Industry News

Today marks the two-week mark of the start of the Google June 2025 core update. This update seems pretty significant thus far, with Google announcing the update on June 30th at about 10:30 am, then the volatility kicking off on July 2nd and seeing some partial recoveries from the helpful content update.

Google has updated a number of search-related help documents for its merchant return policies and loyalty programs. Google said these updates are to "remove unclarities in the documentation and examples."

We knew this was coming but as of July 11th, your reviews on Google Local Service Ads are now managed by Google Business Profiles. I know a number of local folks noticed who have LSAs noticed their Business Profiles reviews jumped on Friday, and this is why.

Google is either testing showing link cards only within AI Mode or it might be a bug. Randomly over the past few weeks or so, I've seen reports of people noticing AI Mode responses without any content, but instead just the link cards.

Google is now showing not just short videos in AI Overviews but also longer-form videos in the AI Overviews. AI Overviews may show no videos or may show several videos as you scroll through the AI-generated response. Google AI Overviews can now show many videos in these AI-generated answers.

Google Ads with Gmail has this feature that you can now click one button to apply a recommendation for your Google Ads. The scary part, you don't even need to open the email to apply this recommendation, so you are kind of applying them blindly.

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 local rankings seem off...

This week we covered the ongoing Google June 2025 core update and how we are finally seeing some recoveries with the past helpful content updates, and some core updates. Google Search Console's performance report...

Starting around June 25, 2025, many are noticing huge declines in impressions and clicks from their local rankings in Google. This is from the Google Business Profiles performance reports and I think it is a data/reporting glitch, but who knows, maybe it was a ranking change?

Google is testing a zoom effect when you place your mouse cursor over the images in the search result snippets. Normally, these images do not move, but in this test, Google is using this zoom feature to give the results a bit more dimension.