Google Search Central

Should we be scared of a 404 status code?

3.1K views · 3d ago · 9:26

Do 404 "Not Found" status codes trigger site wide disasters or haunt your crawl budget? Should you redirect every dead URL straight to your homepage? ...And the most terrifying question of all: where is Chicken?

Topics: Welcome back to the Cabinet (Where is the chicken?) · Search Console 404 panic: Are dead pages really bad? · Technical indexing vs. business & user experience impact · Redirect all 404s to the homepage? To do or not to do? · The 3-Step Framework for managing dead URLs · Myth busted: Do 404s drain your crawl budget?

Google Search news with platform properties, multimodal Search & AI Features (Q4 ‘26)

7.5K views · 4d ago · 7:04

In this episode of Google Search News, John Mueller shares major updates across Search Console, Google Search, and publisher tools! He also covers recent core and spam updates, site reputation policy changes for the EEA, new favicon image format guidelines, and exciting new tools like Connected Apps in AI Mode, expanded Search Profiles, and regional breakdowns in Google Trends.

What can you actually put in a robots.txt?

7.9K views · 1w ago · 9:45

Can you use emoji to keep crawlers out? What about ASCII art chicken or non English characters in your robots.txt file? And can robots.txt tell AI bots to stay out of chicken's personal diary? Is chicken bot real? Welcome back to the Non-Canonical Cabinet, where Cherry and Gary from Google Search Relations drag weird, edge-case technical questions asked by the community out of a dusty filing cabinet and onto your screen.

Topics: The sign in the Non-Canonical Cabinet · What is robots.txt & RFC 9309? · ASCII art in a robots.txt file? · How parsers handle formatting mistakes and custom rules · user-agent tokens: 🐔 and non-English characters? · URL paths: 🐔 and non-English characters?

What can you actually put in a URL 🐔?

9.5K views · 2w ago · 12:57

Can you put a chicken emoji in your domain name? What about your URL path? What about non-English characters? Welcome to the premiere of The Non-Canonical Cabinet—a series where Google Search Developer Advocates Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin dig through the vault to answer the weirdest, most hyper-specific edge cases of SEO. These are questions that don't belong on a standard FAQ page but are still useful for Search and generative AI features.

Topics: Welcome to The Non-Canonical Cabinet · Can you put anything in a domain or URL path? · Domain: understanding ICANN & RFC standards · Emoji in a domain name? · Do keywords in a URL help with ranking? · URL Paths: UTF-8, special characters, and "chicken gear"

PDFs in Search: Indexing, AI & Pitfalls

4.5K views · 2w ago · 25:16

Should you publish your content as a PDF or stick strictly to standard HTML? Does Google treat PDF files differently when it comes to indexing, ranking, and AI search features? In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin Splitt and John Mueller from the Google Search Relations team demystify how Google Search handles PDF documents.

Topics: Can you save an LLMs.txt file as a PDF? · Plain text vs. Binary container: What makes PDFs different from HTML? · Inside Google's converter pipeline: Turning PDFs into HTML for indexing. · Extracting images and links from PDF files. · Crawling limits, file sizes, and testing cut-off thresholds. · When does it make sense to publish a PDF?

Do sitemaps still matter?

6.7K views · 1mo ago · 26:27

Sitemaps have been a core element of web development and search engine optimization for two decades, yet Search Console warnings like "Couldn't fetch" continue to generate concern among site owners. Are XML sitemaps still necessary with modern search crawlers, or can search engines and AI bots figure out site structure on their own?

Topics: Sitemaps History & John Mueller's Path to Google · Why Search Engines Started Using XML Sitemaps · Deprecated Fields: Priority, Change Frequency, and lastmod · Sitemaps for Small Sites vs. High-Volume News Outlets · Canonical Selection & Parameterized URLs in Sitemaps · Comparing RSS Feeds and XML Sitemaps

Japanese Google Search Office Hours（ #Google検索オフィスアワー 2026 年 09 月 24 日）

4.7K views · 1mo ago · 20:43

Google では、日本のサイト運営者のみなさまに向けて、2013 年より検索のご質問にお答えするオフィスアワーを定期的に行ってきました。幾度かのリブランディングを経て、2023 年 5 月より新しく Google 検索オフィスアワーとなりました。 Google 検索オフィスアワーでは、SEO 担当者、エンジニア、デザイナー、マーケティングなどサイトの運営に関わる皆さんからの、Google 検索に関するご質問に Google 社員がお答えします。

Should you block your Search result pages?

9.4K views · 3mo ago · 28:44

In this episode, you’ll learn: The "Infinite Crawl Space" Concept: How Googlebot treats internal search functions as infinite crawl spaces that can generate an endless loop of new URLs. Robots.txt vs. Noindex: The distinct technical trade-offs of using a broad robots.txt disallow rule versus a robots meta tag or HTTP header noindex.

Topics: Defining Internal Search Results Pages · How Googlebot Discovers Search Features & Creates Infinite Spaces · Crawl Budget, Server Load, and Database Performance Hurdles · Solutions: Robots.txt Disallow vs. Meta Noindex · The Fallacy of the Search Console Removal Tool & 404 Pages · Why You Should Never Serve 500 Errors to Bots

How to read the Indexing Report

12K views · 3mo ago · 31:41

In this episode, you’ll learn: The Indexing Report Shift: Insights from the Search Console team's Hillel on why you should look for trend lines and systemic patterns rather than treating the report as a giant list of errors.

Topics: Tracking site migrations and processing data delays. · Why 404 errors can be a good thing · Handling canonical shifts and the value of Domain Properties. · CDN bot protection and the absolute nightmare of soft error pages. · How to use "marked as fixed". · Discovered vs. Crawled Not Indexed: Is it a technical or site quality issue?

Google Search Gen AI Reports, Search Profiles & more (Q2 ‘26)

18K views · 4mo ago · 6:29

In this episode of Google Search News, John Mueller shares major updates of Google’s official launch of Generative AI Performance Reporting inside Google Search Console, alongside a brand-new control that allows site owners to manage how their content grounds responses in features like AI Overviews and AI Mode.

Japanese Google Search Office Hours（ #Google検索オフィスアワー 2026 年 06 月 18 日）

2.5K views · 4mo ago · 30:18

Googlebot の内部: クロール、取得、処理するバイトの謎を解く 「戻るボタンのハイジャック」に関する新しいスパムポリシーの導入 Search Console に検索の生成 AI のパフォーマンス レポートを導入 Google 検索の生成 AI 機能向けにウェブサイトを最適化する Google 検索のコア アップデートとウェブサイト Search Console のデータ異常 > パフォーマンス レポート Google 検索の生成 AI 向けに最適化するための新しいリソース

Topics: マークアップでテキストを含む画像の使用 · Google 検索のコア アップデート · 重複コンテンツの処理 · Discover のインプレッションが急落 · バックボタンハイジャッキング · 戻るボタンのバックボタンハイジャック

Should I use markdown for my site?

8.8K views · 4mo ago · 26:13

Chapters 0:00 - Introduction: Should we all be using Markdown? 3:45 - The history and purpose of Markdown. 7:15 - Why developers love it: Separation of style and content. 11:20 - Do crawlers need Markdown to understand your site? 14:50 - The danger of "parallel versions" and dynamic rendering lessons. 17:30 - Discussing the "llms.txt" proposal and AI agents. 21:00 - Where Markdown actually makes sense (Developer Docs). 24:00 - Final verdict: Stick to HTML for the web.

Vibe Coding - yay or nay?

6.8K views · 5mo ago · 33:57

Guest: Vibe Coding

In this episode, you’ll learn: What is Vibe Coding? Understanding the shift from writing syntax to "talking" to your IDE. The Developer’s Trap: Why you still need technical knowledge (like linters, deployment scripts, and GitHub Actions) to prevent AI from breaking your project. SEO & AI Architecture: Why you can't just "add SEO" at the end—and how to guide AI to build with canonicals and sitemaps from day one.

How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO

16K views · 6mo ago · 33:11

Guest: Nikola Todorovic

In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin speaks with Nikola Todorovic (director of Software Engineering at Google Search) about how AI is changing Google Search. They discuss the evolution from traditional search to AI Overviews and AI Mode, how Google tests and launches search changes, and why query behaviour is becoming more conversational and complex.

Analysing Robots.txt at scale with HTTP Archive and BigQuery

5.1K views · 6mo ago · 27:41

Guest: HTTP Archive

In this episode of Search Off the Record, Martin and Gary turn a simple robots.txt question into a data‐driven deep dive using HTTP Archive, WebPageTest, custom JavaScript metrics, and BigQuery. They explore how millions of real robots.txt files are actually written in 2025–2026, which directives and user‐agents are most common, and what that means for modern crawling and AI bots.