Industry News

Google's Robby Stein announced three new agentic capabilities within AI Mode - (1) booking event tickets (2) booking beauty appointments and (3) wellness appointments.

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 added a new user agent to the list...

Google is supposedly testing an endless, infinite scroll for Google Discover. When I scroll through Google Discover, it eventually just stops and doesn't keep going. But Gagan Ghotra said he is seeing it go on and on forever.

Did you know that Google Merchant Center will automatically crop your product images in Google Shopping if it thinks it will look better in Google Search? Did you know that you can also opt out of what they call "Smart Cropping"?

We had a few unconfirmed but big Google search ranking updates but we are still waiting on an official core update...

Google Search Console has a bug with its API when filtering on the searchAppearance dimension. This bug occurs when using the notEquals or notContains operators, it will only return rows with the excluded value, instead of excluding those rows.

Google added a new user agent to the Googlebot's user-triggered fetchers documentation. The new user agent is for the Chrome Web Store named Google-CWS.

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 new ad layout is driving accidental clicks on search ads...

Grokipedia, an AI-generated online encyclopedia launched a week ago with over 800,000 AI-generated pages, and both Google and Bing have already indexed hundreds, if not thousands, of those AI-generated pages.

A few weeks ago, Google launched a new ad layout with the large "Sponsored results" label that groups numerous ads under that one label, and then sticks a "Hide sponsored results" button after you have already seen the ads. Well, it is leading to accidental ad clicks based on what I am reading and hearing across the industry.