Industry News

Google AI Overviews seems to be slower with removing citations/content from its index that it serves for answers, when compared to web search. This includes when a page or section is noindexed or robots.txt out and when Google deindexes the pages or sections of the site, due to a manual action or some other reason.

Google launched a new feature in the Google App for iOS named Page Annotation. When you are browsing a web page in the Google App native browser, Google can "extract interesting entities from the webpage and highlight them in line." When you click on them, Google takes you to more search results.

The Department of Justice has asked the judge in the Google monopoly ruling case to force Google to sell Chrome, restrict Android from serving Google Search, and ban its default search deals with Apple and others devices. Of course, Google says this is "widely overboard proposal goes miles beyond the Court's decision."

Google Search is testing showing icons and labels in the sitelinks within the search results snippets. I am seeing icons for a phone, price tag, fork/knife, map pin and information icons.

Almost a year ago, we reported how Bing Search went from circle favicons in the search results to square favicons in the search results. Now, we are seeing Bing testing going back to the circle formatted favicons.

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

Google has updated its site reputation abuse policy to expand what is included in abuse. It now includes third-party content that has first-party involvement or content oversight. Google also dropped a mention of the starkly different content algorithm but made no mention that site reputation abuse is enforced algorithmically'"so it must still be only through manual actions.

Google announced new shopping features through Google Lens to help with in-store shopping and local shopping. Google said, "Google Lens can quickly show you product insights tailored to the store you're in. Just snap a photo to find product information, similar products in-stock, whether a store's price is competitive and shopper reviews."

Google has updated its guide to Google Search ranking systems to mention at the top of the page that it uses both page-level and site-wide signals for search rankings. There was a debate on this after the Google creator summit about Google possibly saying they only have page level signals, so this may clear things up a bit.

Is OpenAI, its ChatGPT service, taking market share from Google? Well, maybe. Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro posted his assumptions based on a mix of data from SimilarWeb and Datos that says ChatGPT's current market share is 4.33% - that is from October 2024 data.