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.

There are many sites noticing a huge crawl decline recently and we are not sure what the pattern is...

There are numerous complaints from SEOs and site owners who are noticing significant declines in crawl rates within Google Search Console. Most who see this, many do not by the way, are noticing the decline starts around August 8th and continues through today.

There may be a new reporting bug in Google Search Console's performance report specific to the Android App search appearance filter. It seems some are reporting that Google stopped showing impressions, clicks and other data related to that filter.

Microsoft Advertising is testing using larger font sizes for the sponsored ads in the Bing search results. This makes the sponsored results stand out just a bit more than the free/organic search results.

Google Ads seems to be rolling out audience exclusions for Shopping campaigns. Previously, the ability to exclude audience types was not permitted for Shopping campaigns but now some are seeing it available in their accounts.

Microsoft Bing is testing bolding the site name in the search results snippet when you hover your mouse cursor over the search result snippet. This is similar to Bing bolding the title on hover, but in this case, it is the site name.

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

Google has released the August 2025 spam update on August 26, 2025 at around 12:00 pm ET. This update applies globally and to all languages and will take a few weeks to complete.

While Google expanded AI Mode access to 180+ countries and regions last week, Google is testing AI Mode in currently unsupported regions. Such regions including countries in the European Union, including Romania.

A new survey from NP Digital says that only 4% of the 1,000 people surveyed said they do not click from the Google AI Overviews. 13.3% of people surveyed said they do click every single time within an AI Overview, 30.5% said they often click, 41.5% said they sometimes click and 10.3% said they rarely click through.