Industry News

After seeing the loyalty pricing and discounts in the Google search results and shopping ads, Google has now announced that they have new loyalty offerings in Merchant Center and also loyalty goal in Google Ads.

Google Ads renamed the "Chat" section or button in the Google Ads interface to "Ads Advisor." The Chat feature was spotted earlier this year in January, and I guess Google would rather call it an "advisor" and not "chat."

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

Google's Robby Stein said that over the coming weeks, Google will be testing changes to AI Mode that will aim to encourage clicks to publishers. He said on X that Google has "been experimenting with how and where to show links in ways that are most helpful to users and sites."

Did you notice that one of the only reports in Google Search Console that does not have a "last updated" time stamp is the links report. I asked John Mueller from Google why and he said, "No particular reason. Different reports are different."

I've covered the almost invisible and incredibly hard to see experiments with Microsoft Advertising placing hard to see search/sponsored ads in the Bing search results many times. Well, now that we have a Microsoft Advertising Ads Liaison, we finally got a response from Microsoft on the topic.

New research released by Rand Fishkin and friends at Sparktoro says that traditional search is not dipping in usage, even as searchers continue to adopt AI search features and tools. "95% of Americans continue to use them each month, and 86% are heavy users," Rand wrote.

To those of you who run advertising campaigns with Microsoft Advertising to show ads on Bing and other Microsoft properties, here are the dos and don'ts of handling suspensions and appeals.

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

Earlier we reported that ChatGPT from OpenAI seems to be using parts of Google search results for its answers. Well, according to The Information, OpenAI has been partially using Google search results scraped by a startup called SerpApi for ChatGPT responses on current events like news and sports.