Industry News

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

Google posted a new job listing looking to hire a new Senior Software Engineer, Search, AI Answers Quality. The job post says "Help the AI Answers Quality team deliver AI Overviews to users' hard and complicated queries on the SRP and in AI Mode."

A month ago, Google added LLMs.txt files to many of its developer and documentation sites including the Search developer docs. As you know, Google pulled it off the Search developer docs within a day or so but the LLMs.txt files still remain on many of Google's other sites.

Microsoft Bing is testing a new home page design where it promotes its AI-powered search and answer engine, Copilot. It seems to be a limited test and is not fully live yet, but it is a big change to the home page, which normally has the Bing custom background, search box, and the news feed below.

Last November, Google announced it was dropping support for a number of structured data types and search features. One of those was practice problem structured data types, and now, Google has removed the help documentation along with it.

Google Ads will update its advertising policies to allow ads for Prediction Markets starting on January 21, 2026. This will be allowed in the United States, but only for federally regulated entities.

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 Discover seems to show X posts way too often and some searchers don't like it...

It is January 2026, and it is now time for the monthly Google Webmaster report, where I recap the most important Google organic stories of the past month. Obviously, the Google December 2025 core update was the big one, it ran for 18 days and it really had a large impact on many sites.

Google has been showing social media posts in Google Discover, including posts from X for a while now, and Google may even show more posts from those you follow. But is Google showing too many social media posts from X in your Google Discover feed?

Google is working on fixing an issue where some searchers are seeing squished images within the Google Search knowledge panels. I personally cannot replicate this but it seems to be happening for a number of searchers.