Google released Gemini 4 Carbon, its “strongest model with frontier performance in cybersecurity capabilities and long-horizon agentic workflows across complex knowledge work, software engineering, and scientific reasoning,” and it is now available in Google Search via AI Mode for subscribers.

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 said it can take time for search to understand the unique value of new websites…

Microsoft Bing is testing asking searchers questions to personalize the shopping search results. In a test, Bing will show you questions and say, “Let’s personalize your results,” then ask you a number of questions to fine-tune your shopping search results.

You can now filter your product results to show non-incentivized reviews only. When you click on a product in the search results, either normal search or AI Mode, the product listing detail panel will show up on the right, and for there, you can filter the reviews to show “Non-incentivized only.”

Google Ads is rolling out a new option named “Ads with pay-per-lead goals terms.” Advertisers must opt into this setting to activate it.

Google’s John Mueller said it can take Google Search some time to understand a new site’s “unique value” and then rank it accordingly. He said on Bluesky in response to a new site not being fully indexed quickly enough, “It’s a fairly new site, and you’ve been busy with content – it can take time […]

Google is testing removing the action buttons, reviews, photos, etc from the AI Overview version of the local pack. This makes it harder for searchers to visit your website, call your business, get directions and so on, from Google Search.

OpenAI announced a month ago that it would release a “new visual ad format in ChatGPT” to show ads while ChatGPT makes images for users. Well, that ad format seems to be live – because if you ask ChatGPT to make an image, it will show an ad while the image is being generated.

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. OpenAI is working on a ChatGPT like Search Console, we have a screenshot…

Google may automatically add booking links to some local business profile listings. I noticed that on my own profile, I had a booking link added and Brandon Schmidt, Joy Hawkins and Syed Amir posted on Friday that this seems to be happening for more businesses. And in some cases, the booking links break and go […]

Microsoft is showing ads at the top of the Bing AI Mode (formerly Copilot Search) results. Bing will show both normal search ads and also shopping ads at the top.

Google is testing more AI-generated summaries within its search ads. This one shows AI-generated summaries above the grouping of the sponsored results, summarizing all the ads from all the advertisers, with also AI-generated summaries below each ad description.

It’s been about two weeks since we reported on a Google Search ranking update, whether confirmed or unconfirmed. But the truth is, the October 27th update lingered on for like a full week. Since then, ranking volatility has been relatively calm, but that may be changing over the past 24 hours.

A couple of weeks ago, Google announced Multiturn ads, ads show up on responses to follow-up user queries. Well, those ads seem live. I was testing AI Mode on Friday afternoon and here are screenshots and videos of Multiturn ads in AI Mode.

Google has updated two help documents, the aggregator unit and supplier unit documentation to include support for “things to do” queries. Things to do is not new in Google Search, but Google has just added them to the aggregator unit and supplier unit help documentation.