designed to showcase ads in a more visual, magazine-like arrangement. Microsoft confirmed that advertisers can appear in this space through existing formats like Shopping, Multimedia, and Performance Max placements — but there’s no separate auction for this placement, meaning ads may show here or in other traditional positions on the page.
Social Media Related News and Updates from Major Platforms
LinkedIn Reveals What Actually Drives AI Search Visibility
LinkedIn shared insights from its internal testing on what factors improve content visibility in AI-generated search results, finding that structured content with clear headings and semantic markup helps LLMs parse and surface material more effectively. It also highlighted that named expert authorship and visible timestamps boost credibility signals, and introduced new AI-centric metrics like citation share and LLM mentions to better measure AI search impact beyond traditional traffic.
