Industry News

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

Google seems to be suspending Google Business Profiles due to user account restrictions. There may have been a wave of suspensions over the past several days related to this issue and local SEO experts are unclear if this is a bug or some other issue.

Microsoft, during its earnings call last week, announced that Bing hit a huge milestone of 1 billion monthly active users. Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft later confirmed these "users" do not include AI agents but are real actual humans.

Google has posted an update and emailed advertisers on changes to its Google Ads data retention policy. What changed? Here is what Google said.

Similarweb published some data sharing the click-through rates for OpenAI's ChatGPT ads. The overall CTR for ChatGPT ads are 0.68%, the top quartile is 1%, the best brands are 1.57% and the peak CTR is 5.4%.

Google posted new developer documentation for how to authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth. This is a "new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic," Google wrote.

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 explained how using AI in isolation works better for them...

A month ago, Google posted that between the dates of May 13, 2025 through April 27, 2026, just about 50 weeks, there was a "logging error prevented Search Console from accurately reporting impressions." Google updated the post to now say "This issue has been resolved."

IAC, the owners of Ask.com, have decided to get out of the search business and shut down one of the oldest and most legendary search engines of all time - Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves. IAC wrote, "As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com."

Google Ads has added a new option (although, I think Google has said this is coming) under the "add product source" section where you can select how to add products to your Google Ads account. The option reads, "Use AI to add products - beta."