Google is testing adding a “loyalty benefits” section to the merchant/retailer knowledge panels. This would show on the right side of the page, under the description of the retailer.

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. Microsoft says SEOs need to do the click studies to see if AI search clicks lead to conversions or not…

Fabrice Canel from the Microsoft Bing team said that search engines, like Bing, have “limited visibility” into the conversions after the click from AI search and it is up to the SEO community to conduct those studies.

Google is now experimenting with keyboard shortcuts to the overlay menu in the AI Overviews within Google Search. Rajan Patel, VP, Engineering for Google Search, said this is just an experiment.

OpenAI updated its ChatGPT iOS app to let you select Google Maps instead of Apple Maps as the maps provider for local results. I am told this is new as of the past week or so.

An SEO consultant posted on LinkedIn that one of his websites saw a 50% decline in traffic in a two week period. This was due to the site being hacked, content being injected and Google indexing that hacked content, leading to the site not ranking well in Google Search anymore.

Google Ads is reportedly rolling out a new cost toggle in the Performance Max reporting to show you the share of cost for each channel within your PMax campaigns.

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

Google has launched the Preferred Sources top stories feature fully in the US and India, after testing it in Search Labs for a bit over six weeks. As I said then, this is a nice feature for publishers and hopefully will lead to more traffic from Google Search for some.

Google has removed some of the restricted countries from the list of countries not allowed to serve Dating and Companionship ads. Specifically, Google removed Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and the UAE from the list.

Google announced it has new AI and large language models to fight invalid ad traffic or as Google calls it “IVT.” Google explained they have used AI for a long time, but they had some breakthroughs that resulted in a “40% reduction in IVT stemming from deceptive or disruptive ad serving practices.”

Google Ads has added the gender exclusions feature for Performance Max campaigns. This was previously announced last week and is now showing up in the Google Ads interfaces for advertisers.

Google and Bing are busy testing changing the search results snippets title. In one case, Google is expanding the title of the search result on mouse hover. In another case, Google is testing changing the color of the title on hover. Bing is also testing title colors and moving the URL in the search snippet.