Industry News

I am sad to report the passing of Andy Drinkwater, a super-experienced SEO and a friend to the search marketing industry. Andy was a UK-based SEO who loved educating his industry by contributing content and attending local events.

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 questions the need for ccTLDs for all websites that go international. Google's John Mueller calls some SEO content...

Google's John Mueller posted one of his one-liners, where he called some forms of SEO content as "digital mulch." He wrote, "And let's be honest'"most of that SEO content is just digital mulch. (...) If your blog exists solely to rank, it's living on borrowed time."

Microsoft has added the ability to add custom columns to the Microsoft Advertising user interface and advertising console. But it doesn't offer every metric, including missing the segment by conversion action metric.

Google is testing an option to read aloud the AI Overviews by clicking on a speaker icon at the top of the AI Overview within Google Search. And the crazy thing, this is being tested in the US.

Google is testing swapping out the Gemini button at the top right of the Chrome browser, with a "Browse with AI" button. The button is more colorful and in your face, which probably gets more users to notice it.

Google's John Mueller questioned the need for all websites to use ccTLDs, different domain names, to take their websites international. He said on Reddit, "you both make things harder on yourself, but you also make it harder for search engines to understand each of these sites."

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

This week in search, we covered an update on the Google December 2025 core update. Google Search traffic to news publishers continues to vanish, but there is Google Discover. A report shows Google has deleted a ton...

A report from The Information outlined a number of avenues OpenAI is looking at for ad formats in ChatGPT. The main one that is reportedly being thrown around at the AI company is to show sponsored content within the AI responses given by ChatGPT.