Industry News

Google has updated its Auto-Apply Recommendations setting within the Google Ads interface. The button moved to just above the regular recommendations section.

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 Business Profiles has a new way to report review extortion scams...

For the original iTunes version...

Google has published a new help document on the topic of Google Business Profile negative review extortion scams. The document explains what they are, how to report the scam, what to expect and more importantly, what not to do.

Google is testing a new section within the Google Ads advertising console named "Missed Growth Opportunities." This section shows you the "performance you could've achieved in the last year if you'd adjusted your bids and budgets for campaigns with growth opportunities," according to Google.

There are a nice number of reports of GA4, Google Analytics, showing a huge surge in organic search traffic over the past couple of days, but Google Search Console is not showing any increase, it remains flat. Some are suspecting this is the result of fake bot traffic not being filtered by GA4, but others are not sure.

Google has updated its Voice Search models to be powered by Speech-to-Retrieval (S2R). Google said this allows it to "gets answers straight from your spoken query without having to convert it to text first, resulting in a faster, more reliable search for everyone."

The Microsoft Advertising blog posted about how to optimize for AI Search Answers. I thought it was weird to see this on the Microsoft Advertising blog and not on the Bing Search blog, because (a) it is an ad blog and (b) it was written by Krishna Madhavan, who is part of the Bing team, not ad team.

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

While I was offline, it seems the chatter within the SEO industry spiked around the topic of search ranking volatility. It is harder to confirm the volatility, now with the tools recalibrating, but it does seem something started around Tuesday, October 7th, into the 8th.