Industry News

In September, we posted about a number of local pack design tests from Microsoft Bing. But now, Bing might be testing a more retro, older-looking interface for the local pack in the Bing search results.

Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison, posted a reminder on LinkedIn, encouraging advertisers to ensure the email settings are all configured properly. You can get monthly invoices, billing alerts, account notifications, ad and keyword rejection notices, optimization and performance tips and more.

This is the hands-on companion to How I Use AI for Product Work and How My AI Product Second Brain Evolved. Those posts explain the philosophy; this one gets you to a working OpenCode setup in 30 minutes.

By the end, you’ll have a folder structure, three useful slash commands, and a context file that makes the AI actually useful. Prerequisites

You’ll need OpenCode installed and configured. Follow the installation guide to get started. If you can run opencode in your terminal and get a...

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

Microsoft is hiring a "very" Senior Product Manager who will initially work on fighting spam across Bing and Copilot. Fabrice Canel said this is a "very" senior PM role and the job description says the "initial focus on reducing Spam in Copilot, Bing, MSN and Ads."

Greg Gifford, a veteran automotive and local SEO, published a hard warning to vendors suggesting that they tell automotive dealerships to set up separate Google Business Profile department listings for separate services. He said, do not, do not, do this and that it can lead to your Google Business Profiles being suspended and removed from Google Search and Google Maps.

John Mueller, a Google Search Analyst, responded to a question on Reddit named Is SEO still enough, or do we need to start thinking about GEO too? In short, John said you should look at the "full picture, and prioritize accordingly."

Adam Wathan the creator of Tailwind CSS posted that he had to let go of 75% of his engineering team because of AI. He said traffic to the Tailwind help documentation is down 40% and that is where most people learn about his solution and then buy commercial products. He added his revenue is down 80%.

Google seems to be testing showing call assets on Vehicle Ads within Google Search. So on the Vehicle Ads there is a way to call the dealer or seller, like you see on some other ads.

Scott H. Young has a thoughtful piece on what’s still worth learning in a world with AI. He cuts through both the panic and the hype to look at what the data actually shows. The biggest finding is probably not all that surprising: early-career workers in AI-exposed fields are getting hit hardest.

Another report from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab notes that early-career workers in AI-exposed fields (such as programming) have seen a relative decline in employment, even as employment...