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.

The Google December 2025 core update is done rolling out...

Will Larson has a good post about implementing “Agent Skills” in their internal agent framework at Imprint. The whole piece is worth reading, but I wanted to highlight this observation:

Humans make mistakes all the time. For example, I’ve seen many dozens of JIRA tickets from humans that don’t explain the actual problem they are having. People are used to that, and when a human makes a mistake, they blame the human. However, when agents make a mistake, a surprising percentage of people...

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I use AI for product work—the basic setup of context files, prompts, and the @ mention system in Windsurf. Since then the system evolved quite a bit, so I figured it’s time for an update.

The philosophy has shifted a bit. I still don’t use AI to do my core thinking—I write my own PRDs and strategy docs. But I’ve come to rely on it more as a helpful assistant for the work around the work: reviewing documents before I share them, researching technical...

Adam and Joanne Gallagher from the food recipe blog, Inspired Taste, has been documenting a lot of really painful and shameful tactics Google is using for its AI responses to some recipes. Adam calls its Google's AI Frankenstein recipes, where it pulls parts of the recipes from recipe bloggers, says it is the brand's recipe, but changes it enough where the recipe is not real and tastes horrible.

Microsoft Bing is testing loading more people also ask options as you click on them. This is something Google has done for a long time now, but now when you click on an option under the people also ask section within Bing, Bing may load more beneath them - to show you more options.

Google Search is showing a carousel in the merchant / retailer panel that lets you scroll through the merchant's delivery, return and payment options. This information has been in the Google Search results for a while, but this carousel feels new to me - is it?

Google has removed the visit website button from the first screen of the Google Maps hotel results. Instead, you first need to click on the "Check availability" to get to the visit website button.

Microsoft made a small update to the Microsoft Advertising console where there is now an "All accounts" tab. This lets you see all your accounts in one place with quick access to account summaries, recommendations and more.

Google's December 2025 core update is now done rolling out, it took 18 days and 2 hours to complete. The core update started on December 11, 2025 at around 12:25 pm ET and ended on December 29, 2025 at around 2:05 pm ET...

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.