I am sad to report that Nick Wilsdon has passed away yesterday, October 11, 2026. Nick Wilsdon has been in the SEO industry for over two decades and was a close friend to many in the search marketing industry.

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

Yes, Google often shows AI Overviews when Google Search cannot match specific web pages or when it thinks your query is a typo. In fact, Google AI Overviews can respond by saying, “It looks like your message might have been a typo or random keyboard input.”

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center low image quality help document to now say that poor image quality will not stop those products from showing in Google Search or Google Ads.

Google is testing using AI to come up with suggested goals and assets for your Google Ads campaigns. Google has confirmed this is a current test.

Microsoft announced Microsoft-Decision-1 last week and it is already being experimented with in both Bing Search and Copilot. Microsoft-Decision-1 is a “decision-scoring model delivers top performance in latency and quality on structured decision tasks to outperform both LLMs and other decision models,” Microsoft said.

Google seems to be successfully blocking enough of the attempts of scrapers from trying to scrape data from its search results page over the past few weeks than it has in a long time. We reported this a few weeks ago, and I am surprised to see that many tools still struggle with Google Search […]

The search performance reports in Google Search Console is now over 64 hours delayed, which is incredibly unusual for this report. Generally, we see this report updated within a few hours but over the past few days, post-spam update, the report has been lagging.

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 launched a new UGC fresh data program document that Reddit…

was a super busy week, so there is a lot more content in this recap compared to most. We start off with the Google September 2026 spam update completing, it had its third and final phase earlier in the week. Google may be issuing more manual action search penalties…

Google Ads now lets you preview the assets generated by Google AI for your Google Ads AI Max campaigns. Google added these details to the About text customization in Search campaigns help page under a new section named “Text customization asset previews.”

Microsoft Bing is getting fancy and stylish with its line separators in Bing Search. Bing is testing fading the line separators at the end of the lines.

Microsoft Bing is testing dropping favicons from Bing search result snippets. This makes the search results page look much less graphical.

Microsoft Bing is testing showing the local pack results without borders. Normally, the local pack has a small outline border around the results, but for some reason, Microsoft is testing not placing the outline around the local results.

Google has made major updates to the Reader Revenue Manager homepage. It was a large redesign of the page, it also now lists AI Mode, AI Overviews, and Gemini, added a matrix to the page and moved things around as well.