Industry News

Google Analytics seems to have had an outage starting at about 4 am ET this morning. The real-time analytics report within Google Analytics was not showing users all of the data. The issue now seems to be resolving a couple of hours later.

Google has just announced the release of the August 2026 spam update and said it should only take a few days to roll out. This is a global update and is expected to impact all languages. This only impacts sites that spam, but with any update, there may be collateral damage.

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

As expected, Google is now enabling those with Google Search Profiles to edit their handle, their short name. This is available by going to your Google Search Profile, click Edit profile and then next to your @handle, click Edit.

Google is testing underlining and maybe hyperlinking the word in the related searches for section of the search results. Normally, that section is not underlined, but for some reason, Google is testing underlining the query.

Sometimes when you look at the ads within OpenAI's ChatGPT, you might notice an ad from one advertiser first loads and then it quickly blinks and loads a different advertiser. I suspect this is a bit of a deficiency with the ad server, but I am not certain.

Google is dropping support for Euro-denominated check payments for AdSense publishers after August 7, 2026. Google wrote this as a note in this document saying, "Effective August 7, 2026, Google will no longer support Euro-denominated check payments. If you're receiving payments via USD-denominated checks, you can continue to do so."

Gary Illyes from Google said Google Search will eventually support the new HTTP QUERY method. He said as the "ecosystem catches up" Google will then support the HTTP QUERY method.

There are a number of reports that the performance reports, both for Google Search and the Generative AI features reports, are showing a decline in impressions and clicks (AI report does not show clicks) starting around August 12th and 13th. This seems like a bug because the drop seems to be super widespread.

A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in AI Overviews this week.