Search Engine Roundtable

8/14/2026

This week, we of course had more Google search ranking volatility, this time on the 12th. Google is testing new AI buttons on its home page...

8/14/2026

Google Ads will roll out a change to language targeting that will remove the ability to manually adjust the language setting. This change is happening next month, in September 2026. Google said its ad systems already match languages automatically and enhanced AI prioritization will automatically select the most relevant ad language when there are eligible ads in multiple languages, Google told me.

8/14/2026

A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in AI Overviews this week.

8/14/2026

Google updated a help document within the Google Merchant Center help area to document that Google Merchant Center for Agencies can now link to up to 1,000 Merchant Center accounts. Previously, that number was not there, and now we know - up to 1,000 accounts can be linked to a single agency account.

8/14/2026

As we know, Google has often declared that its crawlers, Googlebot, etc, come from Mountain View, California. But the truth is, that is where they self-declare the bots are coming from. Google has data centers all over the world, and even though Google may be declaring the crawler is coming from a specific location, it might be coming from a different location.

8/14/2026

Google has a new reporting option for reviews in Google Business Profiles and Google Local. This one is called "Report owner response." It lets you tell Google if an owner response to a review is off-topic, contains profanity, is harassing, discriminatory, hateful, or includes personal information.

8/13/2026

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

8/13/2026

We saw a spike in volatility yesterday amongst the Google Search results rankings. There was a spike in ranking movement outside the day-to-day norm that seemed to start yesterday and maybe into today. The chatter is somewhat cool, but the tools showed a spike in the Google rank volatility.

8/13/2026

Google has dropped the minimum number of followers needed to be approved for a Search Profile on Google. Previously, it was 100,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, X and Tiktok. Now it is 35,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, and X but still 100,000 on TikTok.

8/13/2026

OpenAI is testing or rolling out a change to how you can click to see the sources from the ChatGPT responses. It used to be a button named "Sources" in the footer of the response, but now sometimes it is showing up within the three-dot "More actions" menu, requiring you to click more to find those sources - which very few will do.

8/13/2026

This is just a random tip, make sure not to misconfigure Cloudflare, your content delivery network and/or your hosting server. I see way too many cases of this popping up and causing such a pain for SEOs to fix. All of a sudden, you might notice your rankings drop off a cliff on Google Search and your pages begin to drop out of the Google index. It is likely because you are blocking Google from crawling your site.

8/13/2026

When you use the Google Search Console URL inspection tool, Google will show you what it calls the "Google-selected canonical." Sometimes that URL will look off, weird and even scary, because sometimes it might be a URL for a spammy site.

8/12/2026

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 has amended its lawsuit against SerpApi...

8/12/2026

With Google migrating Local Service Ads to the main Google Ads platform, Google is already preparing new Google Ads help documents with more details about the change. A new document named About Local customer optimization within Performance Max campaign for store goals was just posted by Google.

8/12/2026

After Google's lawsuit against SerpAPI, the Google Search scraper tool, was dismissed a month ago, Google has decided to amend the complaint. Google filed the amendment on August 10, 2026 as an "Amended Complaint." Google is now taking an approach around protecting licensed content within its search results.

8/12/2026

Google will randomly show AI Overviews for local results, and when it does, It will often show AI-generated information about each local listing. The issue is that Google often cites low-quality and self-promotional listicle articles from across the web when showing those snippets in the local pack.

8/12/2026

Google announced several new updates to the Merchant Center performance report, starting on August 24, 2026. There are four updates: separating YouTube affiliate results from organic traffic, updating the YouTube organic traffic definitions, expanding product-level reporting for Google Ads, and adding new performance segmentation capabilities.

8/12/2026

OpenAI is testing placing descriptive headings above the ads within ChatGPT responses. I assume it is using AI to generate these headlines above the ChatGPT Ads.

8/11/2026

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

8/11/2026

Google is testing placing the list of advertisers in the group of sponsored results at the top of the ad block in the mobile search results. So if the sponsored results group has two advertisers in it, Google will show the favicon and domain name of the ads that will be shown below, all the way at the top, directly under the "Sponsored results" header and directly above the actual ads.

8/11/2026

Google will be migrating Travel campaigns to the new Search campaigns for Travel in Google Ads. This is happening sometime in the third quarter of 2026; we do not have a specific date.

8/11/2026

I feel like a broken record and that Google simply does not care but again, I am seeing numerous reports from the PPC community about Google representatives attempting to poach their client accounts from them.

8/11/2026

Google announced a number of new AI features for Google Ads and Google Analytics aimed to "simplify your workflow and expedite your path to business growth," as Google wrote. Specifically, there are new AI Overviews at the top of the pages, new AI data dashboard tools, and a new nebcging AI feature.

8/11/2026

It looks like we are seeing some Googler accounts being taken over by sites that sell SEO services, or dare I say it, spammy or low-quality SEO services. Martin Splitt from Google let his X account go during the whole Twitter to X Elon thing and eventually that account was picked up by a search engine indexing service.

8/11/2026

The Google Search Console generative AI performance reports seem to be live for everyone now. Google has not yet announced the full rollout of the generative AI performance reports but after checking all my profiles in Search Console, it seems to now be fully live.

8/10/2026

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

8/10/2026

Meta, the social media company that operates Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Threads, is allegedly crawling the web and in the process of building its own search engine. Pieter Levels posted about this pattern on X and wrote, "Meta is ALLEGEDLY building their own Google search engine..."

8/10/2026

Google has updated its guidelines for representing your business on Google in the Google Business Profiles help documentation to add a new rule. Google said for your business name you cannot repeat "the same business name in multiple scripts or languages."

8/10/2026

Google's Gary Illyes said that hreflang alternates, hreflang URLs are not "indexed in the proper sense." In short, Google just keeps the hreflang URL as alternate URLs. So the URL is not what is getting the page indexed, it is just being stores as an alternative to the main page URL.

8/10/2026

A month ago, Google said it would now label ads created or edited with AI with an AI label within the ad or on the ad itself (depending on the region). We soon saw those AI labels roll out on ads in the Google Search sponsored results but now we are also seeing them in the local pack listings and within Google Discover.

8/10/2026

Microsoft has released the ability to adjust and appeal disapproved assets in bulk. This feature is named Bulk edit disapproved assets and should be live globally in all Microsoft Advertising accounts.

8/10/2026

The Google home page is testing or rolling out now, new AI features and buttons in place of the Google Search and I'm Feeling Lucky buttons. There is now "Create images," "Ask about files," and "Brainstorm" buttons below the big search box. This is in addition to showing the AI Mode button, the plus sign at the left of the search box, Google Lens, and the Voice button.

8/7/2026

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

8/7/2026

This week, we covered two unconfirmed Google search ranking updates, one mid-week and one over the weekend - some were pretty big. Google said Reddit gets no special preference in its search rankings or AI results...

8/7/2026

Google Ads is rolling out a new customer acquisition option named "Report on new customers acquired." This lets you "Drive purchases from new and existing customers without changing bidding," according to Google.

8/7/2026

Earlier this week, OpenAI sent an email to advertisers about new ChatGPT Ads Manager product updates. These updates include testing a new multi-product carousel format for product feed campaigns, plus a number of updates to the ad manager itself.

8/7/2026

Google Ads will begin migrating or "upgrading" Automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting to AI Max starting on September 1, 2026. We knew this was coming and now the process is soon going to begin.

8/7/2026

Gary Illyes from Google said that Google's crawlers do not only send HTTP requests such as GET and POST but also for HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. He said the latter make up for less than 1.5% of the total number of requests all Google's crawlers send. Google sends them for JavaScript, he said.

8/7/2026

Google Ads added a "View call report" link in the Phone Call conversions leads report. This makes it easier to jump to the details of what makes up the metrics of that report and gives you access to that data in a new tab.

8/7/2026

Google Ads is now testing the "Strongest match" and "Strong match" labels it announced back in mid-June. This is the first time I have seen this label in the wild. I am actually a bit surprised Google went on with this test after the backlash...

8/6/2026

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 seeing big changes and swings with the Google Search results...

8/6/2026

Yes, I reported Google Search ranking volatility over this past weekend, but I am seeing a large increase in the chatter within the SEO community over the past 24 hours or so. The chatter seems consistent with a big Google Search algorithm update that is underway but at this point, Google has not yet confirmed it and may never confirm it.

8/6/2026

Google announced a number of big changes within its executive AI leadership ranks, including Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years, Demis Hassabis stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to be its chair, and Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over many of his responsibilities. No matter how Google spun it, the stock was down about 4% yesterday from the news.

8/6/2026

While the Google Search Console generative AI performance reports do not share query data, you can still try to figure out which queries are from AI Mode versus normal searches. The SEO community has been doing this for years now by looking for more conversational-style queries in your Search Console performance reports.

8/6/2026

Microsoft Advertising is rolling out a new feature for advertisers to allow you to exclude Audience ads placements within Performance Max campaigns. There is a new setting named "Excluded content terms" within Audience Ads.

8/6/2026

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, posted a video Q&A on the upcoming bidding update coming on August 17th. As you know, these bidding changes are causing a big stir within the PPC industry and Ginny wanted to answer some questions in a video format.

8/6/2026

Google has a new specialized feature within Product Listing Ads within Merchant Center named Deal Ends annotation. This is experimental now but works globally, except for EEA+, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It will add high-impact and real-time urgency signals, such as "3 days left" or "5 hours left" badges, directly below product prices.

8/6/2026

Google Ads is testing a new security feature to disallow free domain email addresses (such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com) from performing sensitive actions on a Google Ads advertiser account. Google will only allow those using corporate emails to perform such actions.

8/5/2026

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

8/5/2026

Google's communications representative, Jennifer Kutz, told The Verge that Reddit gets no preference in Google Search or Google's AI Search features. Kutz told The Verge that Reddit "gets no special preference" in Google's ranking systems.

8/5/2026

We knew this day was coming, and now Google has sent out emails announcing the date when Google Assistant will be going away on mobile devices. The date is September 4, 2026, and Gemini will replace Google Assistant on WearOS, headphones and earbuds that are compatible, and Android Auto.

8/5/2026

Google will be updating its Other restricted businesses: Government documents and services policy on October 5, 2026. There are a lot of changes coming to this policy, so if you are in the business that promote direct acquisition of government documents and services, then read on.

8/5/2026

Microsoft is testing a "Top Source" section within the Bing Search results interface. This section shows the Top Source with various sections from the site or various news articles from the site.

8/5/2026

Google has renamed the Local Services platform policies document to Local Services Ads requirements. I am not sure if this was renamed and reworded because the Google Local Service Ads platform is being migrated into the main Google Ads platform but it just seems weird to do this now?

8/4/2026

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

8/4/2026

Here is the big Google Webmaster Report for August 2026, including of course the ongoing Google search ranking volatility; we saw volatility on...

8/4/2026

Google is testing adding keyword-rich anchor text hyperlinks to the ad descriptions in the sponsored results within Google Search. Clicking on the link takes you to the same ad landing page URL as it would if you clicked on the main title link in the ad.

8/4/2026

The Google Ads Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool, where you can preview your ads in the Google Search results, within the Google Ads interface is broken. It loads a CAPTCHA box and doesn't let you remove the CAPTCHA from being displayed. So you cannot use the tool to preview your Google Ads.

8/4/2026

Google Ads is testing a new text disclaimer feature that lets you set the text disclaimer to override descriptions pinned to position 1. This is labeled as "new" under where you add text disclaimers in the Google Ads interface.

8/4/2026

Google is currently beta testing a new Search Profiles feature named Handle Swapping. Handle Swapping allows you to switch your handle to any of your linked verified platforms within Google. Some sources say it's launching very soon.

8/3/2026

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 seeing Google Search ranking volatility starting on August 1st and kicking up today...

8/3/2026

I am seeing signs of another Google Search ranking update with a lot of volatility hitting this past weekend again. This one started on Saturday, August 1st, and has continued thus far through today, August 3rd. Both the third-party tracking tools are showing a spike and there is chatter within the SEO community about a lot of this ranking shuffling.

8/3/2026

The Google Business Profile help page on Help protect against fraudulent calls and texts has been updated. It now includes how to identify legitimate texts over WhatsApp and RCS messages, it also updated a lot of the examples of the types of calls and messages you get, plus more.

8/3/2026

Microsoft has confirmed it is working on bringing filtering capabilities to the Bing Webmaster Tools performance reports. Right now, there is no way to add a filter for any of the metrics in the report. Of course, you can download the data and do what you want with it, but there is no native filter box in the reporting interface.

8/3/2026

Google Search is testing asking searchers to sign in to verify they are humans and not bots conducting the searches. I don't think Google has done this before, geneally when Google tries to verify human versus bot activity, Google will serve a captcha and has done so for many years. But this test is asking the searcher to sign in.

8/3/2026

Google Trends now lets you compare up to 400 search terms across 8 groups of terms and up to 50 terms in each group. Previously, it was 125 search terms across 5 groups of terms and up to 25 terms in each group. That is a 220% increase, if my math is correct.

8/3/2026

Microsoft will be retiring the Bing Webmaster Tools SOAP/POX APIs on August 31, 2026. If you use these legacy APIs you should begin to migrate to the JSON/HTTP (REST) API version.

8/2/2026

If you try to filter you Google Search or Google News tab results by the recent search tools option, it simply won't work. If you try to select the "Tools" and then "Recent" options, including the past hour option, it won't listen to that filter and it won't filter the content by the last hour.

7/31/2026

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

7/31/2026

This week, yep, we had more ongoing Google Search volatility but a calming period on Wednesday. Google has rolled out the platform properties to track X, YouTube...

7/31/2026

Microsoft Advertising is moving its Predictive Matching targeting option to Search term matching within AI Max. Microsoft added a note to various help document pages about the change, it says:

7/31/2026

In the latest Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller from Google said that it is no longer in the Google Guidelines, now Google Search Essentials, that you must block Google from accessing your internal search results pages. He added that you likely should continue to do so because it can lead to (a) intense server load and (b) quality issues if abused, which can cause Google search ranking issues as a result.

7/31/2026

Google Ads may be rolling out a new design for its insights section where it gives you the "Top things to know today." This new interface for this section is in a carousel format, where you can toggle through the various automated insights that Google Ads is providing.

7/31/2026

OpenAI is testing a new campaign type named Agent, which allows you to send ChatGPT searchers and users to a Business Agent conversation. So instead of just going to your website, you send them into a chat experience on your website?

7/31/2026

Google has begun alerting some advertisers that it will soon require D-U-N-S numbers for businesses and users to be verified. Verification is required for select verticals and users in the US. And honestly, getting a D-U-N-S numbers for some businesses can be a pain.

7/31/2026

Google has yet another bug with the Google Business Profiles platform. This one is with products being placed in "Pending" status, new products and old products, I believe. This started a couple of days ago and the issue still seems to be lingering, or pending, if you will. I have not seen Google respond to the complaints about this issue but it does seem widespread.

7/30/2026

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

7/30/2026

Google is now testing showing related searches based on your browsing. I suspect this is based on your browsing history on Chrome, beyond what you may search for in Google but based on what pages you browse.

7/30/2026

Google is now testing AI-generated descriptions on shopping and product ads. We saw this with normal sponsored results earlier this month, Google confirmed it was a small test then, and now we are seeing it on shopping ads.

7/30/2026

Doesn't it feel like you are always seeing AI Overviews at the top of all your Google Search results? Well, new data from Similarweb says that AI Overviews show up for about 43% of all queries. Meanwhile, Semrush data has it at about 48% of all queries. It depends on the query category because informational queries tend to be even higher.

7/30/2026

Normally, I wouldn't cover political topics like this, but with Google trying to copyright its search results, including AI Overview responses, I thought it was appropriate. Google responded to complaints about a race-based AI Overview answer, blaming the websites it sourced, rather than taking credit for the AI-generated answer in Google Search.

7/30/2026

Google has a new help document in the Google Ads support area on how to set up offline conversions using GBRAID. A GBRAID URL parameter (&gbraid=xyz) is a privacy-preserving identifier used to measure ad performance.

7/30/2026

Google is testing a new carousel at the top of the Google home page on mobile for Google Discover. It is a carousel of content that is titled "Read Later Queue," and it comprises articles you saved to read later.

7/29/2026

Microsoft reported its fourth-quarter 2026 earnings, showing that its search and advertising revenue was up 10%, indicating its ad growth was 2 points lower than the previous quarter. The previous quarter it was up 12%, before that up 10% before that, up 16% and the one before that was 21% and this quarter, it is only up 10%.

7/29/2026

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 Search Console platform properties is fully live, it is cool...

7/29/2026

Earlier this month, Google announced platform properties, a way to see content that you manage but on third-party platforms, including social platforms and video platforms. So if you have an account on Instagram, TikTok, X and/or YouTube, you can claim access and see how your content on those platforms are performing within Google Search. That feature is now globally live as of today, Google announced.

7/29/2026

Google supports the unavailable_after meta attribute, which will tell Google not to show this page in search results after the specified date/time. The problem with this, is that if you try to change the unavailable_after date later, Google might not pick up on it because Google may not try to crawl that page before the last given date.

7/29/2026

Microsoft seems to be testing showing pricing on the product images within the Bing Search organic results. Normally, Bing would show review stars on the product images and, below the image, show the price. I should note that I am also seeing two rows of products under a single search result snippet, which I think is new.

7/29/2026

The Google Ads interface now shows Target CPA and Target ROAS as explicit bidding strategy options in the drop-down of bidding options. We knew this was coming, as it is supported in the new version of Google Ads Editor 2.13 and all the other recent communication from Google and now advertisers are seeing it.

7/29/2026

Google's John Mueller confirmed it has not and likely won't publish publicly Google Search's defined order of precedence for metadata reconciliation. In other words, if you have conflicting signals you are sending Google, which signal trumps the other. Like a 301 redirect from URL A to URL B but on URL B, you have a canonical tag to URL A, which should Google trust.

7/29/2026

Google Ads posted details about a new feature it calls "Lead Journey Mapping." Lead Journey Mapping is a visual drag-and-drop tool that allows lead generation advertisers to map their end-to-end customer journey within Google Ads.

7/29/2026

Google Ads has introduced what it calls "Budget Panel," which should be able to be found (at some point) in Performance Max and Demand Gen campaign review page. Google says the Budget Panel "provides customized budget recommendations to optimize campaign performance and prevent low starts."

7/28/2026

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 is testing related searches based on your browsing within Search...

7/28/2026

Since June 11th, Google Search Console's page indexing report has been getting stuck and not showing more daily data for the past several weeks. Google has fixed it a few times, but it leads to seeing the data grouped by weeks rather than by days.

7/28/2026

Google Ads may have released a new ad status named "Has improvements." I don't see any other mentions of this status before the weekend, so I am thinking it might be new. Have you seen this one before?

7/28/2026

Google Ads has added two new product reporting metrics to some reports, product clicks and non-product clicks. Product clicks are when a searcher clicked directly on a product in your ad and non-product clicks are when a searcher clicked another part of the ad, not the specific product.

7/28/2026

Microsoft Advertising has rolled out the Ad Preview Hub to now support Performance Max campaigns. Microsoft Advertising Ad Preview Hub launched for other campaigns this past January and is now supported for PMax campaigns.

7/28/2026

Google Ads has given advertisers the ability to upload an image when creating AI-generated images within the ad platform. The uploaded image is used to help the AI generate an image in the style you are looking for.

7/27/2026

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. Another week...

7/27/2026

Google updated its review snippets structured data markup guidelines on Friday to provide a pretty obvious guideline that Google felt it needed to spell out. Google wrote, "Don't include fake or undisclosed incentivized reviews on your page or in your structured data markup."