Microsoft is testing using really large images in the Bing Search Copilot ads. I don’t believe I’ve seen such large ads in this ad unit before, so it seems new to me.

This is just a programming note that I will be 100% offline starting Wednesday night (October 1st) through Thursday night (October 2nd) for Yom Kippur. I am not scheduling any stories on Yom Kippur…

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

Google announced new message assets requirements for Google Ads. These new requirements aim “to ensure a good user experience” and go into effect on October 30, 2025.

Google’s spam update completed after almost a month rollout, it was pretty wild and got even more wild after the rollout completed. Google AI Mode rolled out to more languages, is more visual, is testing agentic experiences and much more. Google dropped the num parameter causing a huge mess for so many of us.

In June, Google began testing showing a new answer box for emoji related queries. So when you search for a specific type of emoji, Google will give you the emoji options that you can copy directly from the search results page instead of going to a third-party publisher site. Well, that seems fully live as […]

Here is a new interview published yesterday by The Economic Times Podcasts with Elizabeth Reid, VP of Google Search. She spoke about Google’s progression of AI in Search, content quality, SEO, blue links, traffic, the ecosystem, agentic features and more.

Google Ads has announced several new features, including segmentation in asset reporting and enhancements to channel performance reporting. Google told me that this continues to provide advertisers with the visibility they are seeking.

Google is testing having the citations stick to the top (of the AI Overview section only) as you scroll down past the AI Overview. This keeps those citations more in view, as you scroll over the AI Overview.

Google announced that AI Mode had been updated to handle and respond more visually. So AI Mode responses both understand your queries in a more visual way and respond with more visual responses. Google said the responses aim at sparking inspiration, amongst other things.

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 added a new report to the Google AdSense reporting named traffic source breakdown. This report helps you understand the origins of your page traffic. It also categorizes traffic based on whether it arrived directly to your page, or from popular and classified platforms.

Google is testing not underlining the search result snippets when you hover your mouse cursor over the snippet. Generally, Google will add an underline to the title of the link (sometimes the whole snippet) when you hover over it. But here, Google is testing not doing that.

Google is testing a blue progress bar under the Shopping Ads carousel in the search results. As you scroll the carousel to see more products, the blue progress bar will indicate how much of the carousel is remaining to be seen.

OpenAI announced Instant Checkout in ChatGPT, allowing you to make purchases directly in ChatGPT. This is powered by the Agentic Commerce Protocol that is built with Stripe.