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.

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 explained how using AI in isolation works better for them…

Nikola Todorovic, Director of Software Engineering at Google Search, spoke about a presentation he gave at Zurich in December at Google Search Central live (I was there). He dug into it on a recent Search Off the Record named How AI Is Changing Google Search and SEO. In there, he explained how AI and machine […]

Google is testing a new label for the search results snippet named “Fresh updates.” This was spotted on a weather website result, Accuweather.

Google Ads has added a new option (although, I think Google has said this is coming) under the “add product source” section where you can select how to add products to your Google Ads account. The option reads, “Use AI to add products – beta.”

IAC, the owners of Ask.com, have decided to get out of the search business and shut down one of the oldest and most legendary search engines of all time – Ask.com, formerly Ask Jeeves. IAC wrote, “As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes […]