Industry News

Microsoft Advertising will soon retire Target CPA and Target ROAS as a standalone bidding strategies. Instead, those bidding strategies will be merged with Max Conversions and Max Conversion Value. This will happen on August 4, 2025, said Navah Hopkins from Microsoft.

Google will soon ban ads for tablet or pill presses; they will be added to the list of dangerous products or services. Ads for pill presses, tableting machines, dies, molds, stamps, punches used for creation or imprinting of pills and tablets will not be allowed after September 1, 2025.

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

Google officially announced the rollout of the June 2025 core update yesterday at around 10:37 am ET. This core update is expected to take about three weeks to roll out. Google said this "is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites."

Google has relaunched its Search Console Insights as a standalone tab and report within the main Google Search Console tool. Previously, Search Console Insights was its own sub-reporting tool and now, it is part of the main Search Console site.

Cloudflare, a company that powers about 20% of all web pages on the web, has announced it is now blocking AI crawlers by default. Plus, it is offering a new model to allow AI services to pay content creators to crawl their content, named Pay Per Crawl.

Here is a weird bug with Bing Search - if you search for the term [ate], there are no search results. All you get are AI Answers at the top and maybe an interesting reads box, then there are related searches.

Google AdSense has added new universal opt-out mechanisms and privacy controls due to new laws they must adhere to. These go across several US states.

Google is promoting AI Mode with an animated Google Doodle on its home page, in some countries. The Google home page logo, animated and clickable, takes you into a search for AI Mode. It also has a Google-colored gradient to the top of the search results bar today, and Google also has promotional text on its home page for AI Mode.

This take on the Pocket shutdown resonates with me real hard:

“What began as a read-it-later app”, they assert, “evolved into something much bigger.” That was the whole problem: the mistake that led ultimately to this “difficult decision” by Mozilla. Pocket was a good tool. Its integration with Kobo, another excellent tool, made it that much more valuable to users like me. We didn’t need “something much bigger”. But by trying to turn Pocket into something much bigger, Mozilla actually...