Industry News

Retailers have been complaining for the past several days that there is a bug in Google Merchant Center when trying to add the shipping rates and costs. Step four of that process just bugs out and it is preventing some merchants from completing their details and advertising with Google Ads or listing free listings in Google Shopping.

Since March 1st, there are many Google Ads accounts that are not serving ads. The Google Ads forum is filled with complaints about this and as far as I can tell, I cannot find a single response from an official Google Ads representative (as of yet).

I agree with Elle Griffin that Social Development > Self-Development:

This might sound obvious, but I think we live in an era of “secure your own oxygen mask before helping others,” and while that might be a helpful mantra for airplanes I think many of us don’t seem to recognize when we are already wearing oxygen masks. We don’t need to keep adding even more oxygen to ourselves, we need to start directing our attention to others. We need to focus less on self-development and more on...

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

Another week and more Google search ranking volatility hit mid-week, did you notice? Google's crawler might be causing issues on your site this week. Google still is making its crawling more efficient and better. Google Search Console's API had delayed this week. Google was sued over AI Overviews...

Microsoft Bing Search's Copilot Answers now can show maps and local results, including local ads. The AI answer has a map on the left side and then on the right side it has local organic and paid listings with the company name, address, phone, website and directions - plus a photo.

A couple of days ago, Google sent out an email to owners of Google Business Profile listings. The email was a reminder about the Google Business Profile policies, and it highlighted policies around reviews.

A year or more ago, Google added a toggle switch to use Gemini directly in the iOS Google Search app. Well, that was removed this week and you now need to go to the native Gemini app to use Gemini, you cannot use the Google app.

Microsoft is testing outlining the individual search result snippets within Bing Search. So when you look at a snippet, it has this outline around it, and then when you hover your cursor over it, it highlights more.

If you go to Google Shopping and enter a query that is not shopping related, Google will add a button above the shopping results asking you to search Google for that query.