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 dodged being broken up for a second time on its monopoly ruling…

In July, Google began to roll out AI performance reports within Google Merchant Center to United States based merchants. Google said the AI reports are now available to merchants within Australia, Canada, India & New Zealand as well.

Google Ads is showing under the status of your ads a label that says “Under Re-Review.” It says the ad is eligible but limited and “this ad is serving to a limited audience.” It then breaks down where the ad may not be serving.

Google added some new nuggets to its Google Ads help documentation on about conversion measurement, specifically on phone call conversions and offline conversions.

Over the past several days, I have been hearing from some publishers that while their content is being crawled, indexed, and served in Google Search results, some of it is missing from the news tab. It may then later show up in the news tab, much later. I was able to replicate this but it […]

As you know, Google rolled out Gemini 3.8 Flash for subscribers to AI Mode and some have started to play with it. And the early feedback is that AI Mode running Gemini 3.8 Flash is not link or citation friendly. Meaning, AI Mode with Google’s latest AI model is less likely to cite sources and […]

Google’s Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, said on X, “Gemini 3.8 Flash has landed in Search.” This comes only a couple of weeks after Google brought Gemini 3.7 Flash to AI Mode within Google Search.

A federal judge in Virginia ruled against breaking up Google’s ad tech business after Google was found to be a monopoly over its ad technology platforms. The judge ordered Google to end its practices that depress ad rates for web publishers, but declined to order divestiture of Google’s ad exchange and other technology.

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

Google Trends now lets you filter your results by category, either with or without a query. This can give you a more refined view of the trends for a specific query or zoom you out more on category level trends within Google Search.

Microsoft is testing removing the site names from the Bing search results and instead showing only the site’s URL. Google tested this about a year ago, so I guess it makes sense for Bing to test as well.

About a month ago, Google announced Tell Maps, a way for Google Maps contributors to use AI to tell Google Maps more about places. “You can suggest edits conversationally, right from Ask Maps and the Contribute tab,” Google said about Tell Maps.

Google Ads added a new section to the how asset groups work help documentation for pre-fill asset groups with generated assets. This section goes over new features like in-construction callout and automatic pre-fill.

Google AdSense will change how it counts impressions for display ads starting on February 17, 2027. Google will use what it calls the Begin-to-Render methodology and will only count the impression once the ad has successfully loaded and has started to render on the user’s device.