Google is now testing adding the Preferred Sources label in the AI Mode links and citations. It is unclear if Google is showing this link in this AI Mode response because it is a preferred source or if it is just labeling it, and it would show the source anyway – does that make sense?

Google added the hasAdultConsideration property to the Merchant listing and Product variant documentation, and it is now officially supported and listed as a recommended property for both Merchant listing and Product variant structured data with Google Search.

Google Search is now using Gemini 3.5 Flash to power AI Mode globally and also there are several new agentic features in and coming to Google Search. These agentic features include information agents, agentic coding, personal intelligence is expanding and Universal Cart, UCP and AP2.

Google has released the first major update to the search bar, the search box, ever – Google is calling it the intelligent Search box. We saw variations of this being tested over the past year, and now it is officially rolling out – as per Liz Reid, Google’s Head of Search, via Google I/O.

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

Microsoft is running a number of tests and experiments for Bing Search and the Copilot answers within Bing Search. These tests include font changes, link updates, product results and more.

Microsoft, not to be outdone by Google, added AI citations to Microsoft Clarity, its web analytics tool. This report shows how your content is referenced in AI-generated answers.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT web search feature does offer a web cache, an offline, locally stored version of web pages that have been previously crawled. This should not come as a surprise, as all search engines store cached versions of web pages (even if they don’t show it to us).

Today is Google I/O, where Google announces many of its new features across its products, including Google Search. It is not uncommon to see Google search ranking volatility spike around Google I/O, and that is exactly what we are seeing today – the morning of Google I/O.

Google has added markdown files, .md.txt files, to the Google Search help documents. But John Mueller from Google said that these are not being used for Search or generative AI responses in Search.

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

Google AI Mode is now showing an edit and copy button when you mouse your cursor near the search term or prompt. Otheriwse, the edit and copy button go hidden. Copy, copies the prompt and edit lets you edit the prompt.

Google updated a number of its Google Ads help documentation to say “Primary conversion actions not used for optimization may be used to enhance predictions.” It is not clear if this is a change in what is actually happening or just a clarification to the Google help documentation about what was happening already.

Google Search is sometimes showing a label under the Live search results named “Updated by AI 1 minute ago.” So Google is labeling what content was updated using AI, which seems new to me.