Industry News

Google, as expected, has officially launched AI Overviews in the US and will expand the launch to other countries by the end of this year. AI Overviews were in Search Labs under the Search Generative Experience last year and has finally launched.

Google not only announced that AI Overviews are rolling out in the US this week but a number of new AI based search features coming out later in Google Search and in Google Search Labs. These features include the ability to adjust AI Overviews, muti-stepping reasoning, planning, AI-organized search results and Lens search with video.

In February, we caught Google testing a new search filter named "Web Results." Well, last night it went live under the name "Web." You can now filter search results to only show text links and weed out all the videos, images, and other non-text links.

Bloomberg reports that Google has downgraded/lowered the search rankings of Deepfake porn sites. Bloomberg wrote, The company is lowering such content in search rankings, a spokesperson said, adding Google is "continuing to decrease the visibility of involuntary synthetic pornography in search and develop more safeguards as this space evolves."

Google may be showing more review stars in the mobile search results, according to some reports. RankRanger six-point lift in how often review stars are showing in mobile search, while is also showing a lift but more modest lift.

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 I/O was today...

Gary Illyes from Google confirmed that Google has "suddenly" dedindexed a "vast amount of URLs" from the Google Search index this past February. He said this was done because Google's "perception of the site has changed."

Six months ago, I covered the famous (non) "buckle up" comments about the changes coming to Google Search over the next several months. Well, Andy Simpson posted a recording of Danny Sullivan, Google's Search Liaison, who said these comments and I thought it would be good to listen to them now - 6 months later.

Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, said yesterday on X that he has read the feedback from the community related to the March 2024 core update and the general feedback about search quality over the past few months. He said there are places where Google can do better, but it won't happen overnight.

For over a decade now, I've been talking about Google adding an automated action viewer to Google Search Console to accompany the manual action viewer. This would provide a way to see if a Google Search ranking algorithm negatively impacts your site's performance.