Weekly Search Engine Updates and Insights
This week in search news, there was notable Google search ranking volatility mid-week, calming after a few days of fluctuations. Google Ads is set to feature in the Google AI Overview, with additional advertising updates covered. Sundar Pichai’s interview offered insights, while Bing introduced an option to disable AI Copilot answers in search results, a feature Google lacks. The quality of AI Overviews was questioned, but methods to identify many low-quality examples have emerged. Google aims to prioritize more genuine, useful content in its search results and is experimenting with a unique snippet format for Reddit content. An unusual spike in search performance reports for product snippets was observed in the Google Search Console. Google and Bing are advising an upgrade to WordPress 6.5 to benefit from lastmod dates in sitemaps, improving site management. Despite advancements, Google’s site reputation abuse policy enforcement remains manual rather than algorithmic. Google Lens has been updated to display richer content and link to websites more effectively. Additional sources have been added to Google’s visual knowledge panels for enhanced information access. Google now supports indexing of epub formats, broadening the scope of content accessible through search. A significant outage affected Bing, impacting ChatGPT search, DuckDuckGo, Copilot, and other services. Bing is experimenting with tag filters in search results for a streamlined search experience. Apple Maps now has stricter criteria for business listings, potentially marking businesses as permanently closed if there are discrepancies in operating hours and addresses. GA4 has improved its real-time reports to show user activity in the last five minutes, offering more immediate data. Lastly, this roundup was sponsored by Duda, a professional website builder platform. For more detailed discussions on these topics, viewers and readers are encouraged to subscribe to the Search Engine Roundtable’s video feed or podcast on various platforms.