Industry News

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that a Google ad representative, a Google employee, has made unauthorized changes to a Google ad account. Marvin wrote that following up after an investigation on the matter, "we did not properly follow our processes for ensuring approvals are granted before making changes."

You thought Google was sneaky with their ad or sponsored labels. Microsoft has a history of being super sneaky with their ad labels in Bing Search. Here is a new example of Bing hiding the small ad label right after the domain name, normally it shows up in the front section of the ad, which is also hard to see, but not as hard as this.

Google is testing a search ad product carousel format that has these sub-categories that scroll as you swipe through the carousel of products. This format looks familiar but I cannot find any coverage of this new look, so I am covering it now.

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 AI Overviews are now rolling out to over 100 countries...

Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in Google Search to over 100 more countries, making it available to over one billion users and in all supported languages. This is the biggest expansion of AI Overviews yet, which was previously available in seven countries by default (without opting into it).

Google's John Mueller said it again, he said on LinkedIn, "We've been pretty clear that Core Web Vitals are not giant factors in ranking, and I doubt you'd see a big drop just because of that." Google has been saying Core Web Vitals are important in general but when it comes to search rankings, they have never been that important.

Google is now testing a "Frequently saved" label on the search results snippets. Previously we've seen you've visit often labels, for you labels, preferred source labels and other labels in the search results.

Google is testing a new "all places" and "compare now" interface to see businesses and third-party comparison sites outside of Google Search. This is something Google launched in the European regions but now some are seeing this in the US with this new user interface.

With the new Bing Webmaster Tools recommendations section, we are learning more about what Bing Search likes and dislikes. One of the things Bing does not like is when a site using batch mode, or batch URL groups for IndexNow. Bing says it can cause server overload and delays in indexing.

Google has updated the "Raise your budgets" recommendation within the Google Ads recommendations with more details and tips. I mean, no one wants to raise their budget unless they can make more money, so having more details on why you should raise your budget is useful.