Industry News

Google is testing showing pricing labels on product and shopping results. It shows if the price is current or what the price usually is. Google labels the product results, near the price as "was" or "usually." I am sure there are more labels.

It looks like the Google Search Console link report has gone haywire and is broken pretty badly. Tons of SEOs are seeing zero links in the report, whereas others are seeing huge drops in the link counts in the report.

This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the holiday of Shavout/Shavous on Friday, May 22, 2026. Any stories published here will be scheduled, written beforehand, and not written during the holiday hours...

Google officially announced the rollout of the May 2026 core update just now, on Thursday at around 11:43 am ET. This core update is expected to take about 2 weeks to roll out. Google said this "is a regular update designed to better surface relevant, satisfying content for searchers from all types of sites."

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 Marketing Live is done and we covered the new conversational discovery ads and highlighted answer ads...

Google announced at Google Marketing Live two new ad formats that will show up in Google's AI Mode. Google said there are conversational discover ads and highlighted answer ads, and of course, they are labeled as "Sponsored."

Google announced at Google Marketing Live that it is also bringing Shopping ads, Business Agent for Leads and expanding the Direct Offers pilot for AI Mode in the coming months.

Google announced it is making one uniform AI-agentic advisor named Ask Advisor that brings together Google Ads Advisor and Google Analytics Advisor, and I assume the beta Google Merchant Advisor.

Google is testing a "for you" label in the product grid, shopping results, within Google Search. It gives you a more personalized response, in this example, a promotion code was available for this merchant.

Google has made a new anchor ads format named Dynamic anchor ads for AdSense. I don't see the announcement for this yet, but Google updated its help document on anchor ads and changed collapsible anchors to dynamic anchors.