Industry News

Google announced that AI Mode now lets you search by uploading a photo or image from your device. Before the new AI Mode only allowed you to search with text, but now, like you can with other Google Search features, you can use multimodal capabilities in Lens with AI Mode.

Google Search is not just having its AI Overviews link back to itself but also search features like Things To Know. This is all while Google touts how it is seeing impressive growth in search results (artificially inflated?) and while supposedly prioritizing traffic to publishers (made up also?).

Google released its annual metrics on how well it did with fighting spam on Google Maps. In short, Google said it blocked or removed more than 240 million policy-violating reviews, blocked or removed more than 70 million policy-violating edits, removed or blocked more than 12 million fake Business Profiles and placed posting restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts.

Google has updated its Google Ads policies around suspensions yesterday. While no changes have been made to enforcement of these policies, Google has really updated a lot of the content, and examples provided in these policies.

Pretty much every data provider that tracks AI Overviews in Google Search are showing that Google is showing AI Overviews more often today than they were a month ago. I am sure this is no surprise to many of you, I mean, we see them so often now.

Google announced it has refreshed its Shopping tab listings report which it initially launched in November 2022 and renamed it to the Merchant opportunities report. The refreshed report now includes details about payments methods and store ratings, Google said.

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

On Friday afternoon, Danny Goodwin covered a 170 or so page PDF that Search Engine Land received from an anonymous tip named "Preference Ranking Guidelines." It looks to me similar to the Google Quality Raters guidelines that continuously leaked until Google began publishing them for all to see.

Google can show search ads with video formats. I mean, Google has been doing this for a while now, but they are kind of rare to see. This latest one is a video ad from Adidas.

After initially going live on Wednesday morning, Microsoft did not officially announce the launch of Copilot Search in Bing until late Friday afternoon. Microsoft said, "Copilot Search seamlessly blends the best of traditional and generative search together to help you find what you need '" and meet you where you're at in your discovery journey."