Industry News

Google announced a new bidding update to Google Ads named Smart Bidding Exploration. Google said this is the "biggest update to bidding in over a decade."

Google announced a number of AI-related features to help advertisers create and manage their ads account across Google Ads and Merchant Center. These include new AI tools for creating ads and creatives and also agentic capabilities to help you with this on the backend.

Google has published two new help documents on the topic of AI; one on guidance on using generative AI content on your website and the second on AI features and your website. Google also published a blog post on the topics over here.

Microsoft is testing a double border style around the Bing Search box. This goes around the main search box but not the auto-complete box, I believe.

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 had a lot of news out of Google I/O, as you would expect. The big item, which we predicted, was that AI Mode is now available to all US searchers without having to opt into it within Search Labs. Plus, Google is testing a number of new features in AI mode including Deep Search, Live Search, personal context, custom charts, AI shopping and yes - Agentic features.

Surprise, surprise, as I called it, Google is expanding AI Overviews into more regions. I mean, we saw this being leaked a couple of weeks ago, so it is not shocking news. But at I/O, Google said AI Overviews are "now available in more than 200 countries and territories and in more than 40 languages, with support added for Arabic, Chinese, Malay, Urdu and more."

Google Search seems to be super volatile today and yesterday, so I will call this the Google I/O 2025 Google unconfirmed update. I am seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community along with many of the tools showing super heated volatility within the Google search results.

Google seems to be testing hiding the citations, link icons, for the AI Overviews default view. So when the AI Overview first loads in the Google Search results, the link icon is hidden.

For the past few weeks or so, Google has a bug where the right side knowledge panel goes missing for business owners when you try to bring up your business listing in Google Search. This is not impacting everyone and it can be random but Google is supposedly aware of the issue and is fixing it.