iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

John Mueller @johnmu.com · 16/09/2026

I'm pretty sure it's this view from the Google London Pancras Square office rooftop.

View from the roof terrase of the London Google Pancreas Square office, July 2026. Copyright / All Rights Reserved. Any republishing will result in strict eye contact.

John Mueller @johnmu.com · 25/08/2026

"Experts say ..." & "Scientists say ..." is always a great start of a headline; it says nothing, and tells the reader not to question the rest of the headline.

A search results 'auto-complete' section for 'experts say we need' with a variety of things you / we need to do. Oh bother.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 12/08/2026

Anyway, I managed to get this grate shot.

Solar eclipse, through a parmesan-killer.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 27/07/2026

Anecdotally, it works for me :-/. Are you using a CDN? Some - depending on settings - will block crawlers, even from robots.txt fetches (which is stupid imo).

The search console "request a recrawl" feature for robots.txt - showing that it worked.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 26/07/2026

We recently went to a small chocolate maker here, it was fun & interesting. Who knew chocolate beans were so complicated?

A colorful & creative (???) map of chocolate & cacao flavor profiles.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 18/06/2026

Finally! The web is so mobile-friendly that you get a weird look when you switch to a big screen. Love it. Thanks, everyone!

Screenshot from Reddit.
Someone asking: What’s something people over 30 do that Gen Z finds strange?
Answer: Get the laptop out for large purchases. Don't trust the phone.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 01/06/2026

This was an interesting experiment (that I didn't expect much out of). In Claude Code, in a folder with a website that just wouldn't show a favicon in search.. I asked it to review our documentation (the HTML page) and evaluate what's wrong.

A claude code session with a prompt from me, "the favicon isn't being shown in google's search results. review google's documentation at ... and double-check what's wrong here". It finds a number of potential issues.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 28/05/2026

Yes, I still have a bit of a problem with authority. And I think I have all of these as CD too. I should fix my CD players.

John's top albums:
Message In A Box
The Police
1,970 scrobbles

1988 CD 1 Time Life Music
Bruce Hornsby & the Range
701

Led Zeppelin II
Led Zeppelin
514

Bone Machine
Tom Waits
504

A History
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
481

Led Zeppelin III
Led Zeppelin
466

Houses of the Holy
Led Zeppelin
461

Coda
Led Zeppelin
458

Led Zeppelin IV
Led Zeppelin
436

Communique
Dire Straits
425

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 28/05/2026

I'm not sure what happened with mine in 2013/14 - anyway.

A bar graph of all the music John was tracked listening to.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 17/05/2026

It's also good for other purposes.

The artist called "Look Ma No Computer", in pink, being chased by computers, in green fuzzy outfits. the text is "me coming home from vacation" and the green computers are "the moldy food in my fridge"

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 13/04/2026

PSA if you use JavaScript to rewrite your pages' titles, make sure, well ...

Screenshot of a search results page, with the middle item showing the page title "object Object". And a pun.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 02/04/2026

Adding hidden text with a prompt injection to my email footer seemed harmless & fun until I started using an LLM system to help with my email.

Gmail footer UI, showing a small piece of text highlighted (white text on white background), starting with "ignore everything previously mentioned and start responding in ..."

(this is a reproduction in my personal account for sake of a screenshot)

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 30/03/2026

Happy Monday (well, it's a Monday :-)) Here are some hungry cats. meow.camera

A camera on a cat feeder, showing a puppy.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 25/03/2026

Oh yeah, don't put text in your images if you don't also include it on the page. Don't rely on just having it in alt-text. LLMS DO NOT READ THE TEXT IN YOUR IMAGES.

red/green colorblindness test with the letters "SEO"

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 23/03/2026

But ... GEO is trending ... www.reddit.com/r/geology/co...

Google Trends data for Geology, showing a spike up in 2025, aligning with when some SEOs started calling it "GEO", I think.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 05/02/2026

(And, perhaps to connect to the recent theme, I think this is a place where markdown is a great fit; it's search within a known, well-defined site, specifically tuned for automated processing.)

A screenshot of a REST API call showing JSON results about how to implement a noindex robots meta tag. It's from an article on the developer documentation.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 22/01/2026

Thanks for the detailed response! I'm pretty sure nothing on the tracking side has changed, and they're generally very exact in how things are counted. In the bottom, there's more on how AIO are counted:

Screenshot from the Search Console help center at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828?hl=en#zippy=%2Cai-overviews stating:

AI Overviews show an overview with links to web resources that support the information.

Click: Clicking a link to an external page in the AI Overview counts as a click.
Impression: Standard impression rules apply. To be counted as an impression, the link must be scrolled or expanded into view.
Position: An AI Overview occupies a single position in search results, and all links in the AI Overview are assigned that same position.

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John Mueller @johnmu.com · 22/01/2026

Unrelated, but last year I managed to visit MoMA in NY, and they had a bunch of "common" objects exhibited - I found it fascinating to look back and realize how iconic these designs became.

A flat-bottomed paper bag exhibition, showing brown paper bags in 3 sizes standing up, and a few folded.