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 updated its search documentation to state that it does smaller core updates more often without confirming them. Google Discover is now minimally aligned to search rankings...

Google has told us that core updates impact visibility within Google Discover, but that may have changed at some point. Andy Almeida from the Google Trust and Safety spoke about Google Discover and one of his slides wrote, "Minimal alignment to Search ranking..."

Google is testing incorporating Ads Advisor into the contact us page for Google Ads support. Google was doing this for policy disapproval support requests as well.

14 months ago, Google updated its documentation around its shopping related structured data warning not to generate your structured data dynamically through JavaScript. Yesterday, at the Search Central Live event in Zurich, a Google engineer explained why - it's because the shopping bot crawls a lot and fast.

Google updated its core update documentation to say it does smaller core updates and does not announce those updates. This is not new; Google told us this back in 2019. What is new is that Google added it to its search developer documentation.

Microsoft is testing moving the ad labels in the Bing Search results from the left side of the ad to the right side of the ad. I am not sure which makes it harder to see the label or not but I assume Microsoft is testing this to see which will get more clicks.

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

Google's John Mueller said at the Google Search Central Live event in Zurich today that Google is still working on the next core update. This update should be out soon, but it is unclear if it will happen in the next couple of days or after the holiday season.

OpenAI has updated its spider/crawler it uses for ChatGPT, OAI-SearchBot. The AI company updated the description and details of the crawler information removing that it is used for links and to train OpenAI's generative AI foundation models.

Google's Vice President, Global Ads at Google, Dan Taylor, said that there are no plans to bring ads to the Gemini app. This comes after AdWeek reported based on sources that ads will be coming to Gemini in 2026.