Industry News

New data from BrightEdge shows that Google is showing far fewer AI Overviews than it did when it first launched them as a beta under the Search Generative Experience. Google went from showing AI Overviews for 84% of queries to showing them for less than 15% of queries.

Microsoft, in its monthly update, announced that it will be moving (or "upgrading" as they call it) smart shopping campaigns to Performance Max within the next couple of months. Microsoft said they sent out notices to advertisers via emails earlier.

Google has fixed an issue with site names not appearing for some internal pages, this has been an issue since December 2023. I checked some examples, and they are indeed fixed - although Google said some fixes are still rolling out and those pages need to be reprocessed to be fixed.

Google News seems to be testing placing a header above news sources in the Google News follow interface, that says "how these stories are ranked." I personally cannot replicate it, but some are able to see it.

Google has updated its discussion forum structured data help documentation to clarify that SocialMediaPosting markup is also supported. Google did say that SocialMediaPosting should be used for sites that are more of a "generic social media platform," versus a discussion forum.

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 fixed the Search Console link report this morning...

Google said it will not index sites that are not accessible on mobile devices after July 5, 2024. "If your site's content is not accessible at all with a mobile device, it will no longer be indexable," John Mueller wrote.

Google seems to be adding a people also ask like search refinement/expander for the popular products on Google Search. Below the popular products section there is this section that shows other variations for your keywords.

Last week, Google emailed its Google Ads and Google Analytics users with a heads-up about new privacy laws coming to some states in the United States. This involves topics around restricted data processing control and universal opt-out mechanisms.

Just last week we reported that chat is going away from Google Business Profiles. Well, Google may be adding native SMS and WhatsApp messaging support for your Google Maps business listings.