Google announced five new ways in how it is improving linking to web pages from AI Mode and AI Overviews. Some of these we saw Google testing earlier, and I (we) were fans of these changes and I am glad to see Google officially roll them out.

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…

A few weeks ago, we uncovered the beta self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT Ads. It was before it officially launched but now OpenAI officially announced its “beta self-serve Ads Manager that allows advertisers in the US to sign up and purchase ads directly to appear in ChatGPT.”

Google is testing letting searchers select the Gemini 3 model they want to use directly in the Google Search bar. The options can include, Pro, Fast or Auto, from what I can see.

Google is testing an update to the citations, anchor links, and favicons within the AI Mode results. This new experience seems to make the citations more clickable because the embedded links have larger favicons and seem to appear more often, near the text it is referencing.

In February, Google announced that UCP, Universal Commerce Protocol, powered checkout is available in AI Mode. Well, now you can use UCP powered checkout in the main search results for some retailers like Wayfair.

Google is showing the full author name and the source, like LinkedIn – and name or Medium – and name, for the citations. It makes sense for these social platforms to show the name, because anyone can write anything on these platforms, so knowing the name makes it more useful.

The Google Local Service Ads account access tab has not been loading and working for advertisers for the past several days. There are numerous reports of it failing throughout the day and it has become a huge frustration for a number of Google advertisers.

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

Google posted new developer documentation for how to authenticate requests with Web Bot Auth. This is a “new cryptographic protocol that helps websites to validate that bots are authentic,” Google wrote.

Similarweb published some data sharing the click-through rates for OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads. The overall CTR for ChatGPT ads are 0.68%, the top quartile is 1%, the best brands are 1.57% and the peak CTR is 5.4%.

Google has posted an update and emailed advertisers on changes to its Google Ads data retention policy. What changed? Here is what Google said.

Microsoft, during its earnings call last week, announced that Bing hit a huge milestone of 1 billion monthly active users. Krishna Madhavan from Microsoft later confirmed these “users” do not include AI agents but are real actual humans.

Google seems to be suspending Google Business Profiles due to user account restrictions. There may have been a wave of suspensions over the past several days related to this issue and local SEO experts are unclear if this is a bug or some other issue.