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.

There is discussion that Google said you should stop hiring SEOs and buying SEO audits...

In Rutledge Daugette's write up from the Web Creator summit that got a lot of attention last week, he wrote a line that struck a cord with the SEO community. In short, some are taking it to mean that Google does not want site owners, or at least, content creators, to hire SEO agencies or have to purchase SEO audits.

As many of you know, OpenAI launched Search within ChatGPT last week. And as many suspected, the relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI seems to still be strong, because it seems that the ChatGPT Search index comes from Bing - for now at least. That is not to say, ChatGPT Search does not rely on other partners, they do.

Google is testing a new feature in the AI Overviews within Google Search. There is this "highlight" button that when you click on, it lets you highlight text in the AI Overview, which then in turn gives you more AI Answers.

Google has made a small update to its crawl budget documentation page to add a best practice is to have the same links on both the mobile and desktop version (if you have different versions) on the page. If you do not do this, it can slow the crawling and discovery of your site, especially if it is a large site.

Google Ads has added a new segment option to the reporting for Performance Max assets groups. Some advertisers are seeing the "segment" option within the PMax Asset Group Performance section of reporting.

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.

We are seeing some spooky Halloween Google search ranking volatility. OpenAI is rolling out Search in ChatGPT...

This week, we covered that Google told creators that a new search ranking update is coming fairly soon, but you shouldn't expect to recover with this update. Google is now downgrading the rankings of content that is starkly different from the main content of the site. Google said again that it is doubtful...

After beta testing SearchGPT for a few months, OpenAI is now rolling out Search within ChatGPT for ChatGPT Plus and Team users, which will come to free users in the future. The first thing most of us will look at are the citations, links, will Search in ChatGPT drive searchers to our sites.

Google added a number of AI, Gemini-powered, features to Google Maps including new search features, review summaries for place listings and a way to ask about a specific business listing where AI will give you answers.