Industry News

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

OpenAI announced GPT-5.3 Instant and said it "delivers more accurate answers, richer and better-contextualized results when searching the web, and reduces unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative phrasing that can interrupt the flow of conversation."

Google is testing bolding the site names in the search results. We've seen Google bold many other elements of the search result snippet, but I don't think I've covered Google testing bolding the site name portion of the search snippet.

Google has posted a new help document named Things to know about Google's web crawling. This document currently lists 9 things on how Google's web crawling works.

Google Search may have rolled out an update for the images it shows in the search results All tab. For some queries, Google is showing a full-width image pack, but with only four wider images, not the five images we saw before.

Google has reportedly confirmed that the Google Discover feed has recently increased how often it shows social media posts in the feed. We covered this in January, and while we know Google does show social media in the Discover feed, it seems Google is more likely to show these social media posts more often now.

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."