Industry News

Google can now show the "price at checkout" within the Google Shopping listings, both paid and organic. I am not sure if this is new, being that Google has had policies about suspending merchants who change their pricing at checkout and even allows Googlebot to add items to the cart for this reason.

Google is testing a new shopping ad format. This format expands product listings available within a store, shows the products with larger images and product details and then lets you swipe through a carousel of those items.

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

No surprise here - Google will be testing and experimenting with ads in Google AI Mode. Google told Adweek that they will be "explore bringing ads into" Google AI Mode.

Google has updated its manual actions documentation around site reputation abuse, to expand on the next steps and actions you can take if you receive this manual action. Google now more clearly says that you should not block that content with your robots.txt file, if you use the noindex rule.

Google's VP of Product at Google Search, Robby Stein, has responded to concerns from publishers around the new AI Mode. Specifically, the concerns around this new AI search interface not being all that encouraging for users to click over to publishers' sites.

Google is testing a knowledge panel that includes a places card that can be expanded to show a map and local pack results. I cannot replicate this, which makes me think this is a test. I do see the places section below the knowledge panel, but not one that you can click to expand.

Google is now using a much larger font for the knowledge panels shown in Google Search. The font size looks jumbo and it does not seem to be test, it seems to be live - I think.

Google Search is testing a feature to quiz you on the product you are looking for and then to give you more tailored recommendations for product suggestions. This box is titled "get tailored recommendations" and it reminds me of the AI powered recommendation ads, but these are different.

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 dropped the horrid page annotations feature, thankfully...