Google Ads is rolling out two new “controls” in the advertising platform named channel prioritization and budget allocation. These are rolling out globally across Google Search, Google Shopping, Performance Max, and soon Demand Gen.

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 rolled out its latest Gemini model, Argon 4…

Google Ads seems to be testing a new report named the Search terms and ad combinations report. This report shows how search queries, ad creatives, and landing pages work together.

Google is testing placing the left vertical sidebar you see in AI Mode results on the main Google web search results page. This places the small super G Google logo on the left, with the chat history lines, a way to start a chat with AI Mode and the settings icon all on the left […]

Microsoft Bing is testing placing a large single ad unit at the top of the Bing Search results page. The sponsored ad has a gray background, with an image and call to action button, and of course, the url, title and ad description.

OpenAI seems to have removed or replaced the UTM parameters it placed on links within the ChatGPT results. This makes it harder to know if a click came from ChatGPT versus some other platform. This seems to have started with the release of GPT”6, which was a week ago.

Google added a section for prediction markets to the main Google Ads policies documentation last week. Google has posted updates and policies on advertising for prediction markets on Google Ads numerous times before, but now it has been added to the main policy document.

OpenAI has humans who are reaching out to advertisers to help them manage their ChatGPT Ads. These ad representatives are called ChatGPT Ads Account Managers and I guess are real humans who help agencies manage ads for their customers?

Google’s Martin Splitt and John Mueller just posted a Search Off the Record podcast on the topic of PDFs, it is named PDFs in Search: Indexing, AI & Pitfalls. It goes over how PDFs are converted for crawling and indexing, how Google processes links, images, what are the file limits and do they rank in […]

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon a couple of weeks ago and today announced that it is now an option in Google Search via AI Mode for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers globally.

Microsoft Bing just announced a new addition to the AI performance reports in Bing Webmaster Tools named Topics Portfolio. Topics Portfolio shows you the “presence is distributed across themes, how much demand each theme represents, how competitive each theme is and where your site has room to grow.”

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

The date picker in the performance reports in Google Search Console seems to be currently broken. The end date seems to be stuck in 1969 and when I try to change it, it says “Date can’t be after 1969-12-31.”

Google may show “certain pharmaceutical products” and pharmaceutical drugs within ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews. A Google spokesperson told Adweek it has “recently expanded to include certain pharmaceutical products” within these surfaces.

Google posted a new job posting to hire a Principal, UX, Search Discover who will lead efforts to transform Google Discover into a “proactive, hyper-personalized concierge experience.”