Google Image Search turned 25 years old and to celebrate, Google revamped the Google Image Search home page. Instead of a clean image search box, Google added an image gallery and placed a search bar at the top of the page.

Google AI Overviews can now generate AI images based on your questions, directly in the AI Overview response in Google Search. Google wrote, “To help bring those unique ideas to life, we’re bringing image generation directly into AI Overviews in Search.”

OpenAI added more features to ChatGPT Ads Manager, the ability to exclude your ads from showing based on geo-location and/or audience lists. ChatGPT Ads Manager continues to rapidly add new advertising features to its ad platform.

Google announced it is no longer allowing the advertisement of prediction markets contracts and related products ads in Michigan and New York. Plus, Google also expanded Google Shopping ads and free listings eligibility to more countries.

Google’s John Mueller noted that if your A/B tests are “significantly different” from one and the other, then that “could be visible in search results too.” He also said, “Depending on your setup, what might happen is that one or the other version is used for indexing.”

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

OpenAI made a number of clarification changes to its crawler help documentation to say that version number of the user-agent string may be updated and it may use a user-agent string with an additional robots.txt marker.

Google Merchant Center is rolling out a beta AI Performance report that shares how well your products are performing within AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google wrote this report “specifically revealing your performance on AI Mode and AI Overviews.”

OpenAI has added new metrics to the ChatGPT Ads manager advertiser control center. The new metrics include Attributed Sales Value and Sales ROAS.

Google Ads has posted that it has (1) expanded its alcohol policy to expand the approved geographic locations and (2) updated the gambling and games policy to expand the certification requirements to all categories under this policy.

Google Ads is now asking you to note a justification for when you request the removal of access for a user in your Google Ads account. Then that request is sent to another administrator for approval, with the justification you entered.

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

Google Ads email support option seems broken right now, when you try to use it, you get a notice that reads in red, “Something went wrong. Please try again.”

We may have had another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update around July 11th, which I will call the 7-Eleven update. It has been an unusual time since the completion of the June 2026 spam update, where I was on the verge of covering a few unconfrimed updates but it seems the chatter in the SEO […]