Industry News

Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said last week that the search company will issue additional clarifications around the acceptable or unacceptable use of AI to generate content for SEO purposes. In short, Google has already said you cannot use AI (or other means) to generate content to manipulate ranking in search results.

Google is testing two new layouts for the hotel search results - the hotel pack. Instead of just listing the results in a list view, Google is testing show the results side by side in columns and rows.

We've been seeing changes to the Google Search results in the European regions related to Digital Markets Act (DMA) comparison sites and hotels, etc. The Google Search team now posted about how the search experiences are changing with new rich results, aggregator units, and refinement chips - most of what we covered already but now it is official.

Google is testing a new top stories feature and label that tells you that there are new top stories available since the last time you searched for that query. There is a new label that reads "new" and says, "There are new results since your last search."

Google has added a section to the use rel=canonical link annotations section of the canonical search documentation to clarify that rel=canonical annotations with certain attributes are not used for canonicalization.

Google Search Console has quietly launched some relatively small user interface changes. It seems like the filters and sorting boxes are now curved and more modern.

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

There seems to be a bug right now with Google Search not showing the local pack results right now. I suspect it will be fixed really soon. Searches that trigger local packs that show business profiles in the search results are not triggering the local pack in Google Search.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, wrote on X, "Another thing to keep in mind is that some of the sites I've looked into, where someone thinks they have a helpful content issue -- they're fine." Meaning, those sites may have seen competitors see a lift and jump up ahead of them but their traffic is down because of the competition ranking better, not because of any unhelpful content issues.

Google Ads is beta testing a new feature, a new button, in the Google Ads console named "Spacing." This is a feature that is available for individual advertiser accounts and not rolling out as a beta to MCC accounts.