Industry News

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

I see signs of another unconfirmed Google Search ranking algorithm update. Right now, there is only one tool showing volatility, and that would be Semrush. The other tools are all relatively calm right now, but that can change later today and tomorrow. But I am also seeing a significant amount of chatter in the past 24- hours.

Google has officially and fully launched the Google Ads AI conversational experience to all advertisers globally in English. Plus, it is now using Gemini, Google's latest multimodal generative AI model.

Google has posted a notice within the Google Business Profiles performance report that it will stop sharing as much data under the driving directions report. Google said, "Starting in January 2024, you might see fewer direction requests."

Google is testing a "Chat with a live agent" button in the search result snippets. We have seen Google place the "Chat with a live agent" button in the local pack and local panels before but I don't believe we have seen it in a search result snippet.

Microsoft is testing two new changes to the Bing Search interface. One is a bubble style for the search bar menu and the other is using bullets for the sitelinks in the search result snippets.

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

Ever since December 2019 when Google removed the requirement for publishers to manually apply for inclusion into Google News, publishers have been pretty upset about the lack of transparency around Google News inclusion. Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, said on Mastodon that he would like to this process get better.

Google has updated its Search Console performance reports to change how it evaluates impressions and clicks metrics with job listing and detail pages. Google said nothing has changed with how it ranks or displays job listings and detail pages, but the metrics within these reports may change because Google has changed how it tracks clicks and impressions.

Google is now sending emails to publishers, app owners and others if their sites and apps are not compliant for GDPR EU User Consent Policy. The email says, "We may take action, including suspension, if the Policy violations have not been resolved."