December’s first weekly news roundup reviews a surge in AI Overviews travel queries favoring local and activity vacations. Google’s new “Crawling December” series explains how Googlebot handles your site’s crawl budget. Google’s Martin Splitt provides robots.txt best practices for SEO. And Google Search adds a “Try without personalization” option that ignores your past search history.
From around the web, Barry Schwartz reviews a Search Off The Record interview about marauding black holes” in Google Search. Danny Goodwin covers an interview where Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai says Search will change profoundly in 2025.
Google AI Overviews Travel Queries Surge To 700%
Marketing company BrightEdge’s latest data report shows AI Overviews trends stabilizing across numerous industries except one: travel, which is experiencing a 700% surge with seasonal, localized, and activity-specific search queries being the most popular.
Key takeaways:
- The report says AI Overviews is at its most stable after its release six months ago.
- BrightEdge said, “We are now six months into the AIO era and seeing macro-changes in AI overviews that are getting smaller and smaller.”
- Niche travel sectors, such as seasonal, local, and activity, rank highest in the AIO results.
- BrightEdge says the travel search surge could also be because of Google’s confidence in AI Overviews’ ability to provide travel recommendations.
- BrightEdge’s report recommends optimizing your travel site for AIO searches, saying publishers should create concise, seasonal, and keyword-relevant content.
Google Provides New Insights Into Googlebot Crawling Process
Google released its new Search Central “Crawling December” series, explaining how Googlebot indexes a website’s pages and tips on maximizing your site’s crawl budget.
Key takeaways:
- The “Crawling December” series will publish articles to help site owners understand the Googlebot crawling and indexing process.
- Google said it would provide “details that aren’t often talked about” that impact Googlebot’s ability to crawl websites.
- Google says Googlebot works similarly to browsers, but modern sites take more time to crawl because of JavaScript and CSS.
- The first article explains crawling basics and budgets, including details many site owners are unaware of.
Google Explains Robots.txt Best Practices
Google’s Developer Advocate Martin Splitt explains the differences between the “noindex” in robots meta tags and the “disallow” command in robots.txt files, which you should use to stop Google from indexing specific content and when to use them.
Key takeaways:
- Splitt says understanding “noindex” and “disallow” directives is essential to control how search engines crawl your site, adding you should not replace one with the other because they have different purposes.
- Google’s Developer Advocate says the “noindex” command is the best way to stop content from appearing in search results while still allowing Googlebot to crawl it.
- Splitt recommends site owners who want to stop search from crawling and indexing content should use the “disallow” directive as it protects sensitive data.
- Martin finished the video by describing one common mistake every site owner should avoid when using the directives.
Google Adds Try Without Personalization To Search Results
Google made a partial U-turn in how Search works by adding a “Try without personalization” option that removes a user’s past search history and preferences in Search. The update reverses the 2009 implementation of the sometimes controversial and misleading personalized results; however, it’s still available.
Key takeaways:
- The new “Results are personalized / Try without personalization” button in the Search page footer provides instant incognito results.
- Activating the “Try without personalization” option removes personalized, historical, data-driven information.
- The new link is convenient and lets users remove personalization in a single click, wiping their search history clean and providing unbiased results.
- Whether the “Try without personalization” option will decrease specific niche website visibility or increase it by removing Google’s personalized algorithms is a question many publishers are asking.
From Around The Web
Google Marauding Black Holes With Clustering & Error Pages
Search Engine RoundTable’s Executive Editor Barry Schwartz reviews what he describes as an excellent interview with Google’s Allan Scott about duplicate content and “marauding black holes” in Google Search.
Key takeaways:
- Scott explains what the “marauding black holes” are in Google Search and why a site’s error pages and Google’s clustering sometimes have a bad relationship.
- Black holes can stop Google from displaying product pages that are temporarily unavailable.
- Scott said during the interview that:
“Error pages and clustering have an unfortunate relationship where undetected error pages just get a checksum like any other page would, and then cluster by checksum, and so error pages tend to cluster with each other.”
- Google’s Martin Splitt explains why Google considers the error pages the same.
- Scott finished by explaining how to avoid the black holes by serving the correct HTTP codes.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai: Search will profoundly change in 2025
Search Engine Land writer Danny Goodwin reports on Alphabets CEO Sundar Pichai’s statement during a New York Times interview where he said Google Search will change profoundly in 2025.
Key takeaways:
- Google CEO said during the interview:
“Search itself will continue to change profoundly in [2025]. I think we are going to be able to tackle more complex questions than ever before. I think you’ll be surprised even early in [2025] the kind of newer things search can do compared to where it is today.”
- Pichai confirmed that the tech giant applies AI most aggressively in search:
“If you look at the last couple of years, we have, with AI overviews, Gemini is being used by over a billion users in search alone. I just feel like we are getting started.”
- Interviewer Andrew Ross Sirkin asked Pichai if Google gives content creators enough credit, but Google’s CEO ignored the question and instead focused on YouTube creators.
