Daily Search Forum Recap: February 16, 2026

Google has confirmed that the volatility we all saw prior to the official announcement of the Google March 2025 Core Update was not related to the March 2025 Core Update. This is something we expected Google to confirm, as I’ve asked Google this question numerous times and got the same answer each and every time.

Google added a new crawler, robot, to its list of user-triggered fetchers in the Google crawlers documentation. This specific bot is named Google Messages and it is a fetcher “used to generate link previews for URLs sent in chat messages,” Google wrote.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…