Industry News

Nick Fox, Senior Vice President of Knowledge & Information at Google, said Google Search "broke all prior usage records and saw its highest usage in history" after Argentina scored its winning goal in yesterday's World Cup match.

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 is testing using tracking URLs within its search results...

For the past week or so, I have heard a few folks notice that Google is appending tracking URLs to the search results. So when you click on a search result, instead of the URL going directly to that site, Google is using a google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL that then passes through to the page URL listed in the search results.

Google added a useful detail to the active conversions screen, to show you when was the last time Google Ads was able to trigger a ping event on your conversion feed and data. When you hover over the conversions, it will show you the date and time for the "last event ping."

Google has posted some new frequently asked questions to the Google Ads AI Max help document. The questions cover what is AI Max, why you should use AI Max, that AI Max is not a new campaign type, how AI Max differs from PMax and what happens when you upgrade to AI Max.

Google Search normally shows product listings with pricing on them, but sometimes it can show "Contact store for price" when it Google does not know the price. I am not sure if I've seen this before, and it might not be new, but it did really stand out as unusual. I mean, you'd think Google would swap this product out for a product it has pricing for.

Google has updated its Google Business Profile appeal process and flow to allow businesses to upload their evidence for the business profile suspension. The old flow had a different form where you would later upload that evidence, and you only had 60 minutes to do so. This is now built into the appeal workflow in Google Business Profiles.

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 Console can now show how your social and video content perform within Google Search. This includes channels such as Instagram, TikTok, X and YouTube. Google kind of did this before, but now this data is going into the Performance reports, Insights reports, and the achievements section in Search Console.

Google has added to its Merchant listing structured data documentation help page that it now supports the Product.category property and a new Sale duration mechanism within the schema.