Industry News

It's been almost ten days since I last reported on a Google search ranking update. Well, I had to stop the streak and cover what I've seen over the last 24 hours or so. It appears that the volatility in ranking positions in Google search results is shifting more than the norm.

Google is testing a new design for its sponsored search ads in the Google Search results. These have horizontal lines that are darkened or filled halfway through, alternating from left to right and right to left every other ad.

There has been a lot, I mean, a lot, of chatter around if one should add an LLMs.txt to their website. Many are starting to add it while others have not added it yet. Well, John Mueller of Google chimed in and wrote on Bluesky, "FWIW no AI system currently uses llms.txt."

Google has rolled out a new feature to automate the process of updating your inventory with Google Merchant Center. It is called Website-reported Autofeeds and it uses Google Tag Manager tag implemented in your site to manage this.

Microsoft is testing new hover effects and styles in the Bing Search results. Specifically, when you hover over the URL of a snippet, it will bold and underline the result. And then on related searches, Bing is using a blue and orangish styled background color.

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 Search Console is now counting AI Mode impressions, clicks and position...

Google has now officially confirmed that Google Search Console is counting AI Mode data. Google said, "AI Mode is now counting towards totals in Search Console." We saw this when AI Mode went fully live in the US late last week, which Google announced would happen at I/O.

Google has rolled out a new interface to view your historical Google Posts within Google Business Profiles. Now the interface is a scrollable list view.

Google is investigating reports of a number of searchers seeing that all the links shown in the Google search results are marked as previously visited. When you click on a link in a browser, often the link is colored purple next time you see that link, indicating you've previously clicked on that link.

A few months ago, Google added big blue buttons to the knowledge panels within the Google Search results but now, some of those knowledge panels buttons are taking searchers to the wrong site or a site that does not exist.