If you run a small business and pay any attention to your website’s performance in Google, you may have noticed that the rules feel like they keep shifting. That’s not your imagination. There have been several significant announcements from Google in recent months that, taken together, paint a pretty clear picture of where things are heading. None of it needs to be alarming, but some of it is worth knowing about.
This one is a firm, confirmed change rather than a forecast. Google has announced it will no longer support FAQ rich results in search. The FAQ search appearance and the rich result report in Google Search Console will both be removed in June 2026, with Search Console API support following in August 2026.
FAQ rich results were those expandable question-and-answer sections that sometimes appeared beneath a website’s listing in the search results, making the listing take up considerably more space on the page. For businesses that had them set up, they were a useful way to get noticed without necessarily ranking higher.
“FAQ rich results are no longer appearing in Google Search. We will be dropping the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and support in the Rich results test in June 2026.”
Google Search Central
There is some context worth adding here. According to Google’s own structured data documentation, FAQ rich results had already been restricted to government and health websites before this announcement. If your business falls outside those categories, there’s a good chance you weren’t seeing the benefit of FAQ structured data in Google anyway.
If your website has FAQ structured data in the code, you don’t need to rush to remove it. Google has said it won’t cause any harm to leave it in place, and other search engines may still make use of it. But don’t expect it to do anything for you in Google from June onwards.
If you’re not sure whether your site has FAQ structured data and you’d like it checked, it’s something we can look at as part of our SEO work for small businesses.
This one is more technical, but worth understanding in plain terms. For years, Google’s deep-learning ranking system (known as RankBrain) has only ever looked at the top 20 to 30 results from the initial search index. This wasn’t a deliberate choice to ignore everything else; it was a hardware cost issue. Running RankBrain across hundreds of results was simply too expensive to do at scale. This was confirmed by Google’s own vice president of search under oath during the US Department of Justice antitrust case against Google in 2023.
The consequence of that is significant. A lot of SEO thinking over the past decade has been built around the idea that you need to get into that top 20 to 30 to have any real chance of ranking well. That window has been fixed not because it’s the right size, but because it’s what Google’s hardware budget would allow.
Now, Search Engine Land reports that Google has published research on a compression technique called TurboQuant, which could reduce the memory cost of vector search by up to four times. If the economics shift enough to make a wider window affordable, far more pages could enter the deep-ranking stage than currently do.
TurboQuant hasn’t been confirmed as live in Google Search yet. But the research is published and the direction of travel is clear.
What does this mean for a small business? A few things. It suggests that good content which currently sits just outside the competitive window has more of a future than the current system would suggest. It also reinforces the case for writing clearly, getting to the point quickly and making your pages genuinely useful rather than just technically optimised. Pages that are built to compete in a wider field tend to be better pages full stop.
Search Engine Land’s analysis of the SEO problem in 2026 puts it plainly: ranking well is no longer enough on its own. AI Overviews in Google are absorbing queries that used to generate clicks. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s own AI features are increasingly where people go first when they’re researching a purchase or a service. And zero-click results, where a user gets the answer directly on the search page without visiting any website, are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
The result is that a business can rank at the top of Google for the terms that matter to it, and still be effectively invisible when a potential customer asks an AI tool which local web designer, accountant, florist or estate agent they should consider. If your brand isn’t being mentioned and cited across the wider web, the AI has nothing to draw on.
Recognition, in this context, means your business name appearing in the places where AI systems are trained and draw their information from: industry publications, review platforms, directories, local press, forum discussions and third-party websites that cover your sector. It’s not about gaming anything. It’s about being genuinely present in the conversations your customers are having and the sources they trust.
For small businesses, this is both a challenge and an opportunity. Larger brands have more budget to throw at paid visibility, but genuine local reputation, real customer reviews and consistent presence in local and sector-specific sources are things that size doesn’t automatically buy. The businesses that will do well in this environment are the ones that are well regarded, well reviewed and well referenced, not just well ranked.
This one is a change that many people who use the web regularly will be very pleased to hear about. Back button hijacking is the practice of interfering with a user’s browser navigation so that when they press the back button, they don’t go back to where they came from. Instead, they might land on a page they never visited, get shown unsolicited recommendations or adverts, or find themselves having to press back repeatedly just to leave the site.
It’s a technique associated with aggressive monetisation strategies, and it has frustrated web users for years. Google has now made it an explicit spam policy violation, classifying it under its malicious practices category alongside things like malware and deceptive redirects. Enforcement begins on 15 June 2026, and sites that don’t comply could face manual spam actions or automated ranking demotions.
One thing worth noting is that back button hijacking doesn’t always come from code that a site owner has deliberately added. It can originate from third-party scripts, advertising platforms, content recommendation widgets or other embedded tools. Google has made clear that site owners are responsible regardless of where the behaviour comes from, so if you’re running a website with advertising or third-party plugins, it’s worth checking.
For most small businesses with straightforward websites built by a reputable agency, this isn’t something to worry about. Well-built sites don’t do this. But if you’ve ever had concerns about the behaviour of your site after updates or new integrations, it’s a good prompt to get a technical review done.
Alongside all of the above, March 2026 also brought the first major core update of the year, and it caused considerably more movement than the December 2025 update that preceded it. Analysis by Search Engine Land, drawing on data from SE Ranking and SEO researcher Aleyda Solis, found that nearly 80% of URLs in the top three positions changed their rankings during the rollout, and around one in four pages that had been ranking in the top 10 dropped out of the top 100 entirely.
The pattern that emerged was consistent: Google shifted visibility away from intermediary sites and aggregators and towards brands, specialist publishers, official institutions and sites that are the actual source of what users are looking for. Aggregators, comparison directories and sites that primarily collect and repackage information from other sources lost ground across travel, jobs, finance, health and entertainment. We cover this in more detail in our dedicated article on the March 2026 core update.
None of these changes mean you should abandon the basics of good SEO. Fast, well-built websites, clear page structure, relevant content and a good user experience still matter and will continue to matter. But the picture has become broader.
A few things are worth paying attention to now:
If you’d like a second opinion on how your website and SEO approach are set up in light of how search is changing, we’re happy to take a look. Get in touch with the b:web team in Plymouth and we can talk through what’s working, what isn’t and where the real opportunities are for your business.
