Industry News

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

Google AI Mode doesn't always pass referrer data from the links on the sidebar. This is supposedly being looked at by the Google Search team and hopefully will be fixed soon, if not, already.

Google seems to be rolling out colorful sections in the knowledge panels. Sometimes you will see gray, sometimes blue, sometimes orange and sometimes green and maybe more. We saw this on mobile over a decade ago, so this does seem new, especially on desktop.

Google updated its image SEO best practices and Google Discover documentation to clarify how Google picks a preferred image thumbnail for Google Search and Google Discover. Google wrote it "uses both schema.org markup and the og:image meta tag as sources when determining image thumbnails in Google Search and Discover."

Google has updated or is updating a number of Google Ads and Google Merchant Center policies. This goes across alcohol, prescription drugs, gambling and games and government documents and services policies.

Google has published a new help document titled About the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and UCP-powered checkout feature on Google. This was published in the Google Merchant Center help documentation section.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

There is a Google patent document that implies Google Search might send searchers to AI-generated page of your site...

There is a Google patent named AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user. It describes the use of AI to create custom landing pages and when a user performs a search, Google Search sends the user to the AI-generated page instead of the page on the company's website.

Google Search rankings remain heated into March - I mean, I can post about this every day but now I am at the point of just doing it weekly. We thought things might be cooling a bit, but the volatility really has not cooled much at all.

Google might be allowing publishers to claim their profiles and publications on Google Discover. I mean, there were forms of this for Google News, Google Business Profiles, even Google Search over the years, but there are hints this is coming to Google Discover.