Industry News

Google's John Mueller posted saying "Authentication for your personal crawlers & SEO tools is going to be more and more of a topic." I believe, but I can be wrong, this is alluding to the num parameter being disabled and how tools are having issues now with scraping Google.

Microsoft is testing bolding the title links in the Bing search results for both the organic and paid listings. I am not sure if this was a bug or a test, but I suspect it was a test.

Microsoft is testing various interfaces for the sitelinks in Bing Search. We've seen and reported on Bing testing sitelinks many, many times here, so here are a few more variations.

Google is testing moving your query from the left top position to the right top position of the AI response within AI Mode. This is a subtle change but it is interesting to see Google test these small changes to AI Mode.

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 23rd and September 24th...

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 completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update today...

Google has completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update, following a 27-day rollout cycle. This update started on August 26, 2025 and 12 pm ET, and was completed on September 22, 2025. This was a broad spam update, not a link spam update and was a pretty big and widespread update, similar to the December 2024 spam update but took 20 days longer to rollout.

Google is testing a new AI Search based option codenamed Darksteel. This reminds me of when we caught Google testing 47 different AI Search options back in March but Darksteel was not one of them.

As you know, Google dropped the num parameter to see more search results on a page, then the third-party tools scraping became severely impacted and many saw impression declines in Search Console. Google confirmed the num parameter is not officially supported. So what was the real impact on Search Console data?

Google is testing AI-generated product summaries in the AI Mode results, after you click on a specific product. I was able to generate this in one out of every four browser attempts, and here is how it works.