Industry News

Over the past almost two weeks, we have seen consistent and ongoing ranking volatility on a daily basis. The last Google search ranking update I covered was around July 23rd, then before that was July 18th and then July 9th. But every says since around July 17th there has been high volatility with the Google Search rankings.

Google Discover is now pushing users to see AI Overviews directly in the Google Search results. As you scroll through the Discover feed on Google.com, you may see a promotion of sorts to learn more about a topic through the lens of AI Overviews.

Google has been mixing search ads into the free organic search results for several months now; Google even changed its definition of what it considers top ads in order to account for this change. New data from Semrush shows just how often Google mixes search ads into the organic results.

Google Business Profiles has a new AI feature to let you upload a photo of your menu and Google will create your menu items for your restaurant based on that photo. This is a generative AI feature and is currently considered "experimental."

Google may be displaying the X (formerly Twitter) carousel in the search results less often for news related topics. A report from Newzdash shows the X carousel is showing up for about 12% of queries, when earlier this year it was showing for closer to 27% of queries in Google Search.

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

This week...

Google pushed out a large update to Gemini (formerly known as Bard) and this update includes more links to both related content and also links to verify the content that Gemini is responding with.

OpenAI has announced SearchGPT, its AI search tool that looks and feels a lot like ChatGPT but gives you more sources and answers through links. OpenAI wrote, "We're testing SearchGPT, a temporary prototype of new AI search features that give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources."

Google's John Mueller said on LinkedIn he does not recommend you use LLMs (AI tools) for SEO advice. He wrote, "please don't use LLMs for SEO advice." "They learn from all the bad SEO information out there," he added.