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

Google will soon support dark mode in Google Search Console. Ariel Kroszynski, a Senior Software Engineer at Google, announced this at the Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026 in Barcelona last week.

Google seems to have a bug of sorts where sometimes it can show the three dots about this ad or search result button twice, instead of just once. I can replicate this for some queries but not all.

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly presented new data from Google Search on how long Google for crawling, indexing and serving on average. This is broken down by process, withing crawling, indexing and serving and shows the typical timeframe versus the slowest timeframe.

Google Ads has a new AI campaign localization tool for Search campaigns (beta), at least according to a new help document I found late last week. “You can use the AI campaign localization tool to quickly localize entire Search campaigns for new languages and regions using generative AI,” Google wrote in the help document.

Google spoke at the three-day Google Search Central Live Deep Dive event in Europe about why it has rolled out so many spam updates in 2026, according to John Campbell’s recap at We Are Roast. He said that Google has been doing more spam updates because there is so much more new content than before. […]

Google Ads sent an email notifying some advertisers that it will automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns starting on October 12, 2026. This is called automated promotions and only applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets.

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

Microsoft Bing is testing a new’ish section labeled “Recommended by” followed by the company making the recommendations. The weird thing is, the specific product thumbnails link to various retailers and not the place that recommended it.

Google made several changes to the about merchant loyalty program within the Google Merchant Center help documentation. The key changes are that Loyalty Customer Match expanded to AI Mode and Gemini and to more regions, but there are even more changes noted in the help documentation.

Google seems to be testing adding tracking parameters to the link URLs within AI Overviews. If this rolls out fully, this will help you decipher when you get a click from an AI Overview in Google Search or just a click from the main Google Search web results.

Google Local Service Ads seems to hide the phone number until you hover your mouse over the ad. I am not sure if this is new or not, but there is a big button that says “Get phone number” which is not needed because the phone number does show up as soon as you move […]

This week, we covered the first impact felt by the Google September 2026 spam update. And then on Wednesday and Thursday we had the second impact of this spam update. Remember the AI contribution report…

Google has updated the creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help document to primarily add two new sections. First, it added that the main content is super critical, added what is main content and then explained how Search Quality raters review content quality of the main content.

Google has updated Google Search’s “guidance on using generative AI content on your website” document to tell those who use AI-generated content to “manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing.”