Industry News

Google has just given up on a third-party cookie alternative. Google announced it will maintain its "current approach to offering users third-party cookie choice in Chrome, and will not be rolling out a new standalone prompt for third-party cookies."

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

Google Ads announced they will "now allow relevant Search ads from advertisers who showed amongst top ads to also participate in the bottom ads auction." Honestly, I thought this update happened last month when they started to allow double serving ads (well, Google now says it is not double serving, so maybe that is the announcement here...).

About a year ago, we covered numerous tests with shaded site name and favicon sections of the snippet. Google continues to test this, but we're now seeing a blue gradient version of the style.

Google is testing a newish section in the Google local panel to tell searchers how far that business is from your location. Google is testing adding either a "Get there" data point and/or a "From your location" data point.

Microsoft is testing adding a read more link to the Bing Copilot Answers in Bing Search. The read more link will expand the answer to show more content, generating a more detailed and longer answer for your query.

Google Ads has updated the number of characters you can add for the Performance Max campaigns descriptions to all be 90 characters long. Previously, there was a short description of 60 characters, but now they have all been updated to show 90 characters.

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

Google seems to be no longer showing the events carousel, event rich results, in the desktop search results. I see them on mobile search but I cannot trigger them on any browser on desktop search.

The folks at Google did a live demo of Android XR, Google's AR glasses with Gemini, at the TED 2025 event. It is pretty wild to watch this demo, so I figured I'd share it with all of you here, in case you missed it.