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

Google seems to be rolling out the new Generative AI controls in Google Search Console to sites outside the United Kingdom. It initially launched a month ago only for .co.uk based sites but now we are seeing it roll out for some (not all) sites based in the US and other countries.

Google is testing placing favicons in the sitelinks portion of the sponsored results from Google Ads. Generally, we only see the favicon in the main sponsored or organic listing, but here Google is testing showing favicons for all the links in the sponsored results grouping, including all the sitelinks.

Google announced it has expanded Search campaigns for Travel to an open beta for the Things to Do and Events verticals. This brings you Search and AI Max features for those types of campaigns.

Google Ads updated its alcohol policy to provide more examples of ad formats that don’t allow alcohol ads. The list previously only had reservation display ads and Google TV masthead ads, and it was updated app install image ads, app install video ads, consumer ratings annotations, Discovery ads, dynamic search ads and Gmail ads.

Google has removed “Next” from Google Merchant Center Next and it is now to be known as just Google Merchant Center. Google announced this over here saying, “The platform you use today will simply be referred to as Google Merchant Center.”

Nick Fox, Senior Vice President of Knowledge & Information at Google, said Google Search “broke all prior usage records and saw its highest usage in history” after Argentina scored its winning goal in yesterday’s World Cup match.

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 is testing using tracking URLs within its search results…

Google has posted some new frequently asked questions to the Google Ads AI Max help document. The questions cover what is AI Max, why you should use AI Max, that AI Max is not a new campaign type, how AI Max differs from PMax and what happens when you upgrade to AI Max.

Google Search normally shows product listings with pricing on them, but sometimes it can show “Contact store for price” when it Google does not know the price. I am not sure if I’ve seen this before, and it might not be new, but it did really stand out as unusual. I mean, you’d think Google […]

Google has updated its Google Business Profile appeal process and flow to allow businesses to upload their evidence for the business profile suspension. The old flow had a different form where you would later upload that evidence, and you only had 60 minutes to do so. This is now built into the appeal workflow in […]

For the past week or so, I have heard a few folks notice that Google is appending tracking URLs to the search results. So when you click on a search result, instead of the URL going directly to that site, Google is using a google.com/goto URL as a passthrough URL that then passes through to […]

Google added a useful detail to the active conversions screen, to show you when was the last time Google Ads was able to trigger a ping event on your conversion feed and data. When you hover over the conversions, it will show you the date and time for the “last event ping.”

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…