Industry News

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

The European Union may fine Google its largest fine for a breach of the 'new Digital Markets Act (DMA). It would be in the triple millions of Euros and would be done because Google allegedly favors its own services in its own search results.

We know Google said it was expanding shopping ads into AI Mode and saw some examples of that. We also know about the new conversational discovery ads and highlighted answer ads. So I am not sure if this is another new format or part of those, but this one seems different.

Google is testing Shopping ads that enlarge, grow and expand when you hover your mouse cursor over the ad unit. We saw something like this for another Google ad format in March and now we are seeing a variation of this for Google Shopping ads.

Part of Google Marketing Live was a small note about conversational attributes, a way to add more attributes to your product feeds within Google Merchant Center that can be used "to update their product descriptions to reflect the more conversational way people search."

Google is now showing the number of times a photo or video was viewed and seen by users in the Google Business Profiles photos/videos section. So now, business owners can see if the images and videos that they are uploading are being seen by searchers and which are the most popular ones.

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

As you know, Google announced the May 2026 core update on Thursday afternoon and it didn't take long for the update to be felt by the SEO community. Many, not all, but many, started to feel the impact of this core update over the weekend.

We knew Google would appeal the search monopoly ruling; in fact, Google asked the courts to pause the remedies until the appeal is handled. Google was ruled an illegal monopoly in August 2024 but then the courts refused to break up Google as part of the remedies in September 2025.

Back in March, we were the first to talk about Microsoft Bing testing a new AI version of Bing image search. Microsoft was not talking about it, but it was clear that this was an AI-curated, categorized, and grouped image search experience. Now, Microsoft has released and announced this version to the public.