There are a number of reports that the performance reports, both for Google Search and the Generative AI features reports, are showing a decline in impressions and clicks (AI report does not show clicks) starting around August 12th and 13th. This seems like a bug because the drop seems to be super widespread.

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

Google is testing blue hyperlinks in the ad descriptions within the sponsored results. These are clickable, keyword rich, links in the ads, similar to what we saw last week with the keyword rich anchor text links but those were black links, not blue.

Google Ads is testing a new layout for review stars for a product in the mobile sponsored results within Google Search. I am pretty sure I’ve seen this layout before, but it is not common and I don’t think I covered it before.

Apple has added over 4,000 new IP addresses for Applebot, Apple’s Siri and Apple Intelligence crawler, to crawl from. Specifically, there are now 18 of /24 CIDR ranges and 3 of /28, which totals 4,656 new IP addresses.

Microsoft Advertising is testing displaying larger images in the Bing sponsored results. These images are full block size images that take up a lot of space in the search results.

Late on Friday, Google’s Robby Stein and Rajan Patel announced on X and X that Google Search is now using its latest AI model named Gemini 3.7 Flash. This model was first announced on Thursday, but Google made no mention of Search, it only said it is its “most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding […]

Google has posted a job listing for a Product Manager for Content Automation, I kid you not. The job posting was posted about two weeks ago and is available for two Google locations, Boulder, CO, USA and Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

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 Ads is removing the ability to manually set your language targeting next month…

Google Ads will roll out a change to language targeting that will remove the ability to manually adjust the language setting. This change is happening next month, in September 2026. Google said its ad systems already match languages automatically and enhanced AI prioritization will automatically select the most relevant ad language when there are eligible […]

A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in AI Overviews this week.

Google updated a help document within the Google Merchant Center help area to document that Google Merchant Center for Agencies can now link to up to 1,000 Merchant Center accounts. Previously, that number was not there, and now we know – up to 1,000 accounts can be linked to a single agency account.

As we know, Google has often declared that its crawlers, Googlebot, etc, come from Mountain View, California. But the truth is, that is where they self-declare the bots are coming from. Google has data centers all over the world, and even though Google may be declaring the crawler is coming from a specific location, it […]

This week, we of course had more Google search ranking volatility, this time on the 12th. Google is testing new AI buttons on its home page…