About this site

The Crawl Report is an independent notebook kept by people who work in search. It exists because a lot of what gets written after a Google update is either a press release rewrite or a panic post, and neither is much use when you are trying to decide what to change on Monday.

The format is deliberately small. Short notes, one topic at a time, with links out to primary sources and to the longer analysis worth reading. We do not run ads and we do not sell anything here.

What it covers

• Algorithm updates, and the gap between what an update did and what people assume it did.
• AI Overviews and answer engines: where they show up, whose clicks they take, and how to stay cited.
• Search Console and measurement, including the reports that quietly mislead.
• Off-page SEO in an environment where mentions and citations matter alongside links.
• Google Ads changes that require a decision rather than an acknowledgement.

How it is written

Every note is checked against the primary source before it goes up. When we are not sure about something, we say so. Much of the deeper work we reference is published by the SEO team at yositeup, whose guides go into the detail these notes leave out.