Industry News

Google Business Profiles now can add backgrounds to the images you upload to your Google Posts, using AI. Victoria Kroll from Google wrote that you can now "can create an engaging AI-generated background for the photos you plan to use in the post."

Google announced three updates to its image and assets system including its generative AI can now generate people and faces. Google also announced asset audience recommendations and asset testing for feed-only Performance Max campigns.

Google is showing AI-generated review summaries on some top quality store pages. So when you click on a specific retailer or merchant's top quality store link, at the top of the reviews you may see an AI-generated summary of those reviews.

Martin Split from Google said that having an audio version of a page or a blog post, does not impact your Google rankings. He said it is good for your users, but has no SEO impact.

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

The first week of January, we reported on an interesting local update we named the January 2025 local search update. Well, this might be more of a diversity update, where Google removes the URL for the core organic results, when that URL is also present in the local pack results.

If you try to access your Google Business Profile page right now, you likely won't be able to. It seems Google Business Profile edit section within Google Search is broken and serves a 500 error when you try to do anything.

Google Business Profiles support team is currently a bit delayed, with a backlog of support requests, video verification delays, and reinstatement request backlogs.

We know Google can show reviews from third-party sources in Google Business Profile listings. We've seen Google take reviews from Yelp, travel sites and other third-party websites. But these days, more often than not, you see reviews only from Google. But have you ever seen a review from Yandex on Google?

Google is testing a new design for its search results that are more of a grid format, more of a boxed in design. They are not on all the search results elements but more of the search features.