Google seems to have added WhatsApp phone numbers to tons of Google Business Profiles automatically over the past week. Google has sent email notifications to some of those businesses, and in some cases, the numbers are wrong or they are not reachable.

Google will soon allow you to connect Google Business Profiles with Gemini. This will allow you to ask questions about your reviews, your local listing and performance within Google Maps and Google Search.

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. Google Search was unaffected by yesterday’s Gemini outage…

Google Ads is testing showing images within the sitelinks portion of the ad unit. I’ve seen plenty of images in the main portion of the sponsored search results but I don’t believe I’ve seen images in the sitelinks area of the sponsored results.

OpenAI has upgraded its ChatGPT Ads Manager tool to allow advertisers to upload product feeds that automatically create ads for each uploaded product. This obviously makes it easier to have ads on ChatGPT for retailers.

Google is testing using a dotted underline and a shaded URL for the search result snippet’s URL. Yesterday, we covered how Google was testing a blue dotted underline for sitelinks within the sponsored results. But now we are seeing dotted underlines and shaded URLs for organic search result snippets.

Google Merchant Center has API issues, causing a temporary delay in product submissions. Google posted the notice in the Merchant Center portal and on its status page.

Google Search and its search generative features like AI Mode and AI Overviews were unaffected by yesterday’s Gemini outage. Gemini, which is Google’s AI product, had several outages throughout yesterday and we know that Gemini powers some of Google Search, so I was curious if the outage had any impact on Google Search.