Industry News

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

We've seen Google test showing Google Discover on the desktop home page for years now but Google has now confirmed it will be bringing Discover to its desktop Google.com home page in the future. When that will happen exactly, I don't know, but Google did announce it at the Search Central Live event in Madrid this morning.

I am hearing reports that Google is showing driving direction request data on the Google Business Profile API for Service Area Businesses (SABs). SABs do not get a directions button, because those addresses are hidden in Google Search and Google Maps - so how does anyone trigger driving directions to that business?

Google seems to be rolling out a new metric in the Google Business Profiles performance report for "messaging clicks." This was a feature we had in the old Google My Business reports in 2020 but it went away. But now it seems to be returning.

Google has been using AI to write parts of the knowledge panels for some time now. But now it seems, when Google does that, it will show references and link cards, like it does in the AI Overviews.

Ginny Marvin, Google's Ads Liaison, said that the Google Ads team is working on improvement the advertiser support experiences and some improvements have been rolling out. "There are ongoing efforts to improve experiences and outcomes for the millions of businesses and agencies around the globe that use Google Ads," Ginny Marvin wrote on X.

Google AdSense has a new version of rewarded ads - not the Rewarded Ad Gate beta program that we covered in 2022 but the AdSense rewarded ad units beta program.

Google has made a number of updates to its Merchant Center product data specifications, including some that went into effect on April 8th and some that will go into effect on July 1, 2025.

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 now supports images as part of your questions...

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.