Industry News

On Friday, Google published its findings from its experiment of removing some EU news publishers from its search results. The results said that Google had no visible loss of search ad revenue when the news publishers were removed.

Google Ads has confirmed that it has lost some conversion data for some advertisers who used Google Merchant Center in February. The data is not coming back, it is unrecoverable. We don't know the exact dates, but Google did mention it was in February 2025.

Google is testing a new feature in the AI Overviews (although, they look familiar to me for some reason). When you click or hover over on a word in the AI Overview, Google will bring up a menu to get an AI explanation, show related images or copy to clipboard.

A month ago, we reported that Google Business Profiles support was backlogged and delayed. Well, the delay is not getting any better. Victoria Kroll from Google posted an update on Friday afternoon in the Google Business Profiles to inform us that the delay is still there.

If you’re currently in the job market I highly recommend this post by Will Larson:

If you pull all those things together, you’re essentially in a market where profit and pace are fixed, and you have to figure out how you personally want to optimize between people, prestige and learning. Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.

It’s a sobering—and imo...

This is a lovely post by Craig Mod about the Japanese approach to garbage, and what that means for other things in our lives…

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. […]

Personally, I don’t love carrying my garbage around with me, but I recognize that it wouldn’t exist without my intervention. Nobody ran up and asked me to hold an empty...

I love this deep-dive on the little interjections we use in everyday speech. One example:

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call ‘continuers,’ such as ‘mm-hmm’—signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. The form of the word is well suited to its function: Because ‘mm-hmm’ is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

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 confirmed that the volatility we saw prior to the core update was unrelated to this latest core update. I also posted status updates on the Google March 2025 core update. Google is testing AI Search features beyond the new AI Mode...

As a reminder, the Google March 2025 core update touched down on March 13th, and as Google said, not before. And while many sites were hit super hard in the early days, the net of this update didn't seem as wide as other core updates. Now, I am seeing the third-party tracking tools explode this morning - but is it a tool issue or real core update volatility being detected?