Industry News

Google is testing using a dotted underline and a shaded URL for the search result snippet's URL. Yesterday, we covered how Google was testing a blue dotted underline for sitelinks within the sponsored results. But now we are seeing dotted underlines and shaded URLs for organic search result snippets.

OpenAI has upgraded its ChatGPT Ads Manager tool to allow advertisers to upload product feeds that automatically create ads for each uploaded product. This obviously makes it easier to have ads on ChatGPT for retailers.

Google Ads is testing showing images within the sitelinks portion of the ad unit. I've seen plenty of images in the main portion of the sponsored search results but I don't believe I've seen images in the sitelinks area of the sponsored results.

Google Search and its search generative features like AI Mode and AI Overviews were unaffected by yesterday's Gemini outage. Gemini, which is Google's AI product, had several outages throughout yesterday and we know that Gemini powers some of Google Search, so I was curious if the outage had any impact on Google Search.

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

A new study has been released that looks at the review replies that have been rejected by Google. Business owners take the time to reply to customer reviews and then Google deletes them, and often, the business owner has no idea the reply was deleted because Google does not notify anyone - Google just removes the review.

Google is testing a new format for sitelinks within the search ads, sponsored listings. This format has the sitelinks underlined with blue dots. So these are blue dotted underlined sitelinks for Google Ads.

Rand Fishkin and friends (Sparktoro and Similarweb) released an ongoing Google zero-click study that showed zero-click searches from Google Search have been sending less and less traffic to the open web and are declining at an even faster rate. In fact, the report says 68.01% of Google searches ended without a click and if you look at AI responses, it is more like only 27.6% of clicks go to the open web.

The folks over at Schema.org have added usage statistics to each schema type. So if you want to see which schema type is used more, you can just check Schema.org. For example, author schema is used on over 10 million domains but event schema is used on under 1 million domains.

Apple has made changes to its documentation for AppleBot to include crawling and usage for its AI efforts. There were other changes made to the document on June 08, 2026 as well.