Industry News

Google announced that on August 20, 2026 it will experiment with an updated set of commonly used ad technology partners. If the experiments go well, Google will switch it "on or after June 5, 2026."

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

Google announced this week that Offerwall is now generally available on AdSense. Google has been expanding access to its publishers for Offerwall and now, it should be available to all.

Google's John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.

The NY Times commissioned a study that says AI Overviews have holes in both grounding and accuracy.

Derek Thompson goes into the history of the "flow" concept, and how tech and entertainment companies learned to simulate it without any of the substance psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi originally had in mind:

Algorithmic flow is flow without achievement, flow without challenge, flow without even volition… To be lost in the lazy river of algorithmic media is to be lost the current of life without a mind. Zombie flow.

Ten years ago the question was how to get into flow more often....

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

Google Ads has rolled out a new update to the channel performance report on the insights report that shows spend over time per channel. This shows you more clarity over your spending and if there are spikes or other reasons for those changes.

It looks like Google is testing a new report within Google Search Console named AI contribution. I have no clue what it looks like but I suspect it is a lot like the Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reports.

Google was asked if it is possible to add a new status to the XML sitemap statuses for "still processing." John Mueller from Google responded on Blueshy saying, "I've chatted with the teams involved about this on & off, I've seen that it can be annoying." But he added he has nothing to announce.

Google has made some changes to the Google Business Profile policy document, specifically the identity change section. It is now much more descriptive than before.

Google has posted a clarification that says it now "Google may use spam report submissions to take manual action against violations." The update was posted here and added to the report spam page.

Google has made a number of updates to its Merchant Center product data specifications. Some changes went into effect on April 14, 2026 and others happen June 30, 2026 and January 31...

A few months ago, we saw Google testing recurring, repeating Google Posts options. Well, now that option is officially live. This is in addition to the ability to schedule Google Posts.

Wikipedia says famed SEO news journalist is "non-notable" as the industry rages in response on platform known for reliable information, X, formerly known as Twitter.

As part of an article from The Verge taking aim at SEOs, Google says that they are aware of self-serving listicles and work to prevent this abuse from impacting results.

Google Ads announced that starting in September Dynamic Search Ads will automatically upgrade to AI Max. This includes automatically created assets (ACA) and campaign-level broad match setting will automatically be upgraded to AI Max.

Google sent out emails the other day to some advertisers that may be impacted by changes coming to enhanced conversions for web or enhanced conversions for leads. Google said they will be simplifying this by consolidating enhanced conversions for web and enhanced conversions for leads into a single, unified setting.

Google's John Mueller said on Reddit that Google can handle and deal with having multiple URLs for a single web page, but it is not a good practice. He said it makes it harder for Google and Google will just pick one URL anyway.

Microsoft Advertising will be transitioning from its SOAP to REST API and with that, on January 31, 2027, the SOAP API will be fully retired on January 31, 2027.

A bug has triggered scores of emails from Google saying it is collecting impressions on sites long since verified in Search Console. Do not be alarmed, it is a bug.

Google posted an update for the Google Ads and Google Analytics data controls yesterday where changes will be coming to the sources of the data. Google said this is to "simplify data controls and remove redundant settings between Google Analytics and Ads, we are planning to consolidate controls based on where the data is used."

It's been a while since Google has come out with a new search spam policy and penalty to accompany it with and now we have a new one, "back button hijacking." Back button hijacking is something many of us were surprised Google didn't specifically disallow but now, Google said it is on the rise and it is adding it to the list - officially.

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

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.

Catching up on the newsletter...

Amol Avasare, Anthropic’s Head of Growth, said on Lenny’s Podcast that maybe PM jobs are not going to shrink as much as we may have thought…

Rather than immediately replacing PMs, AI is currently increasing engineering leverage the fastest, which creates new pressure on PMs and designers. In larger organizations, that may actually increase the value of PMs who can guide priorities, manage alignment, and sharpen decision-making—especially as engineers take on more "mini-PM"...

Lalit Maganti writes about building a SQLite parser with AI — a project he’d been putting off for eight years, finished in three months. His comparison of AI coding to slot machines is uncomfortably familiar:

I found myself up late at night wanting to do “just one more prompt,” constantly trying AI just to see what would happen even when I knew it probably wouldn’t work. The sunk cost fallacy kicked in too: I’d keep at it even in tasks it was clearly ill-suited for, telling myself “maybe...

On the latest Search Off The Record Podcast, Martin Split and Gary Illyes discussed the growing page weight issue and how that impacts users and Googlebot crawling. This follows Google updating its documentation to clarify file size limits for Googlebot (and various versions of Googlebot).

If you're using Gemini in Chrome (the sidebar you can summon via a button in Chrome), then you might be happy about the latest feature that showed up in Chrome Canary. After running a prompt...

Google's March 2026 broad core update has officially completed rolling out. Google announced this via X this morning and the Search Status Dashboard has been updated to document the rollout. The update took 12 days and 4 hours to complete...

In January Google announced a change to how AI Overviews worked where clicking the "Show more" button at the end of an AIO would directly take you into AI Mode. But that was only on mobile. Now it seems Google is testing that functionality, but on desktop...

Google's Sundar Pichai was on the Cheeky Pint podcast and was asked about the future of Search. He basically laid out a future where Search is Jarvis-like where users will be completing tasks and have "many threads running"...

Spotted in the wild are what appear to be swipeable GBP location assets.

This is a programming note that I am completely offline for the last days of Passover holiday Wednesday and Thursday. I am likely not going to schedule any stories, I apologize (still in recovery mode). So I apologize for the lack of stories here. I hope to come back soon...