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.

OpenAI added shopping search features to ChatGPT Search...

OpenAI has begun rolling out shopping search features directly into ChatGPT Search across fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics categories. These are not ads or affiliate-driven, but they are powered by structured data from third-party sources.

Google's John Mueller explained that changing the dates in your XML Sitemaps lastmod date to all show today, the most recent day, won't favor your rankings or SEO. He said on Reddit, "setting today's date in a sitemap file isn't going to be something that works in favor of anyone, it's just lazy."

Microsoft is testing a new format for an AI Answer or AI Summary in the Bing Search results. This shows the AI generated answer as a list of terms that can be expanded and clicked on to generate a new search result set.

Google is testing a new design for the shopping ads format, one that looks a bit more like the image pack design than shopping ads.

Microsoft is testing removing its name, i.e. Microsoft Bing, next to the logo in the Bing Search bar. Normally the search bar has the Microsoft Bing name next to the logo on the left side of the search bar, now Microsoft is just testing showing the logo.

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

Google uses its search engine data and signals to help train its Gemini AI models, we learned from documents from the DOJ deposition testimony. Although, we kind of knew that when Google launched SGE, they told us they used Google Search's core ranking systems to help identify high-quality sites (although, it didn't seem like they did...).

Microsoft Bing is testing placing a "more videos" section in the Bing Copilot answers. Recently we covered how Bing placed images and video links but this implementation makes more sense.

Last December, we reported how Google was showing a payments option section in the retailer/merchant knowledge panel. Google is now testing a clearer version of it, while adding shipping and return information to the payments section.