Google announced a number of updates to help people find and remove personal information and sensitive imagery about themselves from Google. But you would need to give Google this information first, so Google can find it and then remove it.

A couple of weeks ago I reported Bing was beta testing a new AI performance report within Bing Webmaster Tools. These reports are now available as a public preview for all to see. Plus, Bing Webmaster Tools has a whole new slick design.

Google will stop showing the business short names on Google Business Profiles in Search and Google Maps. The short name will still work, if you have one, but going forward, the link in your Google Business Profile will no longer be displayed to you or searchers.

Google added a new button to the top stories section of Google Search named “Sign in to customize.” This leads users who are not logged into Google to sign in, so those users can configfure there preferred sources in Google Search.

I am seeing some early signs of yet another unconfirmed Google Search ranking update with more volatility touching down today, February 10th. The chatter within the SEO community is starting to spike, and some of the third-party tracking tools are showing volatility.

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

Google appears to be testing showing the citation favicon site icons at the bottom of the answer in AI Mode. This is in addition to where it normally shows those icons, at the top right of the card stack, on the side of the answer response.

OpenAI has officially launched ads in ChatGPT yesterday. The company announced, “Today, we’re beginning to test ads in ChatGPT in the U.S. The test will be for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise, and Education tiers will not have ads.”

There are some reports coming out that Grokipedia, the AI-based Wikipedia, is now showing a decline in search visibility in both Google and even ChatGPT. This comes after both an indexing and ranking surge in Google Search.

A month ago, we reported on a new help document on Google Ads for Performance Max optimization experiments: A/B testing assets beta. Well, now some are seeing this in the wild, where you can set up these A/B tests in a controlled environment.

Microsoft Bing is testing a dynamically loading results count under the search box. So when you enter your search phrase, the results count will dynamically count up from 0 to the number of results found.

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

Over the past week or so, Google has been testing a new format for link cards in the AI Overviews within Google Search. When you place your mouse cursor over a link clip icon, a new overlay will show you the page/site cards that line of text is being sourced from.

A thread at Reddit asked if a one-year-old website can beat a four-year-old website in SEO and perform better in Google Search. John Mueller from Google answered with his classic “it depends.”