Industry News

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

The Google search ranking volatility has not calmed down since the June core update and we are in mid-August and expecting another core update soon. Google launched the preferred sources feature for Top Stories...

The studies we have thus seen from third parties have all said traffic from Google Search to websites has declined a lot since AI Overviews came out. But we have a new study from Chartbeat that says traffic to news publishers from Google (including Discover) has been stable over the past few years.

Google's John Mueller replied to a lot of the hype around all GEO, AIO, AEO, etc topics floating around the SEO space. John said on Bluesky, "The higher the urgency, and the stronger the push of new acronyms, the more likely they're just making spam and scamming."

Google Search started to roll out the age verification that it said it would begin doing a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is not just YouTube, it goes across Google Search ads too, as we reported back a couple of weeks ago.

Google recently launched the preferred sources for top stories within Google Search. But there is no way for publishers to know how many of their readers selected their website as a preferred source. But Google said they are "looking into this" and may provide such data to publishers.

Google is testing adding a "loyalty benefits" section to the merchant/retailer knowledge panels. This would show on the right side of the page, under the description of the retailer.

It looks like Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, is using Google Maps reviews for its local AI results. It also links directly to the Google Maps business profile listing when you click on the review stars and ratings from Copilot.

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.

Microsoft says SEOs need to do the click studies to see if AI search clicks lead to conversions or not...

Fabrice Canel from the Microsoft Bing team said that search engines, like Bing, have "limited visibility" into the conversions after the click from AI search and it is up to the SEO community to conduct those studies.