Industry News

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 Ads now is testing AI generated performance summaries. Google launched two new Googlebots...

Google announced they are rolling out AI Overviews in the US and many searchers want to turn it off, and some content creators want to opt out of them. Google also announced new AI search features that will roll out soon...

When Google announced it is rolling out AI Overviews in the US search results and last year when Google launched SGE in labs, SEOs and content creators wanted to know how to prevent their content from showing up in these responses. Well, you can, but only through Google Search controls as I covered in my larger story.

Google Ads continues to roll out AI features within the advertiser console. Now some advertisers are seeing AI summaries of how their ad performance is doing. These AI summaries give you an overview of your Google Ads campaign performance over a specified period.

Google looks like it will discontinue the direct ordering option with the Order with Google button by the end of June 2024. This will impact third-party food delivery sites, such as DoorDash, GrubHub and Uber Eats. I assume Google will instead link to third parties and not directly integrate with them in the search interface.

Google has added two new Googlebots, Google crawlers, to its crawler list. They include GoogleOther-Image and GoogleOther-Video, which are part of the GoogleOther category of bots and are used for crawling of binary data for research and development reasons.

For the past few months we have covered the vocal and visual complaints around Google Search not showing image thumbnails for recipe search results and other search results that generally have image thumbnails attached to the search result snippet. Google has responded to the large Google Webmaster Help thread in the forums by saying we know, we are still investigating, follow our guidelines and then locked the thread down.

Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, has announced he is now on the advisory board for Perplexity. Perplexity is a new AI search start up, which technically would be in competition with Microsoft's Bing Search and Copilot.

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

I have been continuing to update the May 9th Google ranking volatility story, but it is super unusual to see such heated volatility for such a long period within the Google Search rankings. This continued Google search ranking update of sorts kicked off with May 3rd but then spiked with May 9th and has really not let up much since.