Google SEO News

Google Cloud Outage Apology

Google has issued a formal apology following a widespread outage on June 12, 2025, that affected more than 70 of its cloud services globally. Key third-party platforms—including OpenAI, Cloudflare, and Shopify—experienced significant disruptions. Google's internal products like Gmail and Drive were also impacted.

The disruption stemmed from a new quota policy feature launched in May, which introduced untested blank data entries across data center regions. The system lacked “feature flags,” a best practice that would have allowed for gradual deployment and rollback in case of failure.

Engineers identified the issue within 10 minutes. However, system overloads prolonged the outage to over seven hours, particularly in larger regions. The cascading impact revealed architectural weaknesses in Google's failover capabilities.

To prevent recurrence, Google committed to overhauling its architecture for fault tolerance, increasing automation and human-led communication protocols, and instituting rigorous auditing of system changes and rollouts.

Domain Migration Exposed Underlying Content Issues

Google's John Mueller clarified that a ranking collapse after a domain migration was not caused directly by the migration itself, but rather exposed pre-existing low-quality, irrelevant content. The migration forced a full reassessment of the website (from javatpoint.com to tpointtech.com), leading to the deindexing of off-topic pages that previously went unnoticed.

Using Bing's site search, Mueller demonstrated how unrelated pages—like celebrity “top ten lists” and “watch online” content—were carried over from the old domain. These pages were out of place on an educational website, undermining trust and quality signals in Google's indexing algorithms.

Google may tolerate irrelevant content temporarily, but Mueller emphasized that intent matters: if content appears made-for-SEO rather than for users, it will be penalized during major reevaluations like migrations. Bing's indexing behavior, in contrast, highlights how Google sets a higher bar for content integrity and coherence.

SEO Recommendations by Jason

Searcher intent is, as always, top of our priority list when working with our customers' websites and our own. Rather than uploading content to fill a list and sending it into the “unknown” focus on the utility of the content and how it connects with the next stage in the buyer journey. 

Here are some resources about creating content that ranks:

Creating Content with AI? Watch This Before You Hit Publish

AI Overviews Triggered by Implicit Recipe Queries

Google is displaying AI Overviews for food-related queries that imply a recipe intent, even when the word “recipe” is not used. For example, “chicken cordon bleu” now triggers an AI Overview, while “chicken cordon bleu recipe” still produces the standard recipe rich results. This signals a shift toward interpreting search intent over explicit keywords.

AI Overviews for recipe-intent queries currently appear to be exclusive to desktop. Identical queries on mobile—such as “healthy dinner ideas” or “chicken cordon bleu”—still return traditional rich results instead of AI Overviews. This suggests a staggered rollout, with desktop users seeing changes ahead of mobile audiences.

Recipe bloggers may see a dip in desktop traffic as AI Overviews surface recipe summaries and reduce the need to click through to original content. As generative results grow, competition for visibility intensifies—especially given that users may not distinguish between authentic recipes and AI-generated outputs.

ChatGPT and other AI tools are increasingly being used for recipe searches. Although these tools often provide synthetically generated recipes that may lack accuracy, their convenience and plausible structure satisfy casual users. This trend further fragments traffic sources for recipe sites.

SEO Recommendations by Jason

This is Google’s shift in reinforcing the user experience with AI mode, in the search engine to maintain top of the food chain and not lose traffic to AI search interfaces or chatbots (we have a video on comparing AI Chatbots usage vs Search Engines like Google. 

AI mode is inclusive and is more like a “glorified” feed that deploys content based on multiple data points and not just the “search term” or keyword in such. 

An example of this, if you showed the search engines that you disliked dry white wine, if you search a recipe that would generally include white wine, it would alternatively show you recipes that do not include white wine. 

This is wild, but the future of search has more data points that make the algorithm and search experience more volatile and open to chops/changes in the near future! 

Buckle up!

5 Ways To Adapt Your SEO To AI Mode [Step by Step Guide]

General Search Marketing News 

AI Search Referral Traffic Is Dominated by Desktop Usage

BrightEdge reports that over 90% of referral traffic from AI-powered search platforms—including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing, and Google Gemini—originates from desktop users. In contrast, Google Search is the only major AI-integrated search engine to deliver a mobile majority (53% mobile vs 44% desktop), highlighting a significant usage pattern difference.

ChatGPT's low mobile referral rate (6%) is linked to its in-app preview model, which requires an additional click to reach external websites. This design creates a referral bottleneck not present on desktop, where 94% of ChatGPT traffic originates. Similar mobile-desktop gaps are seen in Perplexity (96.5% desktop), Bing (94%), and Gemini (91%).

Apple devices account for 57% of Google's mobile search traffic to brand sites. With nearly a billion devices using Safari as the default browser, any changes to its default search engine—especially amid the rise of Apple Intelligence—could trigger major realignments in the mobile search ecosystem.

BrightEdge and Perplexity highlight the strategic importance of Apple's WWDC announcements. A potential move by Apple to shift Safari's default search engine could dramatically impact traffic distribution and search marketing, especially given the platform's dominant mobile reach.