8 Answers from Google Search Office Hours, May 2025 — Part 3

Google Search Office Hours is Google Japan's recurring Q&A session where Google employees answer search and SEO questions from site owners. The 29 May 2025 episode covered app deep linking, AI search experiences, and eight technical questions on canonicals, indexing reports, crawler IP blocking, and title links.

Part 3 of a series. Start with 7 answers from google search office hours 2025, then google search office hours: ten answers from february 2025.

What Is Google Search Office Hours in Japan?

Google Search Office Hours is a recurring video series in which Google employees answer search-related questions from Japanese site owners, SEO specialists, engineers, designers, and marketers. Google Japan has run these sessions regularly since 2013, and the format was rebranded as Google Search Office Hours in May 2023. The 29 May 2025 episode, hosted by Anna Ogawa on the Google Search Central channel, opens with the hashtag #GoogleSearchOfficeHours for social comments and closes with the announcement that the next session was scheduled for 26 June 2025.

Each episode has two parts. The first covers recent Google announcements, and the second is a live Q&A where submitters can include their site URL so Google's team can debug the actual case. On 29 May 2025 the team handled eight questions, several of which were investigated against the submitter's real site data.

What Did Google Say About Content in AI Search Experiences?

Google repeated its long-standing guidance: success in AI experiences such as AI Overviews and AI Mode comes from the same practices as classic search. The session pointed to the blog post "Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google's AI experiences on Search," which was English-only at recording time with a Japanese translation expected within days.

Anna framed the advice this way: continue making unique, enjoyable content that satisfies site visitors, because Google's goal of surfacing excellent original content with its own added value has not changed. The session also promoted two other resources: a post on app deep linking connecting websites and apps, and the Google I/O search-related sessions available on YouTube with automatic Japanese subtitles.

How Should You Canonicalize Pages With the Same URL on Desktop and Mobile?

When a site serves desktop and mobile versions at identical URLs with different UIs, Google's answer was to simply use that shared URL for canonicalization. The question came from an e-commerce operator whose PC and mobile sites had a different total number of product list pages, and Google directed them to the mobile site and mobile-first indexing best practices page as the reference to check.

Google noted the answer was general because no specific site information had been submitted, and invited the site owner to follow up if the question meant something different.

Does Google Forget URLs in the Page Indexing Report?

Yes. Google pushed back directly on the premise that URL counts in Search Console only rise. A submitter reported that many previously excluded URLs had vanished from the page indexing report without becoming 404 or 410, and asked whether this was a visualization change or a real indexing impact.

The Google employee answered that the claim "the total never decreases" is not entirely correct: Google does forget URLs. With search running since 1997, keeping every URL ever recognized would demand unmanageable storage, so counts can fall. If a genuine crawling or indexing problem occurred, Google said it would normally be reported separately, so site owners should handle any alerts that fire rather than read the report as an audit of every URL Google has ever seen. The page indexing report documentation remains the reference for how statuses are assigned.

Why Would a Site With Wrong AI-Generated Content Rank Higher?

In the one case Google actually debugged, it found nothing wrong with the competitor. The submitter said a rival site about German museums, apparently built with AI, listed museums that do not exist, yet outranked their site. Because the submitter provided the specific URL, Google's team checked all available signals and found the site was well received and the page showed no problems; the museum section, possibly due to a translation issue, actually named existing museums with their characteristics.

Google pointed the submitter to the documentation on debugging a drop in search traffic, specifically the section on slight ranking drops: when a page that sat at the top of results slips slightly, traffic can fall sharply even if impressions barely change. The guidance on creating helpful, people-first content applies equally whether content is AI-assisted or written by hand.

How Risky Is Delayed Sync of Googlebot IP Lists?

A 1-2 week synchronization delay is avoidable and carries a real cost if it happens. A large e-commerce site asked about blocking fake Googlebots by crawler IP detection, worried that Google IP list updates syncing slowly could cause problems.

Google answered that the IP file is exported daily, so the site should stock the latest version every day. The warning was concrete: if you accidentally block Googlebot's real IP range, your pages may disappear from Google search results. Google's verifying Googlebot documentation is the canonical page for identifying fake crawlers and handling real crawler access.

What Other Site Issues Did Google Debug?

Four remaining questions in the session covered spam reports, missing product images, a site migration, and wrong title links. Each received a specific, actionable answer.

### Reporting keyword-hacking spam sites

A submitter reported many unknown sites generated around search queries, with titles and descriptions changing daily. Because the example name was very common in Japan, Google could not confirm the pages as spam. For confirmed spam or fraudulent pages, Google pointed to the official report spam, phishing, and malware page and asked the submitter to follow its instructions.

### Product images not recognized on an e-commerce site

The submitter's lazy-load implementation already followed Google's recommended pattern, and their hypothesis was a per-page crawl timeout dropping remaining resources. Google agreed that improving page performance is worthwhile, then offered a different check: look at whether the images appear in Google Image Search, because Google Search may extract images while processing the page at a later stage. In fact, some of the submitter's items did show up in image search depending on parameters.

### Wrong titles and meta after a same-domain site migration

Despite 301 redirects and canonical tags, search results showed old titles and meta information after a revamp, and rankings and CTR fell. Using the submitted site and query, Google traced the cause to a JavaScript SSO check that pushed pages through multiple redirects, including pages on other domains, before reaching the page hosting the article. Google said the issue should resolve itself once the redirect chain is fixed, and asked the site to report back if wrong results persisted.

### Strange mobile title links for a business name

The submitter saw a strange title on smartphone searches despite setting the title tag, H1, and og:title, while desktop results looked correct. Google checked, could not reproduce the issue in its environment, and concluded the problem had resolved itself over time. For future cases, the guidance on title link best practices explains how Google generates the headline shown in results.

FAQ

• When is the next Google Search Office Hours session? The 29 May 2025 episode announced the next session for 26 June 2025. Google Japan posts upcoming dates on its event page, and questions can be submitted in advance through the official question form.

• Does Google Search Office Hours answer questions about specific websites? Yes. Submitters who include their site URL and query often get the actual case debugged on air. In the May 2025 session, Google traced a redirect chain, checked a competitor's ranking signals, and confirmed image indexing using real site data.

• Can Google's page indexing report lose URLs? Yes. Google stated in the May 2025 session that it forgets URLs, so report totals can decrease. Genuine crawling or indexing problems are normally reported separately through Search Console alerts.

• What happens if I accidentally block Googlebot by IP? Google warned that pages can be removed from Google search results if you block real Googlebot IP ranges while filtering fake crawlers. The IP file is exported daily, so sync it daily rather than on a weekly or biweekly schedule.

• Does AI-generated content rank in Google Search? Google's position in the session was that using AI itself is not a problem; ranking depends on content quality signals. In the one disputed case it checked, the AI-suspected competitor site was judged well received with no page issues found.

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