Industry News

Google is supposedly showing AI Overviews for movie-related queries. Apparently, this is new, although I don't have firsthand knowledge since I don't typically search for movies. However, I've been told it's new by a number of sources.

Google Ads is rolling out its new Smart Bidding Exploration bidding update to some advertisers. At Google Marketing Live, Google called this its "biggest update to bidding in over a decade."

Microsoft is testing showing sitelinks with light gray underlines in the Bing search results. Normally, the Bing sitelinks don't have any underline at all - but here Bing is testing this.

Google Analytics real-time reporting screens seem broken again. I am seeing a ton of complaints about GA4 real-time reporting not showing full data.

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 announced the June 2025 core update finished after just over 16 days...

Google is charging searchers to access the latest and best of its AI Mode and Deep Search. Google released Gemini 2.5 Pro for AI Mode and Deep Search for Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers.

Several weeks ago, we reported Google was testing AI-generated summaries for Google Discover. Well, according to TechCrunch, Google has confirmed as of this week, this is an official launch and is rolling out in the U.S.

Earlier this year, Google released a new search labs feature named Ask For Me. Google would call local businesses to get the information you need and then send it to you, without you having to pick up a phone. Well, it is still in labs, still an experiment, I am still on the waitlist but according to one user, it can be hit or miss.

Google is testing much larger favicons in the Google Search results on mobile. We've seen Google test variations to favicons and sitenames countless times and covered a lot of them here but this version has Google using a really large favicon and sometimes removing the site name completely.

For the past couple of years, we've seen Google show QR codes you can scan and email or text this number to call features in the Google Ads. Google's Ads Liaison, Ginny Marvin, confirmed that these actions are indeed tracked by Google Ads, down to the conversion, if you set those up.