Industry News

Microsoft reported its fourth-quarter 2026 earnings, showing that its search and advertising revenue was up 10%, indicating its ad growth was 2 points lower than the previous quarter. The previous quarter it was up 12%, before that up 10% before that, up 16% and the one before that was 21% and this quarter, it is only up 10%.

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 Search Console platform properties is fully live, it is cool...

Earlier this month, Google announced platform properties, a way to see content that you manage but on third-party platforms, including social platforms and video platforms. So if you have an account on Instagram, TikTok, X and/or YouTube, you can claim access and see how your content on those platforms are performing within Google Search. That feature is now globally live as of today, Google announced.

Google supports the unavailable_after meta attribute, which will tell Google not to show this page in search results after the specified date/time. The problem with this, is that if you try to change the unavailable_after date later, Google might not pick up on it because Google may not try to crawl that page before the last given date.

Microsoft seems to be testing showing pricing on the product images within the Bing Search organic results. Normally, Bing would show review stars on the product images and, below the image, show the price. I should note that I am also seeing two rows of products under a single search result snippet, which I think is new.

The Google Ads interface now shows Target CPA and Target ROAS as explicit bidding strategy options in the drop-down of bidding options. We knew this was coming, as it is supported in the new version of Google Ads Editor 2.13 and all the other recent communication from Google and now advertisers are seeing it.

Google's John Mueller confirmed it has not and likely won't publish publicly Google Search's defined order of precedence for metadata reconciliation. In other words, if you have conflicting signals you are sending Google, which signal trumps the other. Like a 301 redirect from URL A to URL B but on URL B, you have a canonical tag to URL A, which should Google trust.

Google Ads posted details about a new feature it calls "Lead Journey Mapping." Lead Journey Mapping is a visual drag-and-drop tool that allows lead generation advertisers to map their end-to-end customer journey within Google Ads.

Google Ads has introduced what it calls "Budget Panel," which should be able to be found (at some point) in Performance Max and Demand Gen campaign review page. Google says the Budget Panel "provides customized budget recommendations to optimize campaign performance and prevent low starts."

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 is testing related searches based on your browsing within Search...