Industry News

Google has begun testing removing EU-based news publishers in Google News, Google Search, and Google Discover for 1% of users in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain (not France). Google is doing this to provide data on the impact this will make for these publishers if this would be rolled out to 100% of users.

Google Ads has this newish "in store" and "online" tab sponsored ads interface for its search ads, where you can tab between nearby stores and online stores that have what you are searching for. Plus a newish list view of "near you" stores that have the products you want.

There are new reports that Google is showing more and more YouTube videos in Google Discover. There is also a new study that says YouTube is the most cited source in Google's AI Overviews. Is Google promoting its own video site way too often?

Google may be testing removing the "more results" button from the people also ask results within Google Search. In some searches, on some browsers, I see the "more results" button after expanding a people also ask result, but in others, I do not see the "more results" button.

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.

We are finally seeing much larger movement from the Google November 2024 core update...

Last week we covered how Google's John Mueller cautioned about using Google Trends for content ideas. Google's John Mueller also agreed that this can be an issue for Google Search's people also ask (PAA) feature. When Glenn Gabe noted PAA falls into this bucket, John Mueller agreed by saying "Definitely them too."

Some are seeing Microsoft placing ads in the Bing Search results mixed in between the organic results. Google has been testing this for a while now, calling it dynamic ad placement to try to make it sound like a good thing, and now Microsoft seems to be testing this in Bing Search as well.

Google Search has been placing trending labels in the search results for a while now. But there is a new variation of that, showing a "Trending this week" label in a gray, green and purple format. I don't think I've seen this label show when the result is trending and for whole long.

On Friday, Google began to show these massive pop up, overlay ads, on top of the Google Search results, for when you search for your business and are logged into your Google Business Profile account. The ad takes up a lot of the screen, blocks access to the search results page (and managing your Google Business Profile) and asks you to spend money with Google Ads with a Google Ads credit promotion.

Google has been telling us for many months that they will be rolling out ads for AI Overviews. Last month, Google said they will soon show in the US mobile search results - well, I think we've seen one of our first examples of it this weekend.