Category: Digital Marketing

Google is testing placing AI-generated search result snippet summaries. Under each Google search result, there is a thing bar, followed by the Gemini logo and then a short AI-generated summary of the page. This test was spotted by Landon Moore who shared screenshots with me on X – he wrote that his team found this…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

On Friday we reported that Google Search was removing the ability to show 100 search results per page. And now, we are seeing a lot of people notice that their Google Search Console performance reports are showing big changes with the data. I did reach out to Google for a comment on the 100 results…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google may be starting to show AI Overviews when you ask for a currency exchange. I can’t seem to fully replicate this but others are starting to see this. What you’d normally see is this answer box, with the exchange rate calculation between one and the other currency: Here is what Radu Oncescu sees on…

Microsoft Advertising is testing using three dots, instead of the arrow down, for the sponsored ads URL in the Bing search results. We’ve seen Bing test three dots before but they were horizontal, the new test are vertical three dots. I cannot replicate this but Sachin Patel spotted it and posted a screenshot on X…

Google Search seems to be testing dropping the ability to see 100 search results on a single page. When you add the results parameter to the end of your search results URL string, i.e. &num=100, it works about half the time. This was spotted by SEOwner on X and I can replicate it, as can…

On Thursday, September 11, 2025, Google updated its search quality raters guidelines PDF document. The last time Google updated this document was on January 23, 2025, over seven months ago. This update gives minor clarification as it relates to rating YMYL content and adds a handful of additional examples for rating newer features like AI…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week, I covered the ongoing Google August 2025 spam update and how it heated up this week. Google got into hot water over saying the web is rapidly declining. Google AI Mode also said AI Mode would be the default, and then backtracked on that statement…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

The Google August 2025 spam update seems to be heating up again. I am seeing both chatter within the SEO spike, while also seeing many of the third-party Google tracking tools show heated weather in the past 24 hours or so. As a reminder, the August 2025 spam update started on August 26, 2025 at…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s John Mueller said in a Reddit thread that he would personally go with a traditional TLD (i.e., .com) even if it means having to put a hyphen in the domain name. This is instead of picking a TLD that may be considered lower quality or cheap. The question was in response to a site…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google Ads will soon allow advertisers to place ads for “Mature Cosmetic Procedures.” This change goes into effect on September 22, 2025, and then advertisers will be allowed to advertise for cosmetic services and plastic surgery focused on intimate body parts. Google posted this update over here and wrote, “In September 2025, the Google Ads…

Apple is reportedly working on a revamp of Siri, Apple Intelligence and its Apple Search features for 2026. Yep, another revamp. Bloomberg reported Apple planning to launch its own artificial intelligence-powered web search tool next year, integrated into the Siri voice assistant. Apple is also reportedly working with Google on this. The new Apple Search…

Logan Kilpatrick, lead product manager for Google DeepMind, Gemini, and all AI products at Google, said Google AI Mode will be the default for Google Search “soon.” He said this after Google made google.com/ai go directly to AI Mode’s interface on Friday afternoon. This was announced on X at around 7pm ET on Friday. Here…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

The European Union has fined Google $3.5 billion, 2.95 billion euro, for breaking its competition rules by favoring its own digital advertising services. Part of this ruling also says Google is required to divest part of its ad-tech business. This comes from the EU’s 2023 ruling where the EU said back then that the only…

This week, we covered the big Google Monopoly remedy ruling that will not end up breaking up the company and was more like a slap on the wrist. Google also has FastSearch, a faster search technology used for grounding. Google court docs also note search use of user interactions, user data, Chrome data, and also…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

I am deeply sad to report that Alan Bleiweiss has passed away on August 22nd. Alan was a true friend to the search marketing industry; he always had a witty and funny response to make everyone smile, even during the most frustrating times. He cared deeply about the industry, the people within it and his…

Google is testing a new top bar interface design for the search results page both in light and dark mode. The new design shades the top bar more, so it is more distinct to the search results section. I spotted a few variations to this afer Punit notified me of one of those variations on…

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled on the remedies for Google being declared a monopoly. In short, Google won’t be broken up (will keep Chrome, Android and Ads), it will have to share search data and it is barred from making exclusive search deals. Many were expecting the remedies to be a lot stricter after…

We finally had a confirmed Google Search update this past month, the August 2025 spam update, which seems pretty intense and it is not done rolling out yet.

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google may be testing a new format for AI Overviews in the search results. This one does not have the AI Overview label on the AI Overview, plus it seems to combine knowledge panel features. The cards on the right side are not in a list view but rather a card stack view. This was…

This week we had our first Google spam update in 8 months, the August 2025 spam update. This update touched down very quickly, likely within 24 hours. I also posted a Google search ranking volatility status report. Google is testing changes to AI Mode to encourage clicks. A new report says traditional search is not…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google may show a new “Profiles” button in the Google Business Profiles NMX dashboard. It may show if you manage multiple Google Business Profiles and you are in this test. This was spotted by Syed M. Amir Hassan who posted some screenshots on X. He wrote, “New update in the GBP interface! Just noticed a…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

There may be a new reporting bug in Google Search Console’s performance report specific to the Android App search appearance filter. It seems some are reporting that Google stopped showing impressions, clicks and other data related to that filter. There is a report about this in the Google Webmaster Help Forums that shows this chart…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Earlier we reported that ChatGPT from OpenAI seems to be using parts of Google search results for its answers (kudos to the SEO community for spotting it first). Well, according to The Information, OpenAI has been partially using Google search results scraped by a startup called SerpApi for ChatGPT responses on current events like news…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google is now testing adding an “Ask Anything” box within the AI Overviews, and when you type in that box and click search, it takes you into the Google AI Mode results. This is an expansion of the follow up in AI Mode and variations of that, including dive deeper in AI Mode and follow…

Google is now showing the deals and loyalty benefits details in the retailer/merchant knowledge panels. Plus, Google Shopping Ads show a “discount code” link that opens a dialog box with the code and a button to “continue to site.” We’ve seem the loyalty benefits and the deals sections in the right side merchant panel, but…

This week, we did a check in on the ongoing Google Search ranking volatility. Google AI Mode expanded to 180 countries, added agentic experiences, got more personalized and gained sharable links. ChatGPT may be sending less traffic to sites, according to one report. A new tool is tracking referral traffic from ChatGPT vs Google. Google…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

OpenAI made some updates to its ChatGPT systems, which are impacting the amount of traffic ChatGPT is sending out from its interface. Josh Blyskal from Profounds posted on LinkedIn that “ChatGPT referral traffic is down -52% since July 21st.” Josh said this is pulled from the Profound dataset of over one billion ChatGPT citations and…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google Ads seems to be rolling out full placement reporting for the Search Partner Network (SPN). This is a feature advertisers have been begging and praying for, for probably 20 years now. You will be able to see exactly where your ads are appearing on with a list of all SPN sites your campaigns served…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

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…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

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. Of…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

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. PressGazzete covered…

For the original iTunes version, click here. 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 in the US and India. Chartbeat says traffic from Google to publishers is…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

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. Fabrice posted this in a comments section on LinkedIn. He said that while search engines feel that AI…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

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. For example, you can add…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google Trends seems to be broken or stalled over the past few hours. If you filter Google Trends for a specific region and then say only show me trends over the past four hours, you may only see a few keywords show up and not pages of keywords, like you’d normally expect. Here is an…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

I am seeing a huge spike in chatter within the SEO industry over the past 24 hours. This comes a day or so after we saw some Google search ranking volatility cooling, only to see that volatility spike again the following day. It has been an absolute wild time for the Google search results, I…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has rolled out an update to the Google Business Profiles Google Posts creation tool. We covered Google testing these changes earlier but now it is officially live as of late Friday. Lisa Landsman from Google announced this on LinkedIn saying, “The Google Posts creation tool in Google Business Profiles just got a major refresh,…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

The past month was a bit intense with Google search ranking volatility. With the June 2025 core update kicking off the day before July 1st, we started to see ranking movement in early July and it continues throughout the core update, even after it finished. It was just a super-heated month with Google Search.

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Guess what – another story on Google Search volatility and how it is heated and the chatter within the SEO industry is pretty high right now. We reported about it a lot during the Google June 2025 core update and after that core update and nope – it is not calming down yet. Is Google…

Google’s search ranking volatility continues and continues, it is weird at this point. Google Search Live with video is finally rolling out. Google AI Mode added file uploads, canvas planner and search while browsing. Google is testing help me shop in AI Mode. Google AI Mode is expanding to the UK. Google Search Central had…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Danny Sullivan is no longer the Google Search Liaison. He is switching roles within Google to work on new projects on the Google Search team. Danny Sullivan joined Google over seven years ago, and was very public-facing up until several months ago. Sullivan joined Google a few months after stepping down from his role as…

Google has a new beta within Google Ads for Al Max ad group settings with search term matching. This shows when AI Max is turned on and Google wrote in the setting, “Turning off search term matching will use only your provided keywords and match types, which will limit the performance boost of Al Max.”…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google announced that the full version of Search Live, with video and not just audio, is now rolling out this week on mobile in the U.S. for users enrolled in the AI Mode Labs experiment. This was demoed at Google at I/O in May, Google released the audio version last month and now is releasing…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google is notifying some advertisers that they do not comply with Google’s EU User Consent Policy, i.e. Consent Mode v2 and that as of July 21st and will turn off personalized and non-personalized ads, remarketing and conversion tracking functionality. This doesn’t seem worldwide and it might just be in the EU regions. Adriaan Dekker posted…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

I know I just reported on the super-heated Google Search ranking volatility week we had, and how the post-core update seems more unstable than during the June 2025 core update. However, we are now seeing even more volatility over the weekend, with some reporting reversals from the events of last week. As a reminder, the…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google launched a new Search Labs experiment it is calling Web Guide. It basically organizes the web search results for you by category. Google wrote, “Web Guide is an AI-organized search results page that experiments with how we find, surface and organize results from across the web.” Google announced this yesterday saying, “Web Guide groups…

Google Ads is adding more detailed data to RSAs, responsive search ads, reporting. Specifically, it now shows click and conversion data per RSA headline. This is instead of it just showing “good” or “bad” labels per headline. This was spotted by Miles McNair who wrote on LinkedIn, he wrote, “some accounts now have full data…

Google finally launched its virtual clothes try-on feature after launching it several times and then demoing it again at Google I/O. Google also launched price alerts to let users specify an amount that will trigger the alert. Virtual try-on is now live in the US. This allows searchers and shoppers to upload a photo of…

As we reported earlier this week, Google Search ranking volatility was more heated (and for longer) after the Google June 2025 core update completed than during the core update. Well, that volatility continues and it is not just the tools but the chatter within the industry is super high right now. As a reminder, the…

This week we covered the strong search ranking volatility post Google June 2025 core update and it continued through the week, with a spike on Thursday. A Pew Research study on AI Overviews shows clicks significantly drop when AI Overviews are on the page, Google disputes this. OpenAI may be crawling the LLMS.txt file but…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Gary Illyes from Google said at the Google Search Live Deep Dive event yesterday that you don’t need to do GEO, LLMO or anything else to show up in Google AI Overviews, you just need to do normal SEO. Kenichi Suzuki was at the event and quoted Gary Illyes – he posted on LinkedIn –…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google reported Q2 2025 earnings today, which showed Google’s ad revenue was up again year-over-year, with an increase of 10.4%, and overall revenue is also up 13.8%. Alphabet reports Q2 revenue up 14% YoY to $96.43B, net income up 19% to $28.2B, operating income up 14% to $31.27B, and Services revenue up 12% to $82.5B….

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has uploaded a new logo for Google Search Console. The logo looks like a variation of an analytics logo with a magnifying glass, with blue, green, yellow and a smidge of red in the logo. Here is what the logo looks like: Here is what it looks like in the interface: Dhruv Pandya was…

Google is supposedly showing AI Overviews for movie-related queries. Apparently, this is new, although I don’t have firsthand knowledge since I don’t typically search for movies. However, I’ve been told it’s new by a number of sources. Radu Oncescu shared this on X and wrote, “Google added “AI Overviews” results for movies queries as well.”…

Google told us the June 2025 core update completed early on Thursday, July 17th, but now, four days later, we are still seeing incredibly heated volatility, even through today. The tools and community are still experiencing significant ranking movement and instability, even today. Is this ranking volatility related to the tail end of the core…

Google’s John Mueller said it is hard for service oriented login web pages to rank in the search results. Like, if you have a landing page where people can login to their account and check on analytics, billing, etc, those types of login pages can be hard to rank well in Google and Bing Search….

Google launched a new feature for Google Business Profiles that lets you check the status of your edits. So if you made a change and you want to see what the status of that change is for your Google local listing, now you can. OMG National spotted this change and posted about it both on…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Google’s June 2025 core update finished on Thursday after running for 16 days. It was a volatile Google update for a while with some recoveries. Google AI Mode gets Gemini 2.5 Pro and Deep Search but you need to pay. Google AI Mode with only link cards…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s John Mueller replied to a question around indexing issues on a site and said that if the site is hosted on a strong platform and is technically sound, and “it’s barely getting indexed, often that’s a sign that our systems aren’t convinced about the site overall.” John wrote this on Bluesky: If you’re hosting…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has updated its local ranking documentation and Tips to improve your local ranking on Google page. The new wording is shorter and has fewer details than the older version. A lot of the page was actually updated, so you can compare the old document here to the new document here. Here is a side…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Starting around June 25, 2025, many are noticing huge declines in impressions and clicks from their local rankings in Google. This is from the Google Business Profiles performance reports and I think it is a data/reporting glitch, but who knows, maybe it was a ranking change? I first spotted this over at the Local Search…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week we covered the ongoing Google June 2025 core update and how we are finally seeing some recoveries with the past helpful content updates, and some core updates. Google Search Console’s performance report might have a bug with the average position. Google Search Console added a…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s John Mueller said the order of the URLs or sites you list in your disavow link file does not matter. He added that the file is not processed in real time, it is crawled and then taken into account as Google crawls the web. John said this on Bluesky: The order in the disavow…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

It seems that the links/citations you see in Google AI Mode can be very different when you search on desktop versus mobile. In fact, it seems like the sources can differ even if you try the same query on a different desktop browser or even on the same browser when you refresh the query. This…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s Nick Fox said that AI Mode has begun rolling out to Workspace accounts in the US. Nick Fox said this started on July 2nd but he clarified later that it did not fully roll out to all accounts yet, but rather it is rolling out. Nick wrote on X, “We’ve rolled out AI Mode…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Microsoft is testing zoomable and sticky related searches in the Bing Search results page. So one variation has the related searches stick to the right top of the screen as you scroll and the other will zoom into the related search, as you hover your mouse cursor over the feature. Here is the sticky version…

This week, we finally had an official Google update, the June 2025 core update, which seemed to have kicked in on July 2nd. We also had an unconfirmed update on June 28th, days before the core update was announced. Google Search Console updated its Insights report. Google promoted AI Mode with an animated not Google…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has added AI Max to the search match types in the Google Ads interface. If you click on the Keywords tab in the Google Ads console, and then segment by “Search terms match type” you should see it. Aleksejus Podpruginas first spotted this and posted about it on LinkedIn and then Thomas Eccel also…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has confirmed an issue with Google Ads, where there are unexpected errors, high latency and other unexpected issues with the Google Ads advertiser console. Google said access is fine but it is likely serving some errors and other issues. Google wrote: We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Ads. We will provide more…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

On Saturday, June 28th, it appears that another significant Google Search ranking update occurred, although Google has not confirmed it. There has been significant search ranking volatility and chatter within the SEO industry over the past 24 hours or so. Again, we haven’t had a confirmed Google search ranking update since the March 2025 core…

Google Ads is experiencing some technical difficulties, although their ad status dashboard indicates that all is currently fine. The issue is somewhat significant in that even Microsoft Advertising is warning that you should manually update your Microsoft Ads account instead of using the Google Import when the Google APIs are having issues. Fred Vallaeys, Former…

Liz Reid, the head of Google Search, spoke with Reed Albergotti of Semafor, on Google’s push towards AI Search. The interview was conducted weeks ago at Google I/O but was just published this week. It is worth a read but I wanted to highlight the SEO comments and ads comments in that article. As you…

Another week and more Google search ranking volatility hits, this time on June 25 and June 26. Google promised more core updates, more often, but that did not happen. Google’s Nick Fox says he questions the AI Overview click studies and says the web is thriving. Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, spoke about SEO…

Google is testing adding the site name next to the link icons in the AI Overviews within Google Search. This makes it much more likely for searchers to click on the links and click over to the source of the information. A month ago, we saw Google testing showing author names in AI Overviews but…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Over the past two days it has felt like there was some sort of ranking adjustment made in the Google Search organic results. Yea, I know, organic search doesn’t send clicks anymore, but they are still ranked and it seems like there was some sort of larger shuffle in those rankings. While we haven’t had…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google updated its service areas business guidelines help document to add “Do not add countries or states as a service area.” Google also updated numerous parts of the document. But the big thing here is that you should not add states or countries to your service area lists, it is not designed for that. This…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s John Mueller several years after posting a video named “Will removing “.html” from my URLs help my site?” still says URL extensions do not matter for SEO. He said it doesn’t matter if you go with a .htm or a .html or go with no extension at all. This came up recently in a…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Jason Howell on the AI Inside podcast had Nick Fox, VP of Search at Google, on a few weeks ago. In that interview, he said that the methodologies used by the click studies done on AI Overviews can be “questioned.” He added, “from our point of view the web is thriving.” He cited what Google’s…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

It is with a heavy heart that I am reporting that one of the founding pillars of the SEO industry, one of the first female SEOs in our industry, and one of the individuals who made the industry what it is today, has passed away. Jill Whalen retired from SEO over a decade ago, having…

Google is testing placing a speaker icon next to the video snippets. The speaker icon includes a language label indicating what language the video is in. This was spotted by Frank Sandtmann who posted a screenshot on Mastodon of the German Google video search results. Here it is: Frank wrote, “Google is testing a loudspeaker…

Google has quietly updated its AI features and your website help document, which it initially launched just under a month ago, with a new section on troubleshooting preview controls. In short, if you are trying to block your content from showing in AI Overviews, AI Mode or other AI features in Google Search, then this…

Google’s John Mueller said that for larger and longer issues, it can take Google longer for Google Search to reprocess it all. Meaning, the bigger the issue and the longer the issue was on your site, Google will take longer to reprocess all of those signals and thus, it will take longer for your rankings…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week we covered the ongoing Google search ranking volatility. Google is now officially counting AI Mode in Google Search Console’s performance reports, but good luck understanding it. Google is testing Audio Overviews in Google Search. Google AI Mode is now within people also ask and Chrome….

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has begun rolling out the audio version, talk and listen version, of Search Live in the Google app to those who opt into the AI Mode experiment. This is not the video/camera/visual version, that won’t be live in the app for a few more months – although you can access it now in the…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

The term, The Great Decoupling has really been catching on over the past couple of weeks. It is being used to describe what we are seeing with impressions and clicks moving further and further apart since AI Overviews has become more of the norm in the Google Search results. We spoke about this term Darwin…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has now officially confirmed that Google Search Console is counting AI Mode data. Google said, “AI Mode is now counting towards totals in Search Console.” We saw this when AI Mode went fully live in the US late last week, which Google announced would happen at I/O. Google also told us that AI Mode…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Tired of all that reading in the Google Search results, is it too hard to read the AI Overviews? Well, Google has a solution for you, they are called “Audio Overviews.” Google will generate an audio version of an AI Overview type of response, that sounds a lot like its NotebookLM technology. Google explained, “Audio…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google recently was testing showing vertical search shortcuts in the autocomplete search suggestions. Now, Google is testing a “back to all” option in the autocomplete. It basically lists “Back to all” under the search suggestion and I assume that clicking it takes you back to the web search results page? These can also show in…

Google Ads is now showing the estimated audience size in the custom segments for some advertisers. This can help you see if the reach will be large enough for you to properly test the campaign. This was spotted by Thomas Eccel who wrote on LinkedIn, “You build a custom segment targeting users searching for competitors…

Google has yet again dropped support for more of its structured data elements/markup that it uses for rich results in the search results page. Google calls this “Simplifying the search results page.” Google will removed support for these seven markups over the coming weeks and months, they include: When you visit these in the Google…

At Google I/O, Google said it will roll out AI Mode to all users based in the U.S. Well, that rollout seems to have started some time yesterday. If you try to go to AI Mode in the U.S. when signed out of Google or in incognito mode, it should work for you. Here is…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week in search, we of course covered some Google search ranking volatility. Google Search had serving issues across Google Search, Discover and Google Lens yesterday. Google’s Sundar Pichai said AI Mode will slowly be incorporated into Google Search. Google is finally rolling out AI Mode in…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s John Mueller responded to a complaint about indexing issues and ranking drops within Google Search, citing that the possible reason is unrelated content on the site. John said in response to the complaint, “One of the things I noticed is that there’s a lot of totally unrelated content on the site.” We have covered…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google’s new AI Max in Google Ads for Search campaigns is coming to all advertisers in Q3 of 2025. As a reminder, Google says AI Max for Search campaigns is a “new, one-click feature suite” that brings you a “suite of targeting and creative enhancements” of “the best of Google AI to your Search campaigns.”…

Google has confirmed an issue with Google Ads this morning, saying, “We’re investigating reports of an issue with Google Ads. We will provide more information shortly.” I am not sure exactly what the issue is, but when I dug into the complaints in the Google Ads Help Forums thread I found a number of complaints…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

When Google announced at Google I/O the launch of AI Mode, Google also announced a number of new features including the ability for Google to take your query and analyze complex datasets and create graphics based on that. Well, Google announced data visualizations and graphs for finance queries are now in AI Mode. It just…

It seems the Google Search Console performance report for Google Discover has reported zero impressions and clicks starting Thursday, June 5th, or has underreported impressions and clicks significantly since that date. I am seeing a lot of complaints about this, and I am able to replicate this for several publishers I have GSC access with….

Google is testing a new label on its search ads within the Google Search results that says “Learn more about Sponsored results.” This label is on the bottom right of the ad and neatly tucked under the listing in the gray background style. This was spotted by Brodie Clark who posted about this on X…

Google is testing replacing the “Google Screened” label with a “Google Verified” label for the Local Service Ads. I am also seeing these results come up with no labels at all, outside of the normal “Sponsored” label. This was spotted by Anthony Higman who posted some screenshots on X – here it shows “Google Verified”…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

This week we covered the ongoing Google search ranking volatility that spiked on June 4th. Have you heard of the Great Decoupling? Did Google start indexing less in late May? Google updated its ranking algorithm around explicit content and videos, plus they updated its SafeSearch documentation. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report for June…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has updated its search ranking algorithm to “more strongly affect the sites that host explicit videos but don’t allow Googlebot to fetch those video files” which may lead to a “significant drop in ranking” for some of these sites. Google also updated its SafeSearch documentation with new best practices and details. Google wrote, “Google…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google Search ranking volatility is heating up today, June 4th. Many of the tools and some of the chatter within the SEO community are showing signs of a Google ranking update of some sorts. Again, Google has not confirmed an update since the March 2025 core update but we’ve seen volatility since then almost every…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Since Google began rolling out AI Overviews in Google Search, publishers, site owners, SEOs, etc have been posting screenshots of their Google Search Console performance reports that show how clicks from Google start to drop, where impressions stay the same or go higher. I mean, all third-party studies basically show click-through rates have significantly dropped…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

It’s time for the big Google Webmaster report where I recap all the big organic Google Search related news I covered here over the past month. We had Google I/O and with that, AI Mode went live in the US, with a bunch of new AI features. AI Overviews expanded, and it leads to Google…

This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the holiday of Shavout/Shavous on Monday and Tuesday, June 2nd and 3rd. Any stories published here will be scheduled, written beforehand, and not written during the holiday hours. I will be completely offline, so any social media posts, tweets, or anything coming from…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

This week, we covered more Google Search ranking volatility around May 29th. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said web publishing is not dead and had a great interview with The Verge. Most SEOs are scared of AI Mode in Google Search. Google AI Mode data is coming to Search Console. Google AI Overviews test query expansion…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google Search ranking and results have experienced increased volatility over the past 24 hours or so – the search results are heating up. I am noticing an uptick in SEO chatter within the industry and also some of the tools are showing increased search ranking volatility. Can Google be prepping to push a new Google…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Nilay Patel of The Verge had a great one-on-one conversation with Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO. Nilay did put on the pressure around how the changes with AI Overviews and AI Mode in Google Search are impacting publishers in a very negative way, but Sundar seemed unconvinced that web publishing is dead. Sundar said that he…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Microsoft is testing a sticky footer in the Bing Search results that show related searches. So the related searches section sticks to the footer, making these related searches way more in your face. This was spotted by Sachin Patel who posted some screenshots on X – here they are: I was able to replicate it,…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has released a new help document named About Ads and AI Overviews, plus, they added a new landing page that contains a link to this single document named Ads in AI-Powered experiences. I assume Google will eventually add a new section named Ads and AI Mode in that document? As you know, AI Overviews…

Google has added a setting for AdSense publishers to pick the positions of their anchor ads. They can pick from up to six different settings depending on top/bottom or side anchor ads. Google wrote, “We’ve heard feedback that you want more flexibility and control over the overlay ad formats in Auto ads. That’s why we’re…

I am seeing some complaints within the local SEO community about a surge or spike in name changes happening to Google Business Profiles. It is unclear how widespread the issue is, or if there is a pattern to the issue or not – at least at this point in time. A thread in the Local…

Google released AI Mode in the U.S. a couple of days ago and Tom Critchlow and Patrick Stox noticed that Google prevented you from tracking referrer data from AI Mode. Well, that turned out to be unintentional and Google said it is a bug and it will be fixed. John Mueller from Google posted on…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google has confirmed that AI Mode reporting will be coming to Google Search Console. It is currently not yet in Search Console, but it will be coming as part of the AI Mode rollout. John Mueller from Google posted a comment on one of my LinkedIn posts saying: Al Mode reporting is not yet live…

This week was a huge week for search; between Google I/O and Google Marketing Live – it was just a lot. We had two unconfirmed Google ranking updates, one on I/O day and one on May 16th. Google announced AI Mode was live in the US and then announced a number of new features for…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Google is now pushing search ads on AI Mode and the desktop version of AI Overviews. Google’s Vidhya Srinivasan said at Google Marketing Live, “we’re expanding ads in AI Overviews to desktop, and bringing ads to AI Mode to create new opportunities for our customers.” Now with the official launch of AI Mode in the…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…

Barry Schwartz is the CEO of RustyBrick and a technologist, a New York Web service firm specializing in customized online technology that helps companies decrease costs and increase sales. Barry is also the founder of the Search Engine Roundtable and the News Editor of Search Engine Land. He is well known & respected for his…