Industry News

Google Ads has a newish option when you create an asset group named "Apply theme to asset group." An asset group is made of images, logos, headlines, descriptions, videos, sitelinks, assets, and audience signals that you upload or that are automatically created by Google AI during your Performance Max campaign setup.

Google is testing a large "Visit site" button on the sponsored results, the Google Ads, within the Google Search results. Google has done this before for organic sitelinks and map results, and even Bing did it for some branded-style search results.

Google AdSense may have added a new setting that lets you specify if you want Google AdSense "experts" to call you offering "personalized advice." You can specify if you want or do not want messages, and how - i.e. via phone calls, SMS messages and/or WhatsApp messages.

OpenAI is rolling out Audiences as a targeting option within ChatGPT Ads. I don't see a help document on what this does but I assume it lets you set up better targeting for your ads by uploading audience lists, like their email and/or phone numbers to the ChatGPT Ads platform.

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

John Mueller from Google said that the new Content Signals robots.txt directive invented by Cloudflare last year has "no effects whatsoever for any crawler or LLM." He added that it "just adds bloat and future maintenance to your robots.txt file." As far as he knows, he said, none of the crawlers or LLMs use the content-signal robots.txt directives.

OpenAI's ad platform, ChatGPT Ads, is now using AI (I guess) to generate ads for you. The ad platform lets you click on "add new ad," which then says, "Generated ads for you," and then lets you review, edit, and approve that generated ad.

Back in early May, Google announced five new ways to explore the web with generative AI in Google Search. One was a feature that was titled "Further Exploration" at the bottom of the AI Overview within Google Search. Well, now it seems some are seeing this feature in the wild.

Those of you who use the Google and YouTube Shopify app to sync your products automatically from Shopify to Google Merchant Center may have a huge headache to deal with after August 18, 2026. The rumor is that you will need to reinstall the app by this date and when you do this, every product ID gets rewritten.

Microsoft Bing is testing product detail screens, overlays, when you click on a product listing within the Bing search results. Bing will overlay a product detail screen, with the products images, description, the retailers and prices they sell it at, price insights and history, related products and more.