Daily Search Forum Recap: January 2, 2026

Google Ads announced a number of updates yesterday, across new reporting, shopping tools and more ad features, including, of course, AI ad features. “To help retailers maximize success and stay nimble in this year’s shorter holiday shopping season, today at our annual Think Retail event we shared some new updates to Google tools,” Google wrote.

Yesterday, OpenAI announced GPT-5 and it is free for all users within ChatGPT and other platforms. That includes Microsoft Copilot, which now is also using GPT-5’s models.

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. If you want your pages to show in Google’s AI Mode…