Industry News

This week, we covered two unconfirmed Google search ranking updates, one mid-week and one over the weekend - some were pretty big. Google said Reddit gets no special preference in its search rankings or AI results...

Google Ads is rolling out a new customer acquisition option named "Report on new customers acquired." This lets you "Drive purchases from new and existing customers without changing bidding," according to Google.

Earlier this week, OpenAI sent an email to advertisers about new ChatGPT Ads Manager product updates. These updates include testing a new multi-product carousel format for product feed campaigns, plus a number of updates to the ad manager itself.

Google Ads will begin migrating or "upgrading" Automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting to AI Max starting on September 1, 2026. We knew this was coming and now the process is soon going to begin.

Gary Illyes from Google said that Google's crawlers do not only send HTTP requests such as GET and POST but also for HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. He said the latter make up for less than 1.5% of the total number of requests all Google's crawlers send. Google sends them for JavaScript, he said.

Google Ads added a "View call report" link in the Phone Call conversions leads report. This makes it easier to jump to the details of what makes up the metrics of that report and gives you access to that data in a new tab.

Google Ads is now testing the "Strongest match" and "Strong match" labels it announced back in mid-June. This is the first time I have seen this label in the wild. I am actually a bit surprised Google went on with this test after the backlash...

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. We are seeing big changes and swings with the Google Search results...

Yes, I reported Google Search ranking volatility over this past weekend, but I am seeing a large increase in the chatter within the SEO community over the past 24 hours or so. The chatter seems consistent with a big Google Search algorithm update that is underway but at this point, Google has not yet confirmed it and may never confirm it.

Google announced a number of big changes within its executive AI leadership ranks, including Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years, Demis Hassabis stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to be its chair, and Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over many of his responsibilities. No matter how Google spun it, the stock was down about 4% yesterday from the news.