Industry News

Google AI Mode seems like it got a lot faster over the past day or so. Instead of going through the steps of saying thinking about this, searching for results, organizing results, it just now saying kicking off searches and then looking at sites and then quickly shows the AI Mode response.

As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seems to be a lot of Google search ranking volatility that kicked off on Friday, May 16th and throughout this weekend. The most heated day seems to have been on Friday but the chatter is pretty busy over the weekend within the SEO community.

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 ads with AI Overviews make as much as ads without AI Overviews on the page...

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that search ads with AI Overviews are at a baseline, at the same level as search ads without AI Overviews, in terms of ad revenue per query. He added, and now it is just about going up from there, and with AI, he doesn't see it to a problem.

This week, we covered, you guessed it, more Google search ranking volatility. Google also said they are rethinking its search stack from the ground up because of LLMs. Google is testing AI Overviews in more regions and languages prior to Google I/O/ Google is testing AI Mode buttons throughout Google...

Last month we shared the spam efforts the Google Maps team announced - but did you know that in 2024 Google had almost one billion reviews published within Google Maps? That is 999 million reviews, 752 million photos and videos and 94 million place edits published just in 2024.

Apple announced this week that it partnered with MICHELIN Guide; The Infatuation and Golf Digest to provide "insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources" within Apple Maps.

Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, confirmed Google is working on making it easier to share AI Overviews within Google Search and AI Mode responses.

Microsoft is testing shading the site names, the brand names, of retailers in the Bing Shopping search results. So the name Amazon is in a blue shaded background color as opposed to just saying Amazon.com.

Google is testing a "Shuffle" button in some of its AI generated answers within the Google Search results. When you click the shuffle button, it seems to redo or change up the response Google's AI gives you.