Industry News

Google has made some big updates to Local Service Ads. Even though LSAs are transitioning to Google Ads, Google is clearly still investing in the LSA product. Google added something called pre-badge ads, massively expanded the verticals and the verified ads badge updated its exclusions.

Google's crawler now strictly enforces standard JSON formatting when reading your site's structured data, schema markup, instead of auto-correcting double-escaped HTML text. "To bring our parser up to JSON and other standards, we changed our JSON-LD extraction and are now only applying a single pass of HTML unescaping," Google posted on LinkedIn.

Google is rolling out the ability to tailor your Google Discover feed by using your words, in a conversational chat-like experience. You are taken to a screen that lets you enter your desired topics, then you can go back and forth with AI to really zone in on the topic you want your feed to look like.

Google updated the Google Tag and Google Tag Manager. Google said, "these changes are designed to streamline your measurement setup, improve performance and management, and provide a more unified experience across Google's tagging products."

The Google August 2026 spam update is now done rolling out. It started on Tuesday, August 18, 2026 at around 12:30 pm ET and completed on August 21, 2026 at around 4:50 am. Despite some people feeling the update started soon, Google's John Mueller said it did not.

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

As you know, Google does smaller core updates and algorithm search updates all the time without announcing them. So why does Google announce some of those updates and not the others. Well, as Google told us before, Google announces the larger, more impactful updates so we know it was a Google update that impacted our site, not a technical change we made.

Google Ads can now help you find sitelinks for your ad extensions. A new feature within the Google Ads advertiser console will now suggest new sitelinks to add to your ads.

Google Ads seems to be rolling out a new customer match option named "enhanced matching." Google writes this allows you to "Expand your audience reach with your consented user lists." Google will then "match your consented users with publishers' consented users where available."

Microsoft Advertising is rolling out AI Max globally and to all advertisers. If you log in to your Microsoft Advertising account, you should be able to toggle on the AI Max setting for your search campaigns.