Industry News

As you know, the Google March 2025 core update was announced on March 13th and it should be just about done rolling out. We saw some volatility related to that core update a few days into the update, then a lot of confusion later on, and now at the tail end of the update, we are seeing more volatility.

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, said that you may see a shift in Top/Absolute Top Impression rate and/or a change in overall CTR as a result of the double serving Google Ads experiment. This is where Google can show the same ads in different ad locations because it has different auctions for each ad location.

Google's John Mueller responded to a concern on Reddit about a site that scored a D with its Pingdom score. Pingdom measures sites uptime and overall page speed metrics. John Mueller responded to the concern saying, "this is not affecting your SEO."

Google has rolled out AI Overviews to more European regions after we caught them testing these AI Overviews earlier this month. AI Overviews are now officially live in Germany, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland.

Google Ads has a new option for getting support, at least, for some advertisers. This option is named "Get a call," and it is addition to call us, chat or email support. Google is also trying a way to text for help.

Google is testing a new quick view button/link within the Google Search results for hotel and lodging results. When you click on the quick view button you are taken to the Google Business Profile listing but when you click on the main result you are taken to the website directly (or maybe the other way, I cannot tell for sure).

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 rolled out AI Mode to more users...

There are tons of complaints in the Google Business Profile Help Forums about a bug during the setup process of a Google Business Profile. When you get to the screen about adding your phone number and website address, the next button won't take you to the next screen - it just won't let you go to the next step.

I don't know if you might also like this, you probably won't but Bing is dropped ads in their featured answers, featured snippets. They are calling these ads "You might also like."

Google seems to be testing removing the green checkmark from the Local Service Ads. I was able to replicate this for the same query, and the same set of advertisers. In one case it has the Google Screened checkmark in green and in the other, it does not.