Google is testing a new label for its search results snippets, this one is named “you may like.” I am not sure how Google knows you may like this search result snippet, unless this is a variation of how Google names the “you visit often” label?

Google will begin showing photos in your Local Service Ads that come from your Local Service Ads profile. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, wrote on X yesterday, “Starting today, we’ll begin selecting photos from your LSA profile to show in your ads.”

Google is testing sending the searcher to the short videos tab after clicking on the more videos button, instead of dynamically loading videos underneath the videos you are currently looking at in the search results.

Google Ads has released an update it the Google Ads API, version 17.1. Version 17.1 includes shareable ad previews, removing specified automatically created assets linked to Responsive Search Ads, retrieving offline conversion diagnostics, offline diagnostics report metrics, standard bidding strategies for video campaigns, and more.

Google notified some advertisers last night that they are expected to receive $16 million dollars and $6 million dollars in credits. I am sure others got similar astronomical credit notices. Don’t retire anytime soon, it is a bug, and Google will fix the amount if they have not done so already.

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

Google Business Profiles performance report is no longer showing the “call” tab that shows you statistics and data on searchers who called you from Google Search and Google Maps. I suspect this might be related to the Google Business Profile call history going away, as we reported earlier.

Google is testing yet another call extension ad format, this one shows the advertiser’s name below the clickable phone number. This gives a lot more visibility to the phone number and the CTA for the call extension.

As part of the DOJ ruling that Google is a monopoly, the document noted that Apple has its own search index and the index size is of billions of websites. The specific number was redacted but it said, “Apple maintains an index of about X billion websites.”

Google Ads will transition the functionality of Smart Campaign into Performance Max campaigns in the coming months. Google said “Performance Max provides all the same benefits of Smart campaigns and more,” in an email sent to one advertiser.

Google Ads may be testing a new search ad format named “featured options.” This shows ad listings in this thing card layouts that should be related to events.

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

It’s been about a week since the superheated and bursting Google Search ranking volatility, and since then, it did happen to calm down a bit, at least relatively speaking. But now I am seeing the Google search ranking volatility heat up again.

The big Google Ads reporting outage from the eve of August 1st was an intentional outage due to Google serving ads for products from other Google Merchant Center accounts. This was not just an ad spend issue but also a privacy and data issue for Google advertisers. But don’t worry, Google will issue credits to the “small fraction of advertisers” that were impacted by this.

Google Trends began rolling out a new design for the trending now page a day or so ago. The new design seems to give you more filter options and provide more keyword data on the same page.

Google is testing the “see also” carousel on Google Business Profiles. This means, someone can be looking directly at your local listing on Google, maybe because they searched for your company name, and Google can be suggesting competitors right under your listing.

Google Search Console is rolling out a new recommendations feature where Google will show you site improvement recommendations. These recommendations are based on the data in Search Console and aim to help improve your site’s performance on Google Search.