Industry News

Google is testing a new sponsored ads section in the search results named Featured Stores. This reminds me of the from online stores but that was organic/free, not ads.

Google is testing a shaded box design for the stock pricing and information in the Google Search results. Google has these shaded designs in other areas as well but for now, this may just be a test.

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

Google AI Mode has had travel planning for some time but according to some in the travel industry, Google recently began rolling out more of these features in the wild. These include dynamic day-by-day trip plans, hotel add-ons, tickets, and dining stitched into a single AI conversation.

Google's John Mueller posted saying "Authentication for your personal crawlers & SEO tools is going to be more and more of a topic." I believe, but I can be wrong, this is alluding to the num parameter being disabled and how tools are having issues now with scraping Google.

Microsoft is testing bolding the title links in the Bing search results for both the organic and paid listings. I am not sure if this was a bug or a test, but I suspect it was a test.

Microsoft is testing various interfaces for the sitelinks in Bing Search. We've seen and reported on Bing testing sitelinks many, many times here, so here are a few more variations.

Google is testing moving your query from the left top position to the right top position of the AI response within AI Mode. This is a subtle change but it is interesting to see Google test these small changes to AI Mode.

This is a programming note that Tuesday and Wednesday are Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and I will be offline the next two days. I will be offline on Tuesday and Wednesday, September 23rd and September 24th...

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 completed the rollout of the August 2025 spam update today...