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

A Reddit thread about a sharp crawl drop prompted guidance from Google’s John Mueller. Here’s how to diagnose the cause.
The post Googlebot Crawl Slump? Mueller Points To Server Errors appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Google recently launched the preferred sources for top stories within Google Search. But there is no way for publishers to know how many of their readers selected their website as a preferred source. But Google said they are “looking into this" and may provide such data to publishers.

Google Search started to roll out the age verification that it said it would begin doing a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is not just YouTube, it goes across Google Search ads too, as we reported back a couple of weeks ago.

Google’s John Mueller replied to a lot of the hype around all GEO, AIO, AEO, etc topics floating around the SEO space. John said on Bluesky, “The higher the urgency, and the stronger the push of new acronyms, the more likely they’re just making spam and scamming."

The studies we have thus seen from third parties have all said traffic from Google Search to websites has declined a lot since AI Overviews came out. But we have a new study from Chartbeat that says traffic to news publishers from Google (including Discover) has been stable over the past few years.

The Google search ranking volatility has not calmed down since the June core update and we are in mid-August and expecting another core update soon. Google launched the preferred sources feature for Top Stories…