Craig Hordlow

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

Google Local Service Ads seems to hide the phone number until you hover your mouse over the ad. I am not sure if this is new or not, but there is a big button that says “Get phone number” which …

Microsoft Bing is testing a new’ish section labeled “Recommended by” followed by the company making the recommendations. The weird thing is, the specific product thumbnails link to various retailers and not the place that recommended it.…

Google made several changes to the about merchant loyalty program within the Google Merchant Center help documentation. The key changes are that Loyalty Customer Match expanded to AI Mode and Gemini and to more regions, but there are even more …

Google seems to be testing adding tracking parameters to the link URLs within AI Overviews. If this rolls out fully, this will help you decipher when you get a click from an AI Overview in Google Search or just a …

This week, we covered the first impact felt by the Google September 2026 spam update. And then on Wednesday and Thursday we had the second impact of this spam update. Remember the AI contribution report……

Google Ads will update its business name policy to allow some advertisers to use a business name that differs from the ad’s destination domain. This is limited to certain cases, specifically three cases and it also excludes advertisers who are …

Google Ads may have a bug or maybe it is testing, not showing images on sponsored product results. You can see from the screenshot below, the images that are generally shown above the ad titles and descriptions are missing from …

Google Ads show up a lot within AI Mode these days and with that, Google is testing various ad formats to see which formats get the highest click-through rate (unlike links in AI Mode). Here is a screenshot of what …

Google has updated the creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help document to primarily add two new sections. First, it added that the main content is super critical, added what is main content and then explained how Search Quality raters review …

Google has updated Google Search’s “guidance on using generative AI content on your website” document to tell those who use AI-generated content to “manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.”…

OpenAI announced that it is rolling out virtual try-on for clothing and accessories for ChatGPT on the mobile and web interfaces. This also includes saving these to your ChatGPT Library.…

About a year ago, Penske, which operates and owns Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Variety, and others, sued Google over its AI Overviews. Well, that case was dismissed because Penske failed to prove that Google entered into any formal …

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

Google announced the Google September 2026 spam update a week ago today on September 24th. We most likely saw the first wave of sites getting hit on September 25th, 26th and into the 27th. Then things cooled a bit but …

Microsoft Advertising announced that optimization experiments is now generally available for Search, Shopping, Audience, and Performance Max campaigns. An Optimization experiment measures the impact of a campaign change through a controlled A/B test, Microsoft’s help center explains.…

Google seems to be testing dropping the historic I’m feeling lucky button for the main Google Search bar. It is totally gone for some searchers when you start to type your query, and in other cases, it is supplemented with …