Industry News

Google has added new fields and options to the Google Business Profiles verification status tool. These options should help some businesses that are having issues getting verified on Google Maps.

We knew Google would stop accepting publications into Google News Publisher Center, but Google also stopped showing news "sources" in Google News, stopped showing a follower count for those sources, and stopped providing access to Publisher Center features to news organizations. This bug was fixed by Google this morning.

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

Ever since the Ray Google AI Overviews update, Google scaled back showing AI Overviews in Google Search for some YMYL categories, especially in the health space. But now we are seeing more and more AI Overviews showing up for health-related queries since the weekend.

Google Search now may show you a special search box for your searches related to finding a credit card. If you search for [credit cards], [best credit cards], [visa credit cards], and so on, you will get this new credit card Google Search widget.

Google is testing a number of sitelink variations within its mobile search results interface. They come in these variations: boxed in, pill-like shaped, some with arrows, some in black, and some in blue.

Google has made a small note to the sitemap documentation to add that the lastmod date specified in the sitemap file "should reflect the date and time of the last significant update to the page." This change was made after I covered the topic of Google trusting or not trusting that lastmod field in your sitemap file.

Google announced it is rolling out Automated Local Services Ads lead credits next month, which should "credit the same or more leads on average," than the old system. This will replace the manual lead credit methods, and use machine learning to process these credits going forward.

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

There are reports that a change is coming to Google Ads ACA, Automatically Created Assets, that will bring this feature to the ad level. Anthony Higman said on X, "they are now adding them in at the ad level, to "fill the gaps in RSA's" and they will be using generative AI to do it."