Industry News

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

It has been week after week of intensely heated Google search ranking volatility, and it is time I start reporting when the volatility cools or calms down. Well, this weekend we had a bit of a cooling period, where the chatter within the SEO community lightened up and the third-party tools showed lower volatility.

As I briefly mentioned two weeks ago, Google has updated the Google Ads API documentation. Now, Google had told us what exactly was updated from the previous version. Google said these updates were "designed to make your development experience smoother, faster, and more intuitive."

Google Ads will be removing the language targeting setting from Google Ads Search campaigns by the end of 2025. This notice was posted quietly at the top of a Google help document in the Google Ads help center.

Google may have added a new convenient feature in the Google Ads console that lets you preview ads directly from the view assets detail screen. Clicking on the preview ad button shows the preview within the same window.

Google has updated its Gambling and games policy to now allow sports betting ads in the state of Missouri. This change is in effect as of August 15, 2025.

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

The Google search ranking volatility has not calmed down since the June core update and we are in mid-August and expecting another core update soon. Google launched the preferred sources feature for Top Stories...

The studies we have thus seen from third parties have all said traffic from Google Search to websites has declined a lot since AI Overviews came out. But we have a new study from Chartbeat that says traffic to news publishers from Google (including Discover) has been stable over the past few years.

Google's John Mueller replied to a lot of the hype around all GEO, AIO, AEO, etc topics floating around the SEO space. John said on Bluesky, "The higher the urgency, and the stronger the push of new acronyms, the more likely they're just making spam and scamming."