Industry News

It's been about a week since we reported on an unconfirmed Google search ranking update and well, now I am seeing multiple signs of an unconfirmed updates of sorts. I am seeing the third-party tracking tools showing volatility and I am also seeing a spike in some of the chatter within the SEO community.

Google announced a number of new goals and image controls that are now available on Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. Google added customer lifecycle goals and reporting and additional image controls.

Google Search is testing a new expandable carousel that says "more from" a specific retailer. When it loads, it loads more products in a carousel beneath the search result snippet from that retailer.

Google sent out emails yesterday through Google Merchant Center inviting some brands to manage and edit their brand content on Google Search. I suspect this is the visual brand profile ads/pages but I am not sure.

Google has finally rolled out API access to its 24-hour data feed of Search Performance data. And it is two days more than we expected, with Google giving us this hourly data for the past 10 days, not the initial 8 days that Google promised us.

Google is testing various link formats in AI Mode. Initially Google launched AI Mode with those tiny paperclip links, but Google, like they've done in AI Overviews, is testing in AI Mode, anchor text links and URL links within the text of the AI response.

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.