Industry News

This weekend I am seeing a spike in chatter within the SEO community on the topic of, you guessed it, Google search ranking volatility. Truth is, it really has not calmed down and the heated Google search results have been ongoing for about 6 weeks now but this weekend, I saw a spike in the SEO chatter.

There are numerous reports that Google may be using a more generic and undocumented Googlebot, Google crawler. The crawler user agent is just named "Google," and it is not listed in any of the documented crawlers that Google has provided.

Google is testing a horizontal line about the search ads, the sponsored results, within the Google search results. We've seen Google show a blue side color on these ads, we've seen animated horizontal lines and lines separating the sitelinks in ads as well.

Kenichi Suzuki and Rio Ichikawa from Farber Company in Japan sat down with Gary Illyes of Google to interview him on AI Search, AI content, SEO and other topics. It is a good interview, it is in English, so I wanted to share it here.

Google seems to be testing a new "Deep Dive" button in the search results. This button is on some of the knowledge panels, specifically, this one is for a movie panel. When clicked, it gives you some bullet points on the highlights of the movie.

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.

OpenAI announced GPT-5 and Microsoft Copilot is using it already...

This week, we covered the ongoing Google search volatility, which cooled for a bit and then got heated again. Google's Liz Reid said that website clicks from Google are relatively stable since launching AI Overviews, but no one believes them. Google did not...

Google announced a number of new Google Ads Performance Max controls and reporting features. They include new controls such as campaign-level negative keyword lists, more search theme limits, more demographic targeting, and new reporting for customer'¬'­ acquisition, goal diagnostics, final URL assets, and creative recommendations.

Bing not only added new filters by device and country, but also Bing added several more months of historical data - from 16 months to 24 months of data to the Bing Webmaster Tools search performance reports. Plus, Bing also added Keyword trendlines at a glance.

Google is testing adding the "people also search for" section within the Google AI Mode results. This shows below the link cards on the right, and shows other queries people use related to the search query you entered into AI Mode.