Industry News

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

Google has released the August 2025 spam update on August 26, 2025 at around 12:00 pm ET. This update applies globally and to all languages and will take a few weeks to complete.

While Google expanded AI Mode access to 180+ countries and regions last week, Google is testing AI Mode in currently unsupported regions. Such regions including countries in the European Union, including Romania.

A new survey from NP Digital says that only 4% of the 1,000 people surveyed said they do not click from the Google AI Overviews. 13.3% of people surveyed said they do click every single time within an AI Overview, 30.5% said they often click, 41.5% said they sometimes click and 10.3% said they rarely click through.

After seeing the loyalty pricing and discounts in the Google search results and shopping ads, Google has now announced that they have new loyalty offerings in Merchant Center and also loyalty goal in Google Ads.

Google Ads renamed the "Chat" section or button in the Google Ads interface to "Ads Advisor." The Chat feature was spotted earlier this year in January, and I guess Google would rather call it an "advisor" and not "chat."

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

Google's Robby Stein said that over the coming weeks, Google will be testing changes to AI Mode that will aim to encourage clicks to publishers. He said on X that Google has "been experimenting with how and where to show links in ways that are most helpful to users and sites."

Did you notice that one of the only reports in Google Search Console that does not have a "last updated" time stamp is the links report. I asked John Mueller from Google why and he said, "No particular reason. Different reports are different."

I've covered the almost invisible and incredibly hard to see experiments with Microsoft Advertising placing hard to see search/sponsored ads in the Bing search results many times. Well, now that we have a Microsoft Advertising Ads Liaison, we finally got a response from Microsoft on the topic.