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.

Microsoft Bing was offline for a while today, taking down third-party sites like ChatGPT Search...

Google has updated its open source robots.txt parser code on GitHub the other day. Gary Illyes from Google pushed the update yesterday morning to the repository there.

Did you know Google Ads has a referral or affiliate program. Where you can refer Google Ads a new advertiser and you will earn $250 in ad credits in Google Ads. I am not sure if this is new, but Anthony Higman thinks it might be new.

Bing Search is currently down and/or having massive latency issues. The Bing home page loads a gray dull background, the Bing search results mostly loads errors pages and if it loads search results, those results are sparse. Plus, Bing's APIs are down, so Microsoft Copilot and other services are down, including partners like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, ChatGPT Search are all down.

Google may be testing replacing the "related searches" box with the "people also search for" box. The two are functionally not that different, from what I can tell.

The from sources across the web Google Search feature is testing showing results without image thumbnails. Google has reportedly been testing the imageless version since January of this year.

Google may be testing a special search result snippet interface for Reddit search results. In this test, Google seems to be showing the number of upvotes and the number of comments on the Reddit thread.

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

After a few days of calm Google weather, we are now seeing a spike in volatility, fluctuations and SEO chatter around Google search ranking movement. It is somewhat early on but I am seeing both a spike in SEOs noticing ranking movement and many of the tools are showing a spike in volatility.

Google Marketing Live was yesterday, and the Google Ad team announced a ton of new AI formats, new ad tools, and changes to the Google Ads platform that are coming soon. The big items for me are ads in AI Overviews, new AI Shopping Ads, Brand Profile ads, and more AI tools to help you create your ads.