Industry News

Google Search started to roll out the age verification that it said it would begin doing a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is not just YouTube, it goes across Google Search ads too, as we reported back a couple of weeks ago.

Google recently launched the preferred sources for top stories within Google Search. But there is no way for publishers to know how many of their readers selected their website as a preferred source. But Google said they are "looking into this" and may provide such data to publishers.

Google is testing adding a "loyalty benefits" section to the merchant/retailer knowledge panels. This would show on the right side of the page, under the description of the retailer.

It looks like Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, is using Google Maps reviews for its local AI results. It also links directly to the Google Maps business profile listing when you click on the review stars and ratings from Copilot.

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.

Microsoft says SEOs need to do the click studies to see if AI search clicks lead to conversions or not...

Fabrice Canel from the Microsoft Bing team said that search engines, like Bing, have "limited visibility" into the conversions after the click from AI search and it is up to the SEO community to conduct those studies.

Google Ads is reportedly rolling out a new cost toggle in the Performance Max reporting to show you the share of cost for each channel within your PMax campaigns.

An SEO consultant posted on LinkedIn that one of his websites saw a 50% decline in traffic in a two week period. This was due to the site being hacked, content being injected and Google indexing that hacked content, leading to the site not ranking well in Google Search anymore.

OpenAI updated its ChatGPT iOS app to let you select Google Maps instead of Apple Maps as the maps provider for local results. I am told this is new as of the past week or so.

Google is now experimenting with keyboard shortcuts to the overlay menu in the AI Overviews within Google Search. Rajan Patel, VP, Engineering for Google Search, said this is just an experiment.