Microsoft has implemented and continues to deploy mitigations against prompt injection attacks in Copilot, the company announced last week. Spammers were using the “Summarize with AI” type of buttons to trick AI engines into believing or trusting a specific company or response.

Google reportedly updated its Google Ads support contact form to add a disclaimer and checkbox to say you authorize “Google Ads specialist on behalf of your company to make the changes above directly to your company’s Google Ads account to reproduce and troubleshoot the issue.”

Microsoft Advertising seems to be testing a new design for the Bing shopping ads carousel. The new design fills the screen more from left to right than the old design and is just wider in general.

Google is testing removing the dates from the articles shown in the Google Discover feed. This is a limited test, Google confirmed, to see the impact of removing the date value.

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

The Google Search Console page indexing report seems to be missing a chunk of data. The missing data is from December 15th and earlier, but we do have data from December 15th (14th) through today.

Google is now (past few weeks?) sending out emails when it detects fake or incentivised reviews on your Google Business Profile. Google also says it has removed the fake or incentivised reviews that were identified.

We’ve seen Google use AI for local panel descriptions, menus and more. But now Google is also using AI to generate a list of services a local business offers.

Google’s John Mueller said a spike/increase in impressions within Google Search Console does not cause any specific problems within Google Search. There are a number of posts where some users are seeing a surge in impressions within Google Search Console but clicks and traffic have not changed.

Microsoft is testing a new user interface for the Bing Copilot AI responses. The new interface shows these link and references cards both inline and on the right.

Google’s John Mueller said that if Google is not convinced that there are new and important content to index on your site, then it won’t use the sitemap file on your site. Just because you have a sitemap file, it does not mean Google will index all the pages in that file.

Some are wondering when the Google Search ranking volatility will begin to cool down a bit. While many of the tools continue to show heated volatility over the past weeks, some are starting to show signs of cooling.

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

As you know, OpenAI said they would release ads in ChatGPT and then about ten days ago, said the ads went live for a limited number of users. Since then, we have not seen reports of anyone seeing ads in the wild within ChatGPT until now.