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

Since Google added AI Overviews to Google Search, many of us have been experiencing what some call the crocodile effect, also known as the great decoupling. But according to new data, the opposite may be happening with Google Shopping Ads.

Google accidentally showed the prompts it uses for some of the insights reports within Google Merchant Center. Instead of providing an easy-to-digest summary of the top product that drove your performance within Merchant Center, it spit out the prompts and actions, like “thinking,” “role,” “Formatting,” and so on.

Google’s new DMA booking search widgets now carry a disclaimer to explain that the prices listed in that block are customized “based on factors such as your device type.” It is unclear what other factors are being used outside of “device type,” but you’d have to assume the users location, language and other factors.

Google Ads posted a new help document about automated promotions that describes how Google Ads can and does automatically identify and apply active promotional offers directly from your website.

Google’s John Mueller went off again on programmatic SEO, this time saying that programmatic SEO can “often leads to a site that’s either spam, borderline spam, or low quality,” he wrote. These tactics can often lead Google’s “systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages.”