Industry News

Google Product Studio, which is part of Google Merchant Center Next, now works in the UK, India, and Japan. Google also added file upload support to Product Studio and additional seasonal-themed templates.

Microsoft may now include AI generated content within the Bing Search people also ask sections. Bing is labeling some of the people also ask boxes with the disclaimer, "Includes Al generated content."

There is a new report out that says menu items and how busy you are during Google Maps popular times are both ranking factors and signals for Google's local ranking system. Claudia Tomina posted the details on her blog and told me she tested this across numerous businesses.

Google seems to be rolling out new WordPress specific conversion code for Google Ads. This seems like a Google Tag code with easier set up for WordPress sites.

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 link cards at the top of the AI Overviews...

Google is testing placing the link cards at the top of the AI Overviews box within Google Search. Instead of having them deep at the bottom, they are being tested at the top, which would clearly drive more clicks to publishers than the current implementation.

Google Ads announced updates to its Search ads query matching and brand controls that made advertisers happy (it has been a while). The updates include better reporting for misspellings, negative keywords now block misspellings, and changes to brand inclusions and brand exclusions.

Google has announced a number of new search-related features to its mobile version of the Chrome browser. These updates include new local Chrome Actions, new search shortcuts, trending in search suggestions and more.

Google seems to be testing (or maybe it is a bug) having the search results page slide over right to the next page (visually at least) when you enter a new query. It seems like some new animation when you change your query from the Google Search results page.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said it again, that "there's clearly more we should be doing" with ranking websites that deserve to rank better in Google Search. He clarified that this is not something Google does manually, on a per-site basis. Instead, Google does this at scale by updating its ranking systems and algorithms, he said.