Craig Hordlow

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 dodged being broken up for a second time on its monopoly …

Google added some new nuggets to its Google Ads help documentation on about conversion measurement, specifically on phone call conversions and offline conversions.…

Google Ads is showing under the status of your ads a label that says “Under Re-Review.” It says the ad is eligible but limited and “this ad is serving to a limited audience.” It then breaks down where the ad …

As you know, Google rolled out Gemini 3.8 Flash for subscribers to AI Mode and some have started to play with it. And the early feedback is that AI Mode running Gemini 3.8 Flash is not link or citation friendly. …

In July, Google began to roll out AI performance reports within Google Merchant Center to United States based merchants. Google said the AI reports are now available to merchants within Australia, Canada, India & New Zealand as well.…

Over the past several days, I have been hearing from some publishers that while their content is being crawled, indexed, and served in Google Search results, some of it is missing from the news tab. It may then later show …

Google’s Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, said on X, “Gemini 3.8 Flash has landed in Search.” This comes only a couple of weeks after Google brought Gemini 3.7 Flash to AI Mode within Google Search.…

A federal judge in Virginia ruled against breaking up Google’s ad tech business after Google was found to be a monopoly over its ad technology platforms. The judge ordered Google to end its practices that depress ad rates for web …

Google Trends now lets you filter your results by category, either with or without a query. This can give you a more refined view of the trends for a specific query or zoom you out more on category level trends …

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

Microsoft is testing removing the site names from the Bing search results and instead showing only the site’s URL. Google tested this about a year ago, so I guess it makes sense for Bing to test as well.…

Google AdSense will change how it counts impressions for display ads starting on February 17, 2027. Google will use what it calls the Begin-to-Render methodology and will only count the impression once the ad has successfully loaded and has started …

About a month ago, Google announced Tell Maps, a way for Google Maps contributors to use AI to tell Google Maps more about places. “You can suggest edits conversationally, right from Ask Maps and the Contribute tab,” Google said about …

Google’s John Mueller said the Google disavow tool “does have effects,” adding, “but it has its place & time.” This was in response a complaint about a site dropping in the search results after adding links to the disavow link …

Google Ads added a new section to the how asset groups work help documentation for pre-fill asset groups with generated assets. This section goes over new features like in-construction callout and automatic pre-fill.…

Google is working on fixing a bug with Local Service Ads where it seems Local Service Ads are being unlinked from the associated Google Business Profiles. There are also complaints of instability and slowness on the Local Service Ads platform.…