Industry News

It looks like we are seeing some Googler accounts being taken over by sites that sell SEO services, or dare I say it, spammy or low-quality SEO services. Martin Splitt from Google let his X account go during the whole Twitter to X Elon thing and eventually that account was picked up by a search engine indexing service.

The Google Search Console generative AI performance reports seem to be live for everyone now. Google has not yet announced the full rollout of the generative AI performance reports but after checking all my profiles in Search Console, it seems to now be fully live.

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

Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is allegedly crawling the web and in the process of building its own search engine. Pieter Levels posted about this pattern on X and wrote, "Meta is ALLEGEDLY building their own Google search engine..."

Google has updated its guidelines for representing your business on Google in the Google Business Profiles help documentation to add a new rule. Google said for your business name you cannot repeat "the same business name in multiple scripts or languages."

Google's Gary Illyes said that hreflang alternates, hreflang URLs are not "indexed in the proper sense." In short, Google just keeps the hreflang URL as alternate URLs. So the URL is not what is getting the page indexed, it is just being stores as an alternative to the main page URL.

A month ago, Google said it would now label ads created or edited with AI with an AI label within the ad or on the ad itself (depending on the region). We soon saw those AI labels roll out on ads in the Google Search sponsored results but now we are also seeing them in the local pack listings and within Google Discover.

Microsoft has released the ability to adjust and appeal disapproved assets in bulk. This feature is named Bulk edit disapproved assets and should be live globally in all Microsoft Advertising accounts.

The Google home page is testing or rolling out now, new AI features and buttons in place of the Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky buttons. There is now "Create images," "Ask about files," and "Brainstorm" buttons below the big search box. This is in addition to showing the AI Mode button, the plus sign at the left of the search box, Google Lens, and the Voice button.

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