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.

Google is testing replacing the local pack in the search results with AI Overviews...

Google may be testing replacing local pack at the top of the Google Search results for "near me" related queries with an AI Overview. So instead of showing a map and the three or so local listings, Google is showing an AI Overview with some local information.

Google is testing a new label or green text on its shopping ads to tell you when the price of that item is low. The label says "Lowest in 30 days," which says the price is the lowest it has been in the past month.

Google's AI crawler, Google-Extended, the crawler it uses for Gemini and other related AI services, does render itself and can render JavaScript, just like Googlebot, Google's main web search crawler.

Google Ads search themes for Performance Max campaign has a limit of 25 search themes per asset group. Well, according to Thomas Eccel, Google is testing doubling that limit to 50 search themes per asset group.

Google announced a number of new tag, analytics and data strategies on Friday including a new Google tag gateway for advertisers. Google tag gateway for advertisers allows you to run your Google tags, be it client-side or server-side through your own website infrastructure, such as a content delivery network (CDN), load balancer, or web server.

Google AdSense will remove the ability to block the video games category of ads. So if you previously told AdSense not to show ads related to video games on your site or in your apps, that block will soon not be respected.

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 AI Mode is now out in the wild, drops waitlist...

This week we covered the ongoing Google Search ranking volatility. I posted the big Google webmaster report for May. Google admitted in a deposition that it used its search data for Gemini AI. Google Search Console leaked that it was showing desktop data...

Google is expanding AI Mode both in terms of features and access. Google is testing AI Mode in the wild with a limited number of searchers. Google also opened up its waitlist to all 18+ U.S. users. Google added product and place cards to the AI Mode results. Plus, Google added a history tab.