Industry News

Google's John Mueller said he still recommends you have visible anchor text for your links in order to "provide more context for search engines." Don't just use title elements in the link attribute; make sure the link has actual visible anchor text.

Google Ads now has a new recommended experiments box in the Experiments page. This should offer you customized and personalized recommendations that Google Ads thinks you should try based on your account setup and performance data.

Microsoft is testing underlining the product name and product price in the shopping ads carousel at the top of the Bing Search results. I am not sure how much this adds to the interface but maybe it drives a bit more attention and thus clicks?

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 Ads launched new AI Mode retailer ads...

Asad Awan, who is in charge of monetization at OpenAI was interviewed by his own company on "The Thinking Behind Ads in ChatGPT." It is a 25 minute interview and one part he discusses how he would like to see advertisers simply prompt to create ads and ad campaigns and not have to hire an agency or "performance marketers" to run ads on ChatGPT.

Google is rolling out UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, powered checkout in AI Mode. This launched as part of the Google Ads news from yesterday, and you can now see it in AI Mode for products from Etsy and Wayfair.

Google AdSense has added additional triggers for vignette ads. There are now a total of six triggers, three old ones and three new ones. These new triggers took effect on February 9, 2026.

Google announced a new ad unit for AI Mode for shopping ads which promotes retailers. Google also launched Veo 3 support in Google Ads Asset Studio. Plus Vidhya Srinivasan, VP/GM of Ads & Commerce at Google, published her annual letter to the industry on the Google blog.

The Google Chrome team announced its early preview of WebMCP, "a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on your side with increased speed, reliability, and precision," André Cipriani Bandarra from Google wrote.

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