Daily Search Forum Recap: January 6, 2026

Gary Illyes from Google ranted on Bluesky about folks updating the lastmod date in their sitemap files when all they have changed was the date in their footers copyright line from 2024 to 2025. Gary said, don’t do it, it is not enough of a change to the page’s content to warrant a lastmod date update.

Raptive, an advertising-sales company representing thousands of websites (content publishers), filed a 93-page complaint against Google in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The suit says “Google has carried out a sophisticated, anticompetitive, and deceptive scheme for well over a decade” by “manipulating auctions for ad space across the Internet.”

Google has posted a new help document in the Google Ads help area named About commerce audience sharing through Google Ads. It explains that “Commerce audience sharing allows commerce partners, such as retailers or marketplaces, to share first-party data segments with their advertising partners, such as brands or sellers.”