As you know, Google announced a new search spam penalty for back button hijacking. Site owners have until June 15, 2026 to remove any such functionality from its site or it will be subject to a manual action and/or automated algorithmic adjustment. Now, Google is sending email notifications through Search Console as reminders.

Google is now showing the number of reviews that were deleted on a specific Google Business Profile due to defamation complaints. This seems to be live in Germany and not other countries right now.

Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft Bing demo’ed some new AI reporting features that should launch within Bing Webmaster Tools soon. They include citation share, grounding query intent, semantic topic label, and GEO-focused recommendations.

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

Google now lets you edit videos within your Google Business Profiles, directly in the Google app. There are basic editing tools, probably more than most businesses require, to update and edit the videos that they want to show in Google Maps and Google Search.

Microsoft Bing is testing making the links within the AI results, the Copilot Search results, less clickable. Typically, the whole line of text is clickable to the citation but here, Bing is testing only linking the citation mark at the end.

Google is testing adding an AI label to some of the search ads, the sponsored results, within the search results. Clicking on the AI label does nothing, according to Brodie Clark who spotted this.

Google’s Ginny Marvin, the Ads Liaison, has confirmed there are delays for some Demand Gen Image ads to be approved. Some of these delays are several days pending, not hours, but several days.

Google may be doing something right with improving the click-through rates from the organic search results page that contain AI Overviews. An update report shows the CTR is improving, after numerous times showing the CTR has been declining.

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 now won’t use spam reports with personal identifiable information. Google’s head of search…

A couple of weeks ago, Google stunned many by saying that they updated their spam report to pass along all information to the site that you enter in the spam report. There was a lot of backlash to that and Google reverted, now saying if there is personally identifying information, it won’t process the spam […]

About a year ago, Google announced you can opt in, within Search Labs, to see Audio Overviews within the Google Search results. But now, I saw two different people say they saw it without opting into the experiment. So Google may be testing this in the wild.

Google is working to fix a bug in AI Mode where it is changing the title links and citations. This bug was spotted by Lily Ray who wrote on X, “Google is changing title links / citations in AI Mode – just the name of the person, with a link to the place they were […]

Here is another interview from Google’s head of search, Liz Reid. This one was done on the Odd Lots Bloomberg podcast and is titled “Google’s Liz Reid on Who Will Own Search in a World of AI.”