Industry News

Google has announced it made some updates to its ad quality where it now takes into account better measurements for understanding the user navigation experience and if that user will or will not be happy with the ad landing page.

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly said at event the other day that it is important for us to focus on originality in the coming year. "Originality is something we're going to be focusing on this year. That's going to be important," is how he was quoted.

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don't do it, it is not enough of a change to the page's content to warrant a lastmod date update.

OpenAI announced big news that its ChatGPT Search service is now open and no longer requires a login or an account. It comes the same day that Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 to all users and where Microsoft said Think Deeper in Copilot is free for all users.

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

I am seeing a lot of renewed chatter within the SEO industry of a possible unconfirmed Google search ranking update touching down in the past 24-hours or so. The weird thing is that the tools are not really showing much of a spike in volatility but the chatter seems incredibly high.

Microsoft published its new Microsoft Advertising features that it released over the past month. This goes across Performance Max tools, reporting, new values, targeting, and more.

Google AI Overviews are now able to show super detailed comparison within Google Search. If you search for two very specific models, Google may give you a ton of details directly in the AI Overview.

Google / Alphabet reported its Q4 2024 earnings last night, where its ad revenue hit $72.46 billion, up 10.6% from last year's quarter of $65.52 billion. Google's revenue was up 12% with $96.47 billion and its profit was up 30.7% to $30.9B. Search revenue specifically was up 12.5% to $54 billion.

The folks at Seer put together a study looking at how the click-through rates of the Google organic and paid search results are impacted by having AI Overviews on the page. And the short answer is, AI Overviews seem to be hurting the click-through rates in a big way.