Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

https://www.theverge.com/tech/961955/google-search-console-reach-platform-properties

by herbertl • 16 days ago

100 44 16 days ago

Mirror without Paywall: https://archive.is/fcl2T

cpncrunch• 12 days ago

Weirdly paywall is borken of safari….just a grey full screen modal overlay with nothing to click. But you can just use reading mode anyway.

harkdif• 16 days ago

It may just be me, but I find googles search console surprisingly inaccurate or at least hard to parse. Even the data within it is often conflicting and I'm not sure why the results show as they do. Things like it will show a click through rate for specific pages but have no correlation to the search terms that drove that click, yet show impressions for the page far beyond what it shows for terms. Can't imagine it will be better for something as hard to track as creator tracking cross-platform.

xnx3• 12 days ago

This is mostly by design. Google doesn't want it to be possible to deanonymize the data.

sylware• 12 days ago

Please gogol, stop being super evil, restore interop with noscript/basic HTML web engines.

tchalla2• 12 days ago

Does everyone see this? I can’t.

khurs• 12 days ago

what do you mean? See what?

tchalla2• 12 days ago

The option that’s talked about on the main post.

AlienRobot3• 12 days ago

I don't have it yet. Probably getting A/B tested or slowly rolled out like everything else on Google.

jasonvorhe• 12 days ago

Reading about anything Google Search in 2026 gives off some Yahoo vibes around 2006.

e40• 12 days ago

Also gives off desperation vibes with Google finally doing some innovation on their monopolistic product now that it’s losing market share to AI.

cjbgkagh2• 12 days ago

They made search worse on purpose to make more money, then tried to gaslight everyone by blaming SEO. It was getting rather hard to find things with it, I would have to explain to people that search wasn’t always this bad. I have negative sympathy for them.

chias• 12 days ago

That and it's wild to celebrate innovation that was literally default behavior 20 years ago, which they themselves worked hard to break.

Used to be you'd look at your server logs and see referrer headers of google.com/?q=search+terms

Then they broke that (deliberately, well before cross origin header concerns were a thing) so you'd have to sign up for their webmaster tools.

cwillu• 12 days ago

I noticed yesterday that they've managed to make editing the text field on their search page lag and flip/reorder characters entered during the edit: editing “foot pedal” into “foot pedal keyboard” became “foot pedal oardkeyb”

andybp85• 12 days ago

having coded with several RTEs, this just triggered some PTSD

salahadawi• 12 days ago

I've had it happen many times that the characters appear right to left. Using google in steam overlay makes this happen constantly

andriy_koval• 12 days ago

google search ads revenue still growing XX% a year.

xnx3• 12 days ago

Official source: https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-con...

redsymbol• 12 days ago

The most interesting part of the official announcement [0]:

"As people gravitate toward firsthand perspectives..."

That implies Google is seeing a shift away from people relying on just AI-generated summaries, and checking the cited sources more.

I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied. Not always of course, but often enough that I have noticed it.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/07/search-con...

swatcoder• 12 days ago

"a different insight"

What a generous euphemism. Depending on the topic, it's not unusual to see Google AI search referencing links that indicate the exact opposite of what it presents in its prose.

So many of these tools are presented as if they're doing something you'd intuitively expect of a human operator, like collating search results and then summarizing them in this case, but the actual operation of them is so alien to us that our intuitions don't apply and these presentations are all but fraudulent.

Because it's presentation cites references, and because those references sometimes reinforce the expression of the AI prose, we grant it trust, but it doesn't use those references in the way a human would and so the relevance of them being cited is radically different (and weaker) than we're accustomed to.

The closest example in human behavior might be the rushed, naive student who just pastes citations into an already written paper at the last minute, but even that's an anthropomorphism that misrepresents the alien ways in which the tool works.

jtbayly• 12 days ago

Yesterday ChatGPT gave me 5 references to a site that doesn’t exist. It’s such a bummer how useless these tools are so much of the time, while seeming so helpful. In fact they are actually helpful, which is why it’s so irritating.

AlienRobot3• 12 days ago

I don't think that means anything. It's just some random words to add pretense to an arbitrary change.

I mean, just stop to think about it. You have a Youtube account, you post videos. Analytics shows traffic from Google but can't show you the keywords.

At one point, Google merged Youtube with Google+. Just did it outright without asking anybody.

Youtubers link their Youtube accounts with Google AdSense.

You can link your Youtube account with your Google Ads account if you want to advertise.

One of the latest features added to the Search Console was... an AI chatbot.

So Google showed us they can link anything with Youtube when it wants, and they can add new features to GSC if it's AI, but for some reason showing Google search terms for Youtube channels took 20 years.

I wish I knew a word like enshittification but for when something improves but at a rate so slow you don't even feel like celebrating it anymore. I think I'd use such word a lot...

lionkor2• 12 days ago

The term you're looking for might be "maintenance mode". This sounds like what we do with software we don't care to develop further, even if it's the big cash cow

shevy-java2• 12 days ago

Hopefully that is the case, because what Google and others are trying via AI, is to privatize the web. They already tried it via AMP.

People are probably annoyed that AI/LLMs are lying to them, so not everyone sees the main threat being Google trying to containerize and "walled garden" approach access to information.

I have certainly found that when I ask a chat tool something, and then go to the human-written source webpage, it's not uncommon I get a different insight than what the AI implied.

Well, many people pointed out that AI lies. We can have two reasons for this:

1) deliberate 2) a feature of how AI works

I think it is mostly 1), but 2) could also factor in, because if ALL AI is lying, then probably something is wrong with how AI works right now. Since they prefer to hallucinate. But AI could be made stricter and not hallucinate, so I think 1) is the main issue.

lionkor2• 12 days ago

But AI could be made stricter and not hallucinate

Do you have a source for this? So far every single LLM-like does a lot of hallucinating, often just small things like wording that implies stronger correlations than exist, or wording that implies relationships that don't exist, etc. but sometimes it's also just wrong facts.

Barbing2• 12 days ago

Which lab is going to stop AI from hallucinating first?

What’s taking them so long? If OpenAI was going to do it, why didn’t Anthropic do it first, or vice versa? Or if we assume collusion: shouldn’t DeepSeek have released a hallucination-free LLM to steal the US’s thunder?

(Good points on AMP and walled garden)

ph4rsikal• 12 days ago

Hope they move away from the engagement model. I prefer blogs over reddit/insta/tiktok in search results.

shevy-java2• 12 days ago

Now if Google only were to have a good search engine ...

kundi• 12 days ago

Thank you Google for giving us subpar suggestions while making a fortune

motbus3• 12 days ago

The company I worked from added a feature where we added context-based translation as we found that 90% of automated translations keep doing same mistakes. We marked all pages canonical and not canonical and we did everything to ensure we were not trying to pass as we were faking content.

It was then that we were wiped out from search results. We got our consultant to get official support from Google and then they simply said: "oopsie we had bug here. Sorry not sorry"

Aboutplants• 12 days ago

My Google usage has gone down fairly significantly in the past couple of years as I use whatever free models to do nearly all of what I used Google search for. The only thing that Google has me with right now is YouTube and Gmail.

Waterluvian• 12 days ago

For now, until they’ve Googled the product into garbage, AI is so much better at getting me exactly what I’m seeking. I wonder if when considering all the ad slop that comes with every Google search or website load, it might actually be more energy friendly, or at least comparable?

ramijames• 12 days ago

Am I the only one who thinks that Google Analytics and its brethren are TERRIBLE in actually providing useful data for making decisions for marketing and sales purposes?

codazoda• 12 days ago

You’re not alone. I haven’t looked at this for my own content (I really only publish on the web) but I’m encouraged that it’s search and not analytics. I don’t use Google Analytics on my site for privacy reasons. I’m kinda hoping this works without it, using their data, not mine.

Google Search lets creators know more about their reach

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