Google writes its own headings for a customer's question

Google writes the headings first, then goes looking for pages

Google is testing a results page that answers a search by writing its own smaller questions first. It reads the sentence a customer typed, writes a short set of headings from it, then files a few web pages under each heading.

The test is called Web Guide, and it runs inside Search Labs. Search Labs is the part of Google Search you have to switch on yourself.

In its July 2025 announcement, Google said the product "groups web links in helpful ways, like pages related to specific aspects" of what a person searched for. Google named the method in the same post: behind the one search your customer typed, Google runs a batch of related searches of its own to find the most relevant results (your customer typed none of them). A custom version of Google's Gemini model reads what comes back and groups those links under headings built from parts of the question.

That changes what your page gets judged on. It now has to answer one heading out of several, written on the spot by a model reading your customer's sentence.

A searcher sees a stack of headings with a few links filed under each one. Google's model wrote every one of those headings, so the wording in them will rarely match the wording on your services page. Your page gets filed under a heading when it answers that heading well, whatever words it uses to do it.

Web Guide is still an opt-in test. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable wrote plainly on 20 September 2026 that most searchers are not using it, and Google has published no number for how many people have switched it on. Nobody can honestly tell you this is how your customers search today.

A year of evidence points the same way

Google has been open about where this goes, and every step on the trail carries a date.

In that same July 2025 post, Google said it would "start to show AI-organized results in other parts of Search", including the All results tab.

That has already happened once. In December 2025, Search Engine Land and Search Engine Roundtable both reported that Web Guide had moved out of the side Web tab and into the All tab. The All tab is the one most people land on.

Then it moved up the page. On 18 September 2026, Glenn Gabe, an analyst who reads Google's results pages every day, wrote that Web Guide now loads right at the top on his own screen. It used to load further down.

Two days later, Barry Schwartz reported a glitch. A searcher named Damien Andell posted that the button meant to return him to classic search kept dropping him back into Web Guide. Schwartz reproduced it on his own screen, and Gabe hit the same thing that morning. The glitch proves nothing about company policy, though it kept people inside Web Guide during the same week the feature moved up the page.

ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini read a page and match what they find against the question in front of them. Web Guide is the version of that you can watch happen.

What an invented heading asks of your page

A business page now competes to be the best answer to one heading that Google's own model wrote from the customer's sentence. Most service pages are built around the name of the service and the reasons to pick you, both written long before the customer typed anything. The customer's question, in the customer's own words, appears nowhere on the page.

A customer types the sentence they would say out loud: how much is a crown without insurance. Google's model reads that and writes its own headings above the links. One heading might cover price ranges, and another might cover how people pay for dental work with no plan.

The same gap turns up in other trades. A daughter looking for overnight dementia care types the words she would say to her brother, and the home-care agency's page calls it "companion care". A medspa customer wants the price and the number of sessions before she books, and the page gives her the name of the laser.

In most of the small business sites I look at, the facts a customer wants are somewhere on the site, spread across three or four pages, with none of those pages written as an answer to a question.

The fix is a lot smaller than a rebuild. You're adding the question to a page you already own, in the words a customer uses, with a short answer under it. Your web person can do a handful of these in an hour, and the words you add work on a phone screen the same way they work in a search result.

Here's what one of those additions looks like on a dental page. The heading reads: how much is a crown without insurance. Under it sits a price range in plain text (a range is enough) and one line on what moves the price up or down. A patient reads that in ten seconds, and a model can quote it back word for word.

Five minutes on a Monday morning

You need a browser, a Google account and five minutes.

1. Open Search Labs while you're signed in to your Google account, find the Web Guide card and switch it on.
2. Type the exact sentence a customer would type about your service. Use their wording. If you sell "annual maintenance agreements" and they say "yearly furnace check", type what they say.
3. Read the headings Google writes above the links and write them down word for word.
4. Open your own site and look for a page that answers one of those headings in plain words.
5. Where nothing on your site answers a heading, add that question to the page and answer it in the two sentences underneath.

The headings tell you what the customer is really asking. Start with the two or three questions that bring in the most money for you. The rest can wait for a quieter week.

I can't tell you which headings Google will write for your service, which is why the five minutes are worth spending on your own screen. What you learn there holds up whether or not Web Guide ever reaches your customers. A page that answers the question in the customer's own words is the page any of these models can quote back.