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…

Google completed the December 2025 core update this week and it hit some news publishers incredibly hard.

Now that the December 2025 core update is officially done, some are looking at the damage it caused. A number of very visible news publishers saw some significant declines in Google Search visibility with this latest core update.

For the past several years now, John Mueller of Google would come out with what he calls the “Mueller Report of SEO memes.” Well, here is his 2025 edition of the Mueller Report of SEO memes. It is fun to scan through, so I’ll just embed them all.

Google is testing a blue “Send” button in the search query box on its home page.