Industry News

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

Google Ads has posted that it has (1) expanded its alcohol policy to expand the approved geographic locations and (2) updated the gambling and games policy to expand the certification requirements to all categories under this policy.

Google Ads is now asking you to note a justification for when you request the removal of access for a user in your Google Ads account. Then that request is sent to another administrator for approval, with the justification you entered.

OpenAI made a number of clarification changes to its crawler help documentation to say that version number of the user-agent string may be updated and it may use a user-agent string with an additional robots.txt marker.

Google Merchant Center is rolling out a beta AI Performance report that shares how well your products are performing within AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google wrote this report "specifically revealing your performance on AI Mode and AI Overviews."

OpenAI has added new metrics to the ChatGPT Ads manager advertiser control center. The new metrics include Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS.

Google has updated its Google crawlers help documentation to fix a typo under the Google-InspectionTool user agent string. In short, Google had a semicolon as part of the Google-InspectionTool user agent string and it should not have been there, so Google removed the semicolon.

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

Google Ads email support option seems broken right now, when you try to use it, you get a notice that reads in red, "Something went wrong. Please try again."

We may have had another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update around July 11th, which I will call the 7-Eleven update. It has been an unusual time since the completion of the June 2026 spam update, where I was on the verge of covering a few unconfrimed updates but it seems the chatter in the SEO community is at an all time low.