Google Trends now lets you quickly add previous time period data to your chart, so you can visualize how the Google Trends data compares to the same time period, the period before.

Google announced on LinkedIn, “You can now quickly compare a trend’s change against preceding periods directly within Google Trends.”

What it looks like. Here is a GIF Google shared of this in action:

How it works. Go to Google Trends, add a search term or topic to the search box. Then you will see “new chips” above your timeline, click on those chips to see the added data. These chips show percentage changes for various periods—whether you’re looking at Month-over-Month, Week-over-Week, or even specific Year-over-Year benchmarks. A single click overlays the historical comparison line onto your graph for instant visual context, Google explained.

Why we care. Google Trends can be a useful source of data for topics and keywords that may interest your content team or data marketing team. Knowing seasonal or trending data can be useful when planning your content strategy and marketing efforts.

This new feature gives you more historical perspective of this data.

After almost 30 years at Microsoft, Fabrice Canel announced he is retiring from the company. Fabrice Canel wrote, “I am retiring from Microsoft, effective today July 1st.” He added, “Today marks nearly 30 years with Microsoft. Thirty years…”

Who is Fabrice Canel. Fabrice Canel is a 30-year veteran at Microsoft. He was responsible for indexing at Microsoft Bing, including crawling, URL discovery, content selection, and content processing. He was the individual who came up with the IndexNow initiative and helped to create and power Bing Webmaster Tools.

Fabrice Canel has spoken at countless conferences over the years, including SMX. He has written countless articles on how search works, how to perform better in Bing and how search is adapting with generative AI. Fabrice not only helped run one of the most powerful and important search engines in the world, but also devoted significant time and effort to advancing the search industry through tooling and education.

Message from Fabrice Canel. Here is what Fabrice Canel wrote on social media about his retirement:

My dear fellow Microsoftees, engineers, attorneys, marketers, webmasters, publishers, SEO champions, product leaders, journalists, and all the brilliant minds across search, AI, and yes, even my friends at Google.

Today marks nearly 30 years with Microsoft. Thirty years… far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable people. As Bilbo once said, “I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve”.

I stand before you for three purposes.

First, to tell you that I am immensely fond of you all. These three decades have been a wonderful adventure: from solving real business problems with IndexNow to helping webmasters and publishers thrive in the ever-changing world of SEO and AI. It has truly been an incredible journey.

Second, to celebrate this milestone and to thank every one of you: the colleagues I worked alongside daily, the partners and publishers I collaborated with, and especially the talented people I’ve trained and mentored over the past two years. You are ready, like young hobbits setting out with Sting and courage, to carry the team and our mission forward with excellence.

Third and finally, after many evenings by the fireside with my family and friends (who wisely reminded me that even the longest journey must eventually turn toward home), I have decided to take advantage of Microsoft’s Voluntary Retirement Program.

So, though thirty years is far too short a time to spend among such excellent and admirable people… this is the end.

I am going.

I am retiring from Microsoft, effective today July 1st.

GOODBYE!

As Bilbo said, the road goes ever on… but for me it now turns west, toward a place of rest, starlight, song, and new tales after many adventures. I leave with a heart full of gratitude, memories brighter than mithril, and complete confidence in the bright future of the team.

Thank you, Microsoft.

Thank you to every colleague, partner, and webmaster who made this journey so special. Stay curious. Keep innovating. And may your content always be found; swift as eagles and sure as the stars.

Fabrice Canel
Retiring after 30 wonderful years at Microsoft (Bing)

Why we care. Fabrice is a true friend to the industry; his contributions are endless, and the truth is, they will live on in the products he created for many years to come. His shared wisdom and knowledge over the years are beyond awesome and breathtaking.

While Fabrice has trained a team to continue his work, I would be lying if I said I am not sad that he is retiring. It has been an honor working with him over the years, but I know he has left Bing in good hands.

Google has released an update to the recipe results within AI Mode to make them more publisher-friendly. Google added the creator name, recipe ratings and number of ingredients to these AI Mode results for some recipes.

What is new. Robby Stein from Google said there are now “prominent links at the top of responses with useful details and images – like the creator name, recipe ratings and number of ingredients.” He added that this should make it “even easier to discover and visit recipe pages with AI Mode.”

We also spotted Google testing top stories carousels in the AI Overviews, but this does not seem to be live yet.

What it looks like. Here is a screenshot of the treatment:

Previously. Robby Stein, back in March, also announced changes to the recipe results in AI Mode. Then he said, “We’ve heard feedback on recipe results in AI Mode, and we’re making updates to better connect people with recipe creators on the web.”

These changes are to help reduce the AI recipe slop that we see for a lot of these queries.

Why we care. Recipe bloggers, well, content creators in general, have not been happy with how traffic from Google’s AI experiences did not send as much traffic as the traditional search results. Here we see Google trying to make changes to encourage more searchers to click from those AI experiences to the bloggers website.

If Google can add more clickable link units to the AI experiences in search, that can help improve the publisher-Google relationship.

Bruce Clay, known as the Father of SEO, sadly passed away in late May. Bruce Clay was one of, if not the, founding father of the SEO industry, starting a real professional SEO agency back in 1996. He was the first sponsor of the first SEO conference, ever and he has given more of his time, resources and money to the creation of the SEO space than almost anyone else.

Tribute video. The Bruce Clay, Inc. team has prepared a tribute video for Bruce, which describes how he was a pioneer in the SEO industry and devoted much of his life to helping it grow. It says that in the three decades he served as CEO of Bruce Clay Inc., Bruce wrote 3 books, built tools, spoke at conferences, hosted training events, and helped the company expand internationally. The are hundreds of employees across the world that have contributed to SEO because of his founding principles, and thousands of students who have benefited from his expertise.

Here is that video:

The Bruce Clay team told me, “We are absolutely heartbroken, but we find strength in the vibrant community and lasting values that Bruce built. Our teams in the U.S. and  around the world remain dedicated to carrying forward the mission Bruce loved so dearly.”

Kyle Pouliot – Sr. Video Production Manager at Third Door Media told me:

“I’ve gotten to know Bruce on a more personal level over these past few years and interacted with him frequently for our online conferences. What I’ve learned about Bruce in that time is that he was genuinely thoughtful and caring about the search community. Never short of an honest opinion, Bruce shared some really practical ideas for Search Engine Land and SMX. He loved sharing his deep experienced knowledge to everyone, it didn’t matter if you were a beginner or 20+ year industry veteran, he treated everyone the same. We talked about the hundreds of golf balls that would find their way into his property every day, food, raising kids and how incredible the weather was in Simi Valley. He will be greatly missed.”

On a personal note, I’ve known Bruce Clay since I started in the SEO industry well over 20 years ago. He has been a role model to me, often a mentor and someone who has always been very approachable, professional and likely the most caring person in the room. I loved his SEO talks, I loved meeting up with him at industry events and I loved getting personal email messages from Bruce about shaping the future of our industry.

You will be deeply missed Bruce.

Google has confirmed the June 2026 spam update, which was released on Wednesday, June 24th at around noon ET, is now done rolling out. The update finished rolling out on June 26 at 2pm ET.

Here is what Google posted:

• “The rollout was complete as of June 26, 2026”

Why we care. This is the second Google spam update announced in 2026 and this update felt a bit bigger than the March 2026 spam update but like for most updates, if your site was not impacted, then you are good to go – at least for now.

There will always be cases of sites not spamming Google that get hit by a spam update but hopefully that won’t be one of your sites.

Type of spam update. Google originally said:

• “This is a normal spam update, and it will roll out for all languages and locations. The rollout may take a few days to complete.”

You can learn more about Google spam updates in this Google help document.

Google Search Console’s page indexing report is currently delayed by over two weeks, with a last updated time stamp of June 11, 2026. That means you won’t be able to see a recent look at the page indexing data for the pages on your website.

The delay. If you check your Google Search Console page indexing report, you will likely see this date:

Page indexing report. This report shows you which pages Google can find and index on your site. It can also teach you about any indexing problems Google has encountered while crawling your website.

You can access the report in Search Console over here or by going to the Indexing section and then Pages.

The report shows a chart of indexed pages in green and not indexed pages in gray, you can even overlay impressions over the chart. It then lists out the reasons why pages on website are not being indexed, below that chart.

For more information on the page indexing report, see this help document.

Why we care. If you are trying to debug why Google has not been indexing specific pages on your website over the past couple of weeks, well, you are out of luck. Google will hopefully fix the report soon, but until then, you need to rely on your own SEO theories or try the URL inspection tool to debug your indexing issues on a page-by-page basis.