Industry News

Google is testing the placement of AI-generated summaries in Google Ads sponsored results, right below the description. Google did add the disclaimer to the ad, "Google Al responses are generated independently and can make mistakes, so double-check responses."

Google has always allowed you to request that content be removed from Google Search via the legal DMCA request form. But in the past year or so, this legal route has become a negative SEO nightmare. Real content, owned by the original publisher and website, has been removed from Google Search due to fraudulent DMCA requests that Google is complying with, even though they are not legit.

Google is adding AI-generated content, generated by Gemini, to Google AdSense ad intents formatted ads. That means when a user interacts with the AdSense ad unit, a link, anchor or chip, it opens a dialog that shows the user ads and Gemini-generated content related to the ad intent clicked.

Google Trends now lets you plot the change of interest in keyword phrases over time and then compare those over the previous time. There is a new compare to previous time period button you can click on Google Trends to get the good looking chart to be drawn.

Fabrice Canel has announced he has retired from Microsoft as of today. This comes after almost 30 years of service at Microsoft. Fabrice was most well-known in our community for his work on Bing and all of Microsoft's search services.

The Google Search Console Generative AI performance reports just launched recently and already Google has documented a data logging bug with the Discover and Generative AI in Discover search performance reports.

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

Google's John Mueller said that while it is useful for site owners to add meta descriptions to their web pages, it is "definitely not a requirement," he added. The usefulness comes from sometimes writing a meta description, "helps you to figure out a clear focus for a page," John wrote on Reddit.

We knew this was coming, Google Ads now allows you to upload your customer loyalty data, i.e. Customer Match data, via the Google Merchant API. Google told us this change was coming back in March and Google has finally updated its documentation to say this is possible.

Microsoft Bing is testing having the source favicons at the top of the search results page work as an overlay box with more links. Previously, when you clicked on an icon it would anchor you down to that specific search result on the page but instead, in this tests, there is an overlay with the links.