Gary Illyes and Chery Prommawin released their second video in the Non-Canonical Cabinet series; this one is named What can you actually put in a robots.txt? Here they discuss what is, and is not, supported by robots.txt files. And while Google may support features or directives, other search engines or AI crawlers might not.

The World Wide Web is rushing now to fix and patch its servers for the critical PHP exploit known as PHP2Shell. Most are able to patch these without downtime but many sites are going offline until the patch is implemented, just to be super safe. Google’s John Mueller offered advice on how to handle Google […]

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 ranking volatility and chatter seem to have spiked big time in the past 24 hours. Google updated its URL best practices document…

Google updated its Control what you share with Google Search help document to add “include existing options such as the robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, X-Robots-Tag, and the Search generative AI control,” Google said. In addition to Google updating its URL structure best practices for Google Search help document this morning.

Google has made a minor change to its URL structure best practices for Google Search help document. Specifically, the “Use hyphens to separate words” section. The overall meaning of the section really did not change but Google did update it, so I wanted to point out the update.

Google has updated its about fast shipping in Merchant Center help document to detail the days Google expects for you to qualify for fast shipping in Merchant Center. This is specific for listings in the AU, CA, IN, JP, GB, US.

Google Search rankings seem to be getting super volatile again, this is alongside the search industry chatter that has been spiking to unusual levels over the past 24 hours. As a reminder, the third-party tracking tools may still be struggling to track the volatility, but when I look at that, coupled with the industry chatter, […]

Google Ads is possibly rolling out a new asset group A/B test toggle named “Save and test asset group changes.” This lets you measure the impact of changing headlines, descriptions, images and videos.

Google Ads has updated the old “Duration of the learning period for campaigns and what affects it” to be renamed to “About Smart Bidding learning.” This is a major help document rewrite, not just a headline change. It mentions a new seven-day limit, a different explanation of what triggers and does not trigger learning and […]

OpenAI sent out emails to advertisers, including me, telling me they have automatically enabled creative enhancements for my ChatGPT Ads. The email says this is starting on October 30, 2026 and I can opt out of creative enhancements or change your settings at any time in Ads Manager.

Google has announced it is expanding its Google Ads Financial Services Verification requirements to the United States and Canada. Google is working with the American Bankers Association and Canadian Bankers Association for this.

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

Google seems to be removing the AI Overviews label from some of the search results that are AI Overviews. The desktop version is missing the AI Overview label, while the mobile version has the AI Overview label.

The Google Ads team posted a new help document that talks about the length of booking bid adjustment in legacy Hotel campaigns versus Search campaigns for travel. Hotel campaigns multiply your base bid by the traveler’s itinerary length of stay (LoS) but Search campaigns for travel (SCT) don’t.