Google Search is testing a new category of search refinements named “you may also need.” These refinements show products that may be found in a specific e-commerce store.

Google has been placing listen buttons in the Google Search results in various locations, like knowledge panels and local packs. So it comes as no surprise to see them also in the AI Overviews.

As you know, Google Ads served other advertiser’s Merchant Center shopping ads on other advertiser accounts. Google promised to issue credits after hiding the data in reports because of privacy issues. Now, Google emailed advertisers who were impacted about the issue, letting them know they asked the advertisers who have their data to delete that data.

Google has confirmed it has fixed the search ranking bug that started over four days ago. The issue was first confirmed by Google on Friday morning, August 16th at around 1:48 am ET. Google confirmed the ranking issue was resolved today, August 20th, at 8:10 am ET.

Recently we saw a hidden gems stores section in the Google Search results, which seemed nothing like the hidden gems algorithm from last year. And now I am seeing another variation of that just named hidden gems, under a stores search refinement.

Google is now testing rounded outlines around some of its search result snippet features. This includes around the snippets in the local pack and also knowledge panels. I do wonder if this is a variation of the snippet background highlights from the other day.

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

John Mueller from Google did it again with his site and this time uploaded an audio file, in wav format, for his robots.txt file. You can go to it and listen to him read out his robots.txt rules in his own voice. It is a valid robots.txt file but I suspect zero search engines can understand it.

Google Search has this new feature named “mentioned in key answers.” This shows you which personalities, entities, within Google’s knowledge graph, are mentioned in the search results in Google.

For the past several months, many sites have been complaining over and over again that their image thumbnails for their websites were not showing up in the Google Search result snippets. Well, with the release of the August 2024 core update, many small publishers are starting to see their images show up in the search results again.

Google is testing adding a dynamic blue colored background highlight color when you hover your mouse cursor over a search result snippet. The whole background just behind that specific search result snippet will change from white, to a highlight blue color.

As you know, Google released the August 2024 core update on Thursday and then shortly after confirmed a ranking bug impacting a large number of search results. During that time, we have seen many reports from SEOs and site owners that they are starting to see positive movement for sites hit by the infamous September 2023 helpful content update.