Industry News

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.

Google Ads launched new AI Mode retailer ads...

Asad Awan, who is in charge of monetization at OpenAI was interviewed by his own company on "The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT." It is a 25 minute interview and one part he discusses how he would like to see advertisers simply prompt to create ads and ad campaigns and not have to hire an agency or "performance marketers" to run ads on ChatGPT.

Google is rolling out UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, powered checkout in AI Mode. This launched as part of the Google Ads news from yesterday, and you can now see it in AI Mode for products from Etsy and Wayfair.

Google AdSense has added additional triggers for vignette ads. There are now a total of six triggers, three old ones and three new ones. These new triggers took effect on February 9, 2026.

Google announced a new ad unit for AI Mode for shopping ads which promotes retailers. Google also launched Veo 3 support in Google Ads Asset Studio. Plus Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM of Ads & Commerce at Google, published her annual letter to the industry on the Google blog.

The Google Chrome team announced its early preview of WebMCP, "a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on your side with increased speed, reliability, and precision," André Cipriani Bandarra from Google wrote.

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

A couple of weeks ago I reported Bing was beta testing a new AI performance report within Bing Webmaster Tools. These reports are now available as a public preview for all to see. Plus, Bing Webmaster Tools has a whole new slick design.

Google announced a number of updates to help people find and remove personal information and sensitive imagery about themselves from Google. But you would need to give Google this information first, so Google can find it and then remove it.

Earlier this month, we reported that Google updated two of its help documents around Google's crawler file size limits. Well, Google made a clarification to one of those documents the other day after some confusion within the SEO industry.