Industry News

Over the weekend Google launched Product Studio AI features to Google Business Profiles products. Now when you add/edit products on your local Google Business Profile, Google will let you "change the background scene of your product with Product Studio, a generative AI tool which helps you create engaging imagery to showcase your products," Kara from Google said.

Google has this new map unit that is titled "Related places" and shows a map with a carousel beneath it of related places. This actually comes up for brand name searches, which isn't great - why would you want Google to show competitor names when you search for a specific brand name.

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

We are seeing more Google search ranking volatility hit both over the weekend and also mid-week. Google expanded its site reputation abuse enforcement to Germany. Google AI Overviews powered by Gemini 2.0 can go insanely deep. Google launched a new labs experiment named Ask for me...

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that demographic exclusions will apply to Shopping inventory in Performance Max campaigns. Marvin added that the reporting on how this is shown to advertisers is still to be determined, but the goal is to let advertisers control which age groups can or cannot see the ads.

Google is testing (I think again) review carousels and block units in its search results for product queries. A number of SEOs spotted these coming up over the past week or two, and they basically show product review content in a separate section within Google Search.

Google Search is now sometimes showing the ability to filter products in its search results by product rating. I am not sure if this is new or not, but I cannot replicate this but some are seeing the product rating filter/refinement option when searching.

Google is testing a new filter for its shopping results in the mobile search results. Instead of showing a single filter menu, Google is showing a product image carousel line first and then a filter menu for additional search filters.

Google has a new Search Labs feature named Ask for me. Ask for me will have Google call businesses for you, to figure out the cost of the service and when it can be scheduled for you. It is like that Duplex feature we saw years ago, where Google would try to schedule a restaurant reservation for you.

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 ranking volatility seems to be spiking once again...