Lately, Google has been trying to get better about incorporating social media posts into your search results, launching a new Perspectives tab right around the same time Reddit's blackouts started. Meanwhile, Twitter has changed its platform in ways that may be affecting the appearance of tweets in search results. CEO Elon Musk announced the controversial decision to impose temporary rate limits just days after the company made most of its content solely available to registered users, and now we're seeing a lot of Twitter results disappear from Google Search.

According to Search Engine Land, Google Search has dramatically reduced the number of URLs it has indexed from Twitter since the website started requiring a logged in account to view its content, more than halving the previous count. Specifically, Twitter saw a drastic fall in its indexed tweet count, dropping from 471 million to 180 million — a staggering 62% plunge in its Google Search saturation. Despite Google still having access to Twitter's "firehose" (the data stream that still allows the display of new tweets in Google Search), older tweets are slowly being phased out of the core Google web search index. This shift results in diminished visibility for Twitter in Google Search.

These aren't just numbers in a vacuum, either. Many Twitter users have started to notice that Google is no longer displaying tweets from their accounts:

The problem goes beyond the inability to find certain tweets through Google — for instance, @TennantRob laments the change for people with traumatic brain injuries, as Twitter's internal search function is typically less effective than appending "Twitter" to the end of a Google search. User @duopoly717 also reported a distinct absence of tweets within his Google Search results, even for popular topics like NBA, which generally provoke a flurry of tweets.

In our testing, we've noticed a marked decline in the presence of Twitter results on Google, with the carousel that usually shows someone's recent tweets being completely absent on searches like Elon Musk Twitter, Gmail Twitter, and even Android Police Twitter. Still, others like Made By Google Twitter and Artem Russakovskii Twitter still display the tweet carousel, so it appears to be an ongoing change.

Hopefully this is just a temporary problem resulting from Twitter's abrupt changes that will ultimately get ironed out by the two companies. Nonetheless, we haven't heard any official word on the situation from either Twitter or Google yet, so things could still evolve.