Industry News

Microsoft held its Microsoft Build event and announced Web IQ, a search engine platform for AI-agents and so many other AI enhancements. But what gave me a double-take was Microsoft Scout. I mean, didn't Yahoo just announce Yahoo Scout in January, in partnership with Microsoft? Why did Microsoft name a similar product Scout, when Yahoo went with that name and even owns the domain name scout.com?

OpenAI sent out an email to advertisers announcing some new ad unit tests, specifically multi-advertiser placements in ChatGPT. OpenAI also announced new updates to the ChatGPT Ads Manager to help advertisers manage their ads and control targeting.

Google Hotel Ads may have dropped several bid adjustments, or maybe it is a bug. Bid adjustments such as day of the week check-in, advanced purchase, check-in date, length of stay and maybe some others are no longer showing up in the Google Ads interface.

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's May 2026 broad core update has officially completed rolling out. Google announced this via X this morning and the Search Status Dashboard has been updated to document the rollout. It took less than 12 days to roll out, and this update felt larger than the last core update - the Google March 2026 core update.

Just when I thought the Google search volatility would start to cool, I am seeing another spike in huge search ranking volatility today - June 2nd...

Google has updated the Google Ads Terms of Service (TOS) in the area of policy, payment, and liability. The changes incorporate AI-related changes to Google Ads and more changes. I believe the last time Google updated these TOS was 8 years ago, April 16, 2018.

Google Discover may be showing Threads (the Facebook Twitter alternative social network) more often in the feed. Threads is not shown as much as YouTube or X but it seems to have grown significantly and surpassed TikTok and Instagram.

James Murray, Global Product Storytelling Lead, Generative AI at Microsoft, gave a webinar named How to successfully navigate the human, LLM, and agentic web last week. He had a slide come up at about the 9 minute and 30 second mark that reads...

Google announced a new feature in Google AdSense to share the full IP address in bid requests. Google said that full IP addresses are indicated by many buyers to be an important signal, so there is a new setting to allow you to share the full IP address with those buyers.