While I think SEOs spend way too much time and effort on Core Web Vitals, many do ask why does the Google Chrome UX report often not match what is shown in the Google Search Console core web vitals report. Well, as Google’s Barry Pollard said, they look at “different measures.”

Google AI Overviews has this feature where you can select the text in the AI Overview and an overlay with explain this, related images and copy text (sometimes other features) overlay as buttons for you to do more with. Google even tested keyboard shortcuts for it. But now Google is testing this in a bottom […]

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

Google has updated its Gambling and games policy to now allow sports betting ads in the state of Missouri. This change is in effect as of August 15, 2025.

Google may have added a new convenient feature in the Google Ads console that lets you preview ads directly from the view assets detail screen. Clicking on the preview ad button shows the preview within the same window.

Google Ads will be removing the language targeting setting from Google Ads Search campaigns by the end of 2025. This notice was posted quietly at the top of a Google help document in the Google Ads help center.

As I briefly mentioned two weeks ago, Google has updated the Google Ads API documentation. Now, Google had told us what exactly was updated from the previous version. Google said these updates were “designed to make your development experience smoother, faster, and more intuitive.”

It has been week after week of intensely heated Google search ranking volatility, and it is time I start reporting when the volatility cools or calms down. Well, this weekend we had a bit of a cooling period, where the chatter within the SEO community lightened up and the third-party tools showed lower volatility.

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

Google recently launched the preferred sources for top stories within Google Search. But there is no way for publishers to know how many of their readers selected their website as a preferred source. But Google said they are “looking into this” and may provide such data to publishers.

Google Search started to roll out the age verification that it said it would begin doing a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is not just YouTube, it goes across Google Search ads too, as we reported back a couple of weeks ago.

Google’s John Mueller replied to a lot of the hype around all GEO, AIO, AEO, etc topics floating around the SEO space. John said on Bluesky, “The higher the urgency, and the stronger the push of new acronyms, the more likely they’re just making spam and scamming.”

The studies we have thus seen from third parties have all said traffic from Google Search to websites has declined a lot since AI Overviews came out. But we have a new study from Chartbeat that says traffic to news publishers from Google (including Discover) has been stable over the past few years.

The Google search ranking volatility has not calmed down since the June core update and we are in mid-August and expecting another core update soon. Google launched the preferred sources feature for Top Stories…

It looks like Microsoft Copilot, formerly Bing Chat, is using Google Maps reviews for its local AI results. It also links directly to the Google Maps business profile listing when you click on the review stars and ratings from Copilot.