1) August 2025 – Google Business Profile – Google Posts interface and expanded Chat features on Maps.
2) (Aug 12, 2025) Google Search now allows users to customize the Top Stories section with their Preferred Sources
➡️ Read more: https://blog.google/products/search/preferred-sources/ “How to select your preferred sources in Top Stories in Search” (blog.google)
3) Aug 11, 2025 – “Google’s Gary Illyes Interviewed On AI Search, Content & SEO”
➡️ Read more on seroundtable.com: https://www.seroundtable.com/gary-illyes-google-interview-ai-search-content-seo-39910.html (by Barry Schwartz)
➡️ Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pstFF6TcqXk
4) Aug 7, 2025 – A new episode of Search Off the Record: “SEO for photographers: websites, social media, and Google Search”
➡️ Watch it now on Google Search Central YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sJPKghoUeU
➡️ Full episode transcript: https://search-off-the-record.libsyn.com/sotr097_transcriptpdf
5) (06 August, 2025) Bing Webmaster Tools – starting today:
- 24 months of historical search performance data
- New filters by country and device
- Keyword trendlines at a glance
➡️ Source: Original Linkedin post
6) (July 31, 2025) “The lastmod field in your sitemap remains a key signal, helping Bing prioritize URLs for recrawling and reindexing, or skip them entirely if the content hasn’t changed since the last crawl”
“To ensure your signals are interpreted correctly, use standard ISO 8601 date formatting for lastmod values, including both the date and time”
➡️ Source & read more: https://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/July-2025/Keeping-Content-Discoverable-with-Sitemaps-in-AI-Powered-Search (blogs.bing.com)
➡️ ISO 8601 date formatting: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 (Wikipedia)
7) Jul 28, 2025 – “Google Search: Introducing AI Mode in the UK”
➡️ Read more: https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/united-kingdom/ai-mode-search-uk/ (blog.google)
8) Jul 28, 2025 – “Introducing Copilot Mode in Edge: A new way to browse the web”
➡️ Read more: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/07/28/introducing-copilot-mode-in-edge-a-new-way-to-browse-the-web/ (blogs.windows.com)
9) Jul 24, 2025 – You can now use AI to virtually “try on” clothes by uploading a photo of yourself to see how they look.
➡️ Read more: https://blog.google/products/shopping/back-to-school-ai-updates-try-on-price-alerts/
10) (Jul 24, 2025) “We’re launching Web Guide, a Search Labs experiment that uses AI to intelligently organize the search results page, making it easier to find information and web pages.”
“Web Guide uses a custom version of Gemini to better understand both a search query and content on the web” (…) “Similar to AI Mode, Web Guide uses a query fan-out technique, concurrently issuing multiple related searches to identify the most relevant results.”
➡️ Source & read more: https://blog.google/products/search/web-guide-labs/ (blog.google)
11) Jul 24, 2025 – In a recent episode of Search Off the Record titled “How does CSS affect SEO?” ( https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-images#semantic-html ), Martin Splitt and John Mueller discuss how CSS can influence how Google understands web content.
Here are the most important points discussed:
- a) Google’s guidelines say you should make your CSS files crawlable
- b) CSS class names do not affect SEO (“You could name them all blurb. It would not make a difference from an SEO perspective”)
- c) Avoid using ::before and ::after for meaningful content (“don’t use before and after CSS pseudo classes if you want to add something that adds context, content, to your pages”)
- d) Google doesn’t index CSS images ( https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/google-images#semantic-html ) – Google can find images in src attribute of img element (even when it’s a child of other elements, such as the picture element)
e) Don’t simulate tables with CSS: tabular data can be useful for indexing when Google can clearly identify rows and columns. If you use only CSS to simulate a table instead of proper HTML table elements, it’s likely much harder for Google to interpret that structure correctly.
➡️ Watch it now on Google Search Central YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2E3gBDP_qY
➡️ Full episode transcript: https://search-off-the-record.libsyn.com/sotr096_transcriptpdf
12) July 16, 2025 – New Microsoft Clarity feature: now you can visualize trends over time with line graphs on your dashboard cards.
➡️ Read more: https://clarity.microsoft.com/blog/new-in-clarity-visualize-trends/
13) The latest major updates made to the Google Search Central documentation:
▪️ July 1, 2025: Google updated “Google Read Aloud” user agent in HTTP requests with newer browser versions.
▪️ July 11, 2025: Google updated documentation for merchant return policies and loyalty programs to improve clarity.
➡️ Source & read more details: https://developers.google.com/search/updates#july-2025
14) June 2025 core update – the rollout was complete as of July 17, 2025
➡️ Source & read more: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/riq1AuqETW46NfBCe5NT
15) On June 25, 2025, Google announced MUVERA, a breakthrough algorithm designed to accelerate multi-vector retrieval while preserving high accuracy in search systems.
➡️ Source & read more details: https://research.google/blog/muvera-making-multi-vector-retrieval-as-fast-as-single-vector-search/
Curious about more SEO updates? Don’t miss the previous editions for a full view.