Industry News

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.

Google Search is not just having its AI Overviews link back to itself but also search features like Things To Know. This is all while Google touts how it is seeing impressive growth in search results (artificially inflated?) and while supposedly prioritizing traffic to publishers (made up also?).

Google released its annual metrics on how well it did with fighting spam on Google Maps. In short, Google said it blocked or removed more than 240 million policy-violating reviews, blocked or removed more than 70 million policy-violating edits, removed or blocked more than 12 million fake Business Profiles and placed posting restrictions on more than 900,000 accounts.

Google has updated its Google Ads policies around suspensions yesterday. While no changes have been made to enforcement of these policies, Google has really updated a lot of the content, and examples provided in these policies.

Pretty much every data provider that tracks AI Overviews in Google Search are showing that Google is showing AI Overviews more often today than they were a month ago. I am sure this is no surprise to many of you, I mean, we see them so often now.

Google announced it has refreshed its Shopping tab listings report which it initially launched in November 2022 and renamed it to the Merchant opportunities report. The refreshed report now includes details about payments methods and store ratings, Google said.