Google Ads has a newish option when you create an asset group named “Apply theme to asset group.” An asset group is made of images, logos, headlines, descriptions, videos, sitelinks, assets, and audience signals that you upload or that are automatically created by Google AI during your Performance Max campaign setup.

Google is testing a large “Visit site” button on the sponsored results, the Google Ads, within the Google Search results. Google has done this before for organic sitelinks and map results, and even Bing did it for some branded-style search results.

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

Microsoft Bing is testing product detail screens, overlays, when you click on a product listing within the Bing search results. Bing will overlay a product detail screen, with the products images, description, the retailers and prices they sell it at, price insights and history, related products and more.

OpenAI’s ad platform, ChatGPT Ads, is now using AI (I guess) to generate ads for you. The ad platform lets you click on “add new ad,” which then says, “Generated ads for you,” and then lets you review, edit, and approve that generated ad.

Back in early May, Google announced five new ways to explore the web with generative AI in Google Search. One was a feature that was titled “Further Exploration” at the bottom of the AI Overview within Google Search. Well, now it seems some are seeing this feature in the wild.

Those of you who use the Google and YouTube Shopify app to sync your products automatically from Shopify to Google Merchant Center may have a huge headache to deal with after August 18, 2026. The rumor is that you will need to reinstall the app by this date and when you do this, every product […]

John Mueller from Google said that the new Content Signals robots.txt directive invented by Cloudflare last year has “no effects whatsoever for any crawler or LLM.” He added that it “just adds bloat and future maintenance to your robots.txt file.” As far as he knows, he said, none of the crawlers or LLMs use the […]

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 Local reviews are disappearing from many businesses…

Google will add to existing penalties or restrictions on your Google Business Profiles if you continue to violate the same policy over and over again. The initial restriction might be 30 days but then if you are caught doing the same thing, Google can make that restriction twice as long.

Google is testing updating the design for the local pack and places listings within Google Search. The map was moved to the top, instead of on the right and the action buttons are also moved and changed. I am not sure which version I like more, but here is what changed.

This week, I covered that Google’s June 2026 spam update completed last Friday afternoon. Fraudulent DMCA takedown requests are breaking Google Search and no one seems to be doing anything. Google AI Mode improved links…

Google reviews seem to be disappearing from Google Business Profile local listings. In the past few days or so there has been an influx of complaints in the Google Business Profile forums. I have not seen Google respond to the complaints, but either there is a bug or a change to the review policy that […]

Google has fixed the page indexing report within Google Search Console after it was struck and delayed for over three weeks. It was literally just fixed within minutes of this story going live, as I continuously check the report like an unwell-OCD man.