Industry News

Microsoft is testing another user interface and experience for the links they show within its AI Answers, the Copilot responses. These links show with a hyperlink icon and the domain name spelled out, and then when you mouse over it, it has a carousel you can flip through for more links.

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

Microsoft seems to be testing a more fully AI-powered search engine, which may be named Copilot Search. Copilot is the name of Microsoft's AI features, formerly known as Bing Chat.

Some sites, hosted on some CDNs (content delivery networks), are experiencing a big spike in server response times for crawling, while seeing a drop in total crawl requests. So technically, the crawling has dropped but Google is taking much longer to crawl a lot less.

18 year old, publicly traded education technology company, Chegg, has sued Google over its AI Overviews and how it has hurt their traffic and revenue. Chegg has "filed a complaint against Google, which has unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg, impacting our acquisitions, revenue and employees," said Nathan Schultz, CEO of Chegg.

Google is testing opening the normally closed/collapsed AI Answer box. Meaning, normally you need to manually tap to expand the answer, here Google is testing opening these boxes by default, without you needing to click expand.

The Google Search Console API has been delayed for the past several days. Data is days behind the web interface and causing issued for those who use Looker Studio, Big Query and other solutions to see the Search Console data when accessed through the API.

Google seems to have added, for some merchants, a new section named Physical Stores to the Google Merchant Center Next console. In this section is random data from within the store's Google Business Profiles listing.

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

A few weeks ago, I reported on how Google was testing showing deeper Google AI Overviews, maybe powered by Gemini 2.0, with over 60 links and citations in them. Well, over the past few weeks, more and more of us are seeing these AI Overviews, with dozens of links within them. And we are asking ourselves, who will click on these links?