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 Financial Times interviewed Google's head of search, Liz Reid. Google AI Overviews can link to itself over and over again...

The Financial Times has a detailed interview with the newish Head of Google Search, Elizabeth Reid. The interview can be gated, so here are some of the quotes that stood out most to me from this interview.

As you know, Google is okay with linking its AI Overviews back to more Google Search results. But is Google okay with linking the same query, to the same query, over and over again, through the AI Overviews?

Google said it again - structured data does not help your site rank any better. John Mueller of Google said this on Bluesky, "Structured data won't make your site rank better." He said, all it is "used for displaying the search features listed in" this search gallery document.

There seems to be a bug that is impacting the first image in the product snippet image carousel set. I was notified about this a few times in the past few days by various people and while I cannot replicate this, many can.

Google is testing a new shortcut location for AI Mode in the Google App on Android. Google is placing the shortcut button directly in the search bar.

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

Google released a new Google Ads ad strength guide and best practices document. The document should help you improve your overall ad strength in Google Ads.

Google is testing yet another search feature that generates new queries on Google Search. This one is named "Ask a follow-up" and they are sported with the Gemini stars next to them.

Microsoft is testing yet another variation for its favicons in the Bing Search snippets. This one uses a dark gray background, with a circle formatted favicon, next to the search result snippets.