March did not ease anyone in gently. Two algorithm updates landed within days of each other, AI Overviews expanded into ecommerce territory, and a flurry of product updates from Google reshaped everything from how local businesses get discovered to how headlines appear in search results. There was also a quiet but significant signal about where the web is heading: one that has less to do with rankings and more to do with machines talking to machines.
It was a busy month. Here is everything that matters, what it means, and what to do with it.
March brought not one but two algorithm updates in quick succession. The March 2026 spam update dropped on 24 March and completed its rollout in under 24 hours, hitting all languages and locations. Hot on its heels, Google released the March 2026 core update on 27 March, the first core update of 2026, with a rollout window of up to two weeks. Google described it as “a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites.” If your site saw traffic dips in late March, these two updates are likely the culprit.
Read more: Core update | Spam update
Two separate reports this month painted a stark picture of where things are heading. An analysis of 64 publisher sites found organic search clicks have fallen 42% since AI Overviews began expanding, with traffic dropping 16% immediately after launch and accelerating further when Google expanded them in 2025. On the ecommerce side, AI Overviews now appear on 14% of shopping queries, up 5.6x from just 2.1% in November 2025. Ecommerce brands that felt untouched by this shift need to start paying attention.
Read more: AI Overviews and clicks | AI Overviews and shopping
A new analysis of 30 million sources across ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews found Reddit is the most cited domain in AI-generated answers, with YouTube, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, and Forbes rounding out the top five. AI systems prioritise these platforms because Reddit captures real user discussions, YouTube dominates via video transcripts and descriptions, and Wikipedia serves as both a live source and a training dataset. Winning in AI search clearly is not just about your own website.
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Treating your Google Business Profile as a set-and-forget directory listing is quietly costing businesses local visibility. According to the 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report, behavioural and engagement signals like posts, photos, clicks, calls, and review cadence are climbing fast in importance. Google is actively rewarding businesses that look active and present. Being open when users search is now the number five local pack ranking factor, meaning business hours are a ranking signal, not just informational. GBP signals are also now feeding directly into AI-driven local results, raising the stakes further.
OpenAI has enabled location sharing in ChatGPT, allowing users to share their device location so ChatGPT can return more precise local results. The feature is off by default and can be toggled on in Settings > Data Controls. Early tests suggest the accuracy is still developing, with some users reporting results for businesses a significant distance away, but the direction of travel is clear. ChatGPT is becoming a local discovery surface.
Google confirmed it is running a test of AI-generated headline rewrites in traditional search results, using language almost identical to how it described the Discover headline test that became a full feature within roughly a month. Unlike existing title tag rewrites, which pull from on-page text, this test is generative. In one documented example, the rewritten headline used phrasing that did not appear anywhere in the original article, and none of the rewrites included any disclosure that the headline had been changed.
Google announced a new user agent specifically for AI agents, called Google-Agent, used when agents browsing via Google infrastructure visit your site. Alongside this, Google published guidance on WebMCP, a protocol that lets agents interact with website functionality directly rather than browsing like a human. Google’s Head of Search Liz Reid has suggested a future where agents are increasingly talking with each other, pointing to a web that operates more and more machine-to-machine.
A little-known capability that Google’s John Mueller confirmed this month. The disavow file’s domain: directive can be used to disavow an entire top-level domain, for example blocking all links from .xyz sites. Mueller described it as “a big hammer” and confirmed it has been possible since the disavow tool launched, but is not documented precisely because of how powerful it is. He noted it makes sense only when a TLD is almost exclusively used by spammers with no legitimate sites linking from it.
Google updated its Image SEO best practices to confirm it uses both schema.org structured data and the og:image meta tag when selecting thumbnails for Search results and Discover. A new section called “Specify a preferred image with metadata” now provides code examples for three approaches: the primaryImageOfPage schema property, the image property on a page’s main entity, and the og:image meta tag. Google recommends images at least 1,200 pixels wide, high resolution, and in a 16:9 aspect ratio for Discover thumbnails.
Google removed the “design for accessibility” section from its JavaScript SEO basics documentation, explaining the advice was out of date. The old text suggested JavaScript content may be hard for Google to process, but Google confirmed this has not been accurate for some time. One important nuance worth flagging: while Google and Bing handle JavaScript well, many of the newer AI search engines may not render JavaScript as effectively.
Just six weeks after launching its ad pilot, OpenAI hit over $100 million in annualised ad revenue from more than 600 advertisers, with ads currently showing to less than 20% of eligible US free and Go tier users daily. The number is striking precisely because the inventory is still so constrained.
In practice, ads are appearing roughly once every five questions on the free tier, always as a website link button at the bottom of a response and always tailored to the topic of the question. Travel queries triggered ads most frequently, and when a user mentioned a specific brand by name, ads for direct competitors sometimes appeared. Self-serve access is expected to open in April, which is when this becomes accessible to the broader advertiser market.
Read more: ChatGPT ad revenue milestone | What the ads look like in practice
Advertisers can now generate short videos directly inside Google Ads using Veo, Google’s generative video model. Upload up to three static images into Asset Studio and Veo generates videos up to 10 seconds long with natural motion, designed specifically for YouTube formats. These can then be turned into ready-to-serve ads using customisable templates. Early testing suggests it works best for consumer product brands with clean imagery and an inherent sense of motion.
Two separate but related PMax updates landed in March, both of which should be on your radar.
On the creative side, Google launched Asset Group Theming inside Performance Max, letting advertisers clone a high-performing asset group and apply a seasonal theme. Google then generates themed image variations and suggests aligned headlines and descriptions, while leaving the original asset group completely untouched for safe testing. Available themes cover promotional styles, the four seasons, and a wide range of cultural moments from Christmas and Black Friday through to Mother’s Day, Lunar New Year, and Back to School.
On the controls and reporting side, Google added first-party audience exclusions so you can exclude customer lists and shift spend toward net-new customer acquisition, a new in-platform budget report that projects end-of-month spend and models the impact of daily budget changes, full demographic reporting including age and gender breakdowns, and network segmentation in placement reports.
Read more: Seasonal creative theming | New exclusions and reporting
YouTube is experimenting with a sticky banner overlay that appears once a user skips an ad. Instead of the ad disappearing entirely, a branded card remains on-screen until the viewer actively dismisses it, extending the advertiser’s presence beyond the initial skip. This is still a test and hasn’t rolled out broadly, but it signals where YouTube is heading with skippable inventory.
A very practical one to be aware of before it potentially hits your invoices. Starting July 1, Meta will add “location fees” to ad buys targeting users in six countries to cover digital services taxes. Fees will be France, Italy and Spain at 3%, Austria and Turkey at 5%, and the UK at 2%. The fees apply based on where the ad is delivered, not where the advertiser is based, meaning a US brand targeting French users pays the French rate.
Meta is narrowing its definition of click-through attribution for website and in-store conversions. Going forward, only link clicks will count toward click-through attribution, dropping likes, shares, saves, and other interactions.
The change is designed to reduce discrepancies between Meta Ads Manager and third-party tools like Google Analytics. Conversions previously attributed to non-link interactions will move to a renamed “engage-through attribution”, and the video engaged-view window is being shortened from 10 seconds to 5 seconds, reflecting faster conversion behaviour on Reels.
Step back from the individual updates and a single theme emerges: the boundaries of SEO are expanding faster than most strategies have accounted for. It is no longer enough to optimise your own site.
Your presence on Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube now influences whether AI systems recommend you. Your Google Business Profile activity now determines whether you appear in AI-driven local results. And the way your content appears in search, from headlines to thumbnails, is increasingly subject to Google’s own editorial interventions.
At the same time, the fundamentals have not moved. Helpful content, accurate data, strong brand signals, and a consistent presence across the web remain the inputs that everything else runs on. What is changing is how many surfaces those fundamentals now need to extend across.
At Verkeer, staying across these shifts and translating them into practical action for our clients is what we do every day. If any of this month’s updates have raised questions about your own visibility, we would love to talk.