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 Search Console performance reports may be off again. A teen SEO wants to save his family business...

Google Search Console's performance report may have some sort of bug or tracking issue. When you set some filters, you may see a huge spike in impressions start to show up in the report.

Google's John Mueller chimed in on Reddit when a teenager of a family vacation rental business said he was trying to save his family business through SEO after being burned by previous SEOs. In short, it seems the family has a vacation rental in Spain, and business is significantly down due to the loss of Google traffic.

New test places AI Overview citations on a white background without throwing any shade behind it.

Bing is testing a new AI-based recommendations section in the Shopping Tab. Bing adds this block to the top of the results, and shows AI-citations at the top right.

Bing spotted testing more listings in the sponsored product section at the top of its results.

Anil Dash has a long essay on the state of the open web and not all of it rings true for me, but buried in the opening is a wonderful definition of what the open web actually is:

The open web is something extraordinary: anybody can use whatever tools they have, to create content following publicly documented specifications, published using completely free and open platforms, and then share that work with anyone, anywhere in the world, without asking for permission from anyone. Think...

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

This week we covered the release of the Google March 2026 core update that rolled out this morning and will take about two weeks to finish. We also covered Google March 2026 spam update that launched on March 24th and finished 19.5 hours later on March 25th...

Google announced Search Live has launched globally, for all languages and locations where AI Mode is available. Google said this is possible by its "new audio and voice model, Gemini 3.1 Flash Live, which delivers even more natural and intuitive conversations."