Industry News

Google would not give a specific date for when we will see independent sites to start surfacing better and higher in Google Search. As a reminder, Google wrote with the March 2025 core update, "We also continue our work to surface more content from creators through a series of improvements throughout this year."

Google now is showing Performance Max terms in the Google Ads search terms report. Plus this report shows the new negative keywords terms that is now supported for PMax campaigns.

On Friday, Google published its findings from its experiment of removing some EU news publishers from its search results. The results said that Google had no visible loss of search ad revenue when the news publishers were removed.

Google Ads has confirmed that it has lost some conversion data for some advertisers who used Google Merchant Center in February. The data is not coming back, it is unrecoverable. We don't know the exact dates, but Google did mention it was in February 2025.

Google is testing a new feature in the AI Overviews (although, they look familiar to me for some reason). When you click or hover over on a word in the AI Overview, Google will bring up a menu to get an AI explanation, show related images or copy to clipboard.

A month ago, we reported that Google Business Profiles support was backlogged and delayed. Well, the delay is not getting any better. Victoria Kroll from Google posted an update on Friday afternoon in the Google Business Profiles to inform us that the delay is still there.

If you’re currently in the job market I highly recommend this post by Will Larson:

If you pull all those things together, you’re essentially in a market where profit and pace are fixed, and you have to figure out how you personally want to optimize between people, prestige and learning. Whereas a few years ago, I think these variables were much more decoupled, that is not what I hear from folks today, even if their jobs were quite cozy a few years ago.

It’s a sobering—and imo...

This is a lovely post by Craig Mod about the Japanese approach to garbage, and what that means for other things in our lives…

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. […]

Personally, I don’t love carrying my garbage around with me, but I recognize that it wouldn’t exist without my intervention. Nobody ran up and asked me to hold an empty...

I love this deep-dive on the little interjections we use in everyday speech. One example:

Other interjections serve as what some linguists call ‘continuers,’ such as ‘mm-hmm’—signals from the listener that they’re paying attention and the speaker should keep going. The form of the word is well suited to its function: Because ‘mm-hmm’ is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.

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...