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 has removed its help document named “Make OpenTable reservations in Google Maps” yesterday. It looks like that implies that Google Maps removed the integration it has with restaurant listings and making reservations with OpenTable.

As many of you know, Google has user-triggered fetchers including Google-NotebookLM. But with NotebookLM being renamed to Gemini Notebook, Google had to update the user agent name of Google-NotebookLM to Google-GeminiNotebook.

Google has updated the help document named How to fix: Google StoreBot crawler can’t access your in-store product page. The document has a number of big updates with a lot of clarifications including the user-agents, checking robots.txt, blocking IP addresses, page speed issues, reprocessing and how long it takes for your landing pages to be […]

The PPC community has been going wild over the change that is coming to Google Ads around bidding for campaigns limited by budget on August 18th. There is some belief that this is going to be a broader smart bidding update than what Google communicated.

This week, we saw some Google Search ranking volatility around July 11th, so I called it the 7-Eleven update. Bing said it does not do one-off search penalties because it is not scalable. Google Images celebrated its 25th anniversary…

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

Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt spoke about the Google Search Console indexing report in its latest Search Off the Record podcast. One item was on how quality issues, including low-quality AI-generated content, can result in those pages not being trusted and not being indexed by Google. That might lead to the page indexing report […]

Google sent out an email to those who use the Google Manufacturer Center to remind them that the ability to manually add or update products directly in Manufacturer Center has been removed. Instead, Google said use the Manufacturer Center API or upload a product file.

Gary Illyes from Google said that you are better off not using a lastmod date in your XML Sitemap if those dates are wrong. He said on Bluesky, “probably better off without the lastmods. at least you save a few bytes.”

Google announced it will consolidate and merge the Shopping ads and free listings policies into a single Shopping policy sometime in September 2026. Keep in mind, there may be specific ads or free listing policies listed in that consolidated policy document, where some policies only apply to ads and some only to free listings but […]

Apple has posted new Apple Maps policies where it now says it is prohibiting home services, such as plumbing, electrical, locksmith, HVAC, pest control, roofing, or general contracting services. It also says bail bonds, cryptocurrency ATMs and some medical services are also banned from Apple Maps Ads.

Google Ads updated its Performance Max product level reporting back on June 15th. This report now uses data from all Performance Max networks, rather than the subset it previously pulled from.

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 Image Search turned 25 years old and with that…

Google has confirmed that it is testing the hide and show sponsored results within the Google Shopping search results interface. Google launched the hide/show sponsored results in the main search results last October and is now testing this feature within Google Shopping.