Industry News

Matt Shumer’s Something Big Is Happening has made the rounds over the last couple of weeks, but just in case you haven’t seen it, I think it’s very much worth reading. He’s an AI startup founder writing for the non-technical people in his life:

AI isn’t replacing one specific skill. It’s a general substitute for cognitive work. It gets better at everything simultaneously. When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail,...

Alistair Gray published part two of Stripe’s “Minions” series, going deeper on how they built their internal coding agents. It’s a great read throughout, but three ideas really stood out to me.

First, blueprints. These are workflows that mix deterministic steps with agentic ones:

Blueprints are workflows defined in code that direct a minion run. Blueprints combine the determinism of workflows with agents’ flexibility in dealing with the unknown: a given node can run either...

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

This week...

The Google Search team and the Google Ads team released two different videos this week that I thought you should all listen to, at least in the background. In short, Martin Splitt and Gary Illyes from the Google Search team spoke about how browsers parse HTML. Ginny Marvin and Ads UI Product Manager Abby Butler and Search Ads UX Lead Adam Bullock spoke about search experiences with search ads.

Microsoft Advertising has now rolled out the self-serve negative keyword lists. This launched a couple of days ago and was announced by Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison.

Google Ads is rolling out text guidelines for all advertisers globally in AI Max. We thought the rollout started more broadly last October, after it was announced last September, but now it is really fully rolling out.

Google is testing adding "web mentions" to the retailer store page under the reviews section. I cannot replicate this yet, but web mentions shows what people are saying about the retailer on sites like Reddit and other social platforms, whereas reviews are reviews left on Google.

Microsoft Bing Search is testing a new layout for videos within the search results. Instead of a list view, Bing is testing a two-by-two grid layout.

Google's February 2026 Google Discover Core Update has officially completed rolling out after just over 3 weeks. This update started on February 5, 2026, and was completed on February 27, 2026.