Industry News

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.

I covered all the Google Search related news from Google I/O including the new intelligent search box...

Google has released the first major update to the search bar, the search box, ever - Google is calling it the intelligent Search box. We saw variations of this being tested over the past year, and now it is officially rolling out - as per Liz Reid, Google's Head of Search, via Google I/O.

Google Search is now using Gemini 3.5 Flash to power AI Mode globally and also there are several new agentic features in and coming to Google Search. These agentic features include information agents, agentic coding, personal intelligence is expanding and Universal Cart, UCP and AP2.

Google is now testing adding the Preferred Sources label in the AI Mode links and citations. It is unclear if Google is showing this link in this AI Mode response because it is a preferred source or if it is just labeling it, and it would show the source anyway - does that make sense?

Google added the hasAdultConsideration property to the Merchant listing and Product variant documentation, and it is now officially supported and listed as a recommended property for both Merchant listing and Product variant structured data with Google Search.

Microsoft Advertising announced its monthly releases, and they include updates to the import center, cross-account portfolio bidding, bidding strategy reports, and custom column conversion metrics (that one we covered earlier).

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

Google has added markdown files, .md.txt files, to the Google Search help documents. But John Mueller from Google said that these are not being used for Search or generative AI responses in Search.

Today is Google I/O, where Google announces many of its new features across its products, including Google Search. It is not uncommon to see Google search ranking volatility spike around Google I/O, and that is exactly what we are seeing today - the morning of Google I/O.

OpenAI's ChatGPT web search feature does offer a web cache, an offline, locally stored version of web pages that have been previously crawled. This should not come as a surprise, as all search engines store cached versions of web pages (even if they don't show it to us).