Industry News

Last week, Google sent out a bulk load of reverification requests to Google Business Profiles. Well, according to Google's Rick Saxe, it was a bug and the bug should be fixed as of the past day or so.

Bing Webmaster Tools has been down and/or loading incredibly slowly for the past couple of hours. SEOs began noticing this since around 11 am ET and as of the time I posted this story, it is still down or barely loading.

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

Google has confirmed that the volatility we all saw prior to the official announcement of the Google March 2025 Core Update was not related to the March 2025 Core Update. This is something we expected Google to confirm, as I've asked Google this question numerous times and got the same answer each and every time.

Google is testing moving the AI Overviews from the top position of the search results page (also known as position zero), to the middle of the search results page. We saw Google test this with featured snippets over the years, so it makes sense Google would test this with AI Overviews.

Google said it is expanding its AI Overviews and Knowledge Panels to offer more medical and health related answers. Plus, those are being expanded in more counties and languages. Also, Google launched a new "What People Suggest" search feature that shows you what other people are saying on the web about those topics.

Microsoft has opened access to the Copilot feature within Bing Webmaster Tools. I played a lot with it when I was in the limited beta in December and it is a cool nifty feature to use, but I am not sure how critical of a feature it is.

You can now compare date ranges of data directly in the Bing Webmaster Tools Search Performance reports without having to export it to a third-party tool.

Microsoft was caught testing way too many ads on its Bing Search results page. I saw 9 ads and only two organic/free listings on the page for a query on [garage door repair].

Google Search seems to have accidentally leaked its various AI Search options and features, that go beyond just AI Mode, which it recently launched. 47 different AI Search options are shown including Info Sleuth, Allium, QTalk, MedExplainer, Fantasy Sports Researcher, Smart Kitchen and many more.