Industry News

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

A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and perform better in Google Search. John Mueller from Google answered with his classic "it depends."

Over the past week or so, Google has been testing a new format for link cards in the AI Overviews within Google Search. When you place your mouse cursor over a link clip icon, a new overlay will show you the page/site cards that line of text is being sourced from.

The Google preferred sources deeplink button feature is broken and has been since at least last Wednesday. When you click on a button to make a site a preferred source, such as for this site, it does not pre-fill in the site's URL in the box, as it should. You can retype it in the box but it does not pre-fill it for you.

Google announced on Friday that there is a delay with the Google Ads team reviewing and thus approving developer token access applications. This is because Google is "seeing significant interest in the developer community for Google Ads API access, and are receiving an increase in developer token access applications," the company said.

On the Reddit Q4 2025 Earnings Call (see transcript here), Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, was asked about how he feels about how Google and OpenAI link or use citations to link to Reddit's content. Overall, Steve made it sound like the interfaces are adapting quickly and he is hopeful they will drive traffic to the conversation (within Reddit) in the future.

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 unleashed its first core update of 2026...

This week, we covered the first core update of 2026, the February 2026 Discover core update. Meanwhile, there is an ongoing super-heated and volatile Google search rankings. Google has nothing to share about the recent unconfirmed ranking updates...

We saw Google test follow up questions below the AI Mode responses back in July. Now Google is testing follow up search suggestions, not necessarily in question format, at the bottom of some AI Mode results.

The Google Ads mixed campaign type experiment beta, which we covered the help document last month, seems to be going live for some advertisers. This feature allows advertisers to test multiple campaign types, budgets, and settings across campaigns in a single experiment.