Early analysis of Google’s December core update points to gains for specialized sites over generalists. News publishers saw heavy volatility across surfaces.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Transform daily PPC execution with prompt templates designed for speed, clarity, and better performance. The post 20 AI Prompt Ideas & Example Templates For PPC (Easy + Advanced) appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Here’s how industry leaders are redefining what content performance means in 2026 and beyond.

It is January 2026, and it is now time for the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I recap the most important Google organic stories of the past month. Obviously, the Google December 2025 core update was the big one, it ran for 18 days and it really had a large impact on many sites.

Google has been showing social media posts in Google Discover, including posts from X for a while now, and Google may even show more posts from those you follow.

Google is working on fixing an issue where some searchers are seeing squished images within the Google Search knowledge panels. I personally cannot replicate this but it seems to be happening for a number of searchers.

Google Search Console’s link report seems to be either missing data or is now showing fewer links. I suspect it is a bug but I also don’t think Google spends too much time monitoring this report within Search Console.

Google added a new button to the Google Ads Change history report that lets advertisers quickly jump to different campaigns and ad groups in this report.

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