Industry News

With Google migrating Local Service Ads to the main Google Ads platform, Google is already preparing new Google Ads help documents with more details about the change. A new document named About Local customer optimization within Performance Max campaign for store goals was just posted by Google.

After Google's lawsuit against SerpAPI, the Google Search scraper tool, was dismissed a month ago, Google has decided to amend the complaint. Google filed the amendment on August 10, 2026 as an "Amended Complaint." Google is now taking an approach around protecting licensed content within its search results.

Google will randomly show AI Overviews for local results, and when it does, It will often show AI-generated information about each local listing. The issue is that Google often cites low-quality and self-promotional listicle articles from across the web when showing those snippets in the local pack.

Google announced several new updates to the Merchant Center performance report, starting on August 24, 2026. There are four updates: separating YouTube affiliate results from organic traffic, updating the YouTube organic traffic definitions, expanding product-level reporting for Google Ads, and adding new performance segmentation capabilities.

OpenAI is testing placing descriptive headings above the ads within ChatGPT responses. I assume it is using AI to generate these headlines above the ChatGPT Ads.

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

Google is testing placing the list of advertisers in the group of sponsored results at the top of the ad block in the mobile search results. So if the sponsored results group has two advertisers in it, Google will show the favicon and domain name of the ads that will be shown below, all the way at the top, directly under the "Sponsored results" header and directly above the actual ads.

Google will be migrating Travel campaigns to the new Search campaigns for Travel in Google Ads. This is happening sometime in the third quarter of 2026; we do not have a specific date.

I feel like a broken record and that Google simply does not care but again, I am seeing numerous reports from the PPC community about Google representatives attempting to poach their client accounts from them.

Google announced a number of new AI features for Google Ads and Google Analytics aimed to "simplify your workflow and expedite your path to business growth," as Google wrote. Specifically, there are new AI Overviews at the top of the pages, new AI data dashboard tools, and a new nebcging AI feature.