Microsoft is running a number of tests and experiments for Bing Search and the Copilot answers within Bing Search. These tests include font changes, link updates, product results and more.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT web search feature does offer a web cache, an offline, locally stored version of web pages that have been previously crawled. This should not come as a surprise, as all search engines store cached versions of web pages (even if they don’t show it to us).

Today is Google I/O, where Google announces many of its new features across its products, including Google Search. It is not uncommon to see Google search ranking volatility spike around Google I/O, and that is exactly what we are seeing today – the morning of Google I/O.

Google has added markdown files, .md.txt files, to the Google Search help documents. But John Mueller from Google said that these are not being used for Search or generative AI responses in Search.

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

Google AI Mode is now showing an edit and copy button when you mouse your cursor near the search term or prompt. Otheriwse, the edit and copy button go hidden. Copy, copies the prompt and edit lets you edit the prompt.

Google updated a number of its Google Ads help documentation to say “Primary conversion actions not used for optimization may be used to enhance predictions.” It is not clear if this is a change in what is actually happening or just a clarification to the Google help documentation about what was happening already.

Google Search is sometimes showing a label under the Live search results named “Updated by AI 1 minute ago.” So Google is labeling what content was updated using AI, which seems new to me.

On Friday, Google published a new help document named Optimizing your website for generative AI features on Google Search. This document covers much of what Googlers have said over the years, including a myth-busting section that will trigger some in the industry.

I asked the SEO community if they think AI Mode will replace Google Search. With Google I/O coming up this Tuesday, there is a lot of speculation around this. And with over 1,000 poll results in, I wanted to share that most of you think AI Mode will not replace Google Search.

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

This week in search I covered, yep, heated Google search ranking volatility kicking in the middle of this week. Google updated its spam policies to say it also applies to Google’s AI responses in Search. Google Discover…

Google is now showing directly hotel booking links directly inside the AI-generated responses within AI Mode. This can lead to sending hotels direct traffic in the AI response, which seems like a win to me.

Google updated the leading paragraph in the search spam policies to clarify that the policies apply to the Google Search AI responses, such as AI Overviews and AI Mode (or whatever else is AI-generated). Google said, “the Google Search spam policies also apply to generative AI responses in Google Search.”