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.

We are seeing big changes and swings with the Google Search results……

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.…

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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 …

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 …

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.…

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, …

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.…

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

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.…

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 …

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.…

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 …