Category: Digital Marketing

Google is testing removing the site names from the search result snippets and just showing the site’s URL at the top – title link – position of the snippet. As a reminder, Google launched the site name feature in October 2022 for mobile and then site names for desktop results in March 2023. Now, maybe…

Google is testing removing the site names from the search result snippets and just showing the site’s URL at the top – title link – position of the snippet. As a reminder, Google launched the site name feature in October 2022 for mobile and then site names for desktop results in March 2023. Now, maybe…

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 the weekend, Google has started to roll out Google Discover on desktop in many countries and regions. I personally can trigger it in Google New Zealand and some other locations but I am not yet able to trigger it on Google.com in the United States. We know Google will bring Discover to desktop soon,…

As I mentioned in my Friday video, there seems to be a lot of Google search ranking volatility that kicked off on Friday, May 16th and throughout this weekend. The most heated day seems to have been on Friday but the chatter is pretty busy over the weekend within the SEO community. And I promised…

Apple announced this week that it partnered with MICHELIN Guide; The Infatuation and Golf Digest to provide “insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources” within Apple Maps. “Users can now view and search for MICHELIN-starred, Green Star, and Bib Gourmand restaurants — along with MICHELIN Key hotels — starting in the U.S., with support for…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week, we covered, you guessed it, more Google search ranking volatility. Google also said they are rethinking its search stack from the ground up because of LLMs. Google is testing AI Overviews in more regions and languages prior to Google I/O/ Google is testing AI Mode…

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that search ads with AI Overviews are at a baseline, at the same level as search ads without AI Overviews, in terms of ad revenue per query. He added, and now it is just about going up from there, and with AI, he doesn’t see it to a problem. 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…

Last month we shared the spam efforts the Google Maps team announced – but did you know that in 2024 Google had almost one billion reviews published within Google Maps? That is 999 million reviews, 752 million photos and videos and 94 million place edits published just in 2024. Google posted these details on its…

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 rolling out device targeting controls and features within Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. We knew this was coming and now it seems to be rolling out to some (not all) advertisers. This allows you to target based on device type and choose the devices where your ads can appear. The devices include: Computers…

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 may be pushing out another search ranking update of sorts, I am seeing more signs of tremors and volatility over the past 24-hours. Some of the tools are already picking up on it but the SEO community is noticing some big movement starting on Monday, May 12th and into today, Tuesday, May 13th….

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 made what I would consider a logical clarification to its image SEO best practices help document. It now says don’t upload the same image under different URL/file names to your site, even if you embed that image on different pages on your site. Google explained why it made this update, saying, “We updated 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 AdSense announced that the Auto optimize feature is now configurable at the site level. Google moved it out of the Experiments section and made several improvements to Auto optimize. Google wrote, “we’ve updated the Auto optimize feature so that you can now configure it at the site level.” Auto optimize lets Google run experiments…

Google announced it is now able to catch “20-times the number of scammy pages,” that it did in the past, leading to a reduction of “these scams by more than 80% in Search.” Google credits investments in AI-powered scam detection systems and improved scam classifiers. Google added that the “advancements in AI have bolstered our…

Did you know that you can quickly add parameters to the end of your Google Search URL to see search results in a specific language and/or country? Yes, you can do this from the advanced search settings screen in Google Search but you can also append &hl=(languagecode) + &gl=(countrycode) URL parameters, if you want to…

Google is showing the number of followers for a Facebook and TikTok profiles in the Google Ads, the search ads. We saw Google testing this for organic / free results two years ago, but now we see them being tested on sponsored search listings. This was spotted by Anthony Higman who shared this screenshot on…

For the original iTunes version, click here. It’s been calm for the past two weeks but we are seeing Google ranking volatility hit on May 8th. Google held another creator summit, this one in Washington, D.C. Apple said Google searches are declining in Safari, but Google said searches are up across Apple devices. 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…

It has been a couple of weeks since we last reported on a Google search ranking update, I bet a ton of you were wondering if I was feeling off. But it has been relatively calm for the past couple of weeks, that is until today. I am seeing renewed volatility over the past 24-hours…

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 Analytics real time reporting seems to be lagging again this morning. I woke up to a ton of complaints on social about the real time reporting reports in GA4 are simply not working as expected. We saw this same thing / or a similar thing, just a few weeks ago and now it 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…

Here is a weird one – doing a site command and Google presenting an AI Overview summary of the results. In this case, the AI Overview was dead wrong – which is not all that uncommon – but why show an AI Overview here? I cannot replicate this but Bill Hartzer spotted this last week…

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 replacing local pack at the top of the Google Search results for “near me” related queries with an AI Overview. So instead of showing a map and the three or so local listings, Google is showing an AI Overview with some local information. I cannot replicate this but Chris Lonergan spotted…

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. I posted the big Google webmaster report for May. Google admitted in a deposition that it used its search data for Gemini AI. Google Search Console leaked that it was showing desktop data for the Google Discover performance report. Google Search Console’s API was stuck…

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…

Here is our monthly Google Webmaster Report – the May 2025 edition – where I summarize the past 30 days or so of the big organic Google related news in one place. Google did not have any official Google ranking updates but we sure did see several days of intense ranking volatility.

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…

Microsoft reported its third quarter 2025 earnings and it showed that its search and advertising revenue was up 21%, again. The previous quarter it was up 21% as well, then the quarter before that was up 18%, then 19% but before than it was 12% and 8%. Microsoft wrote, “Search and news advertising revenue excluding…

OpenAI has begun rolling out shopping search features directly into ChatGPT Search across fashion, beauty, home goods, and electronics categories. These are not ads or affiliate-driven, but they are powered by structured data from third-party sources. In fact, you can sign up to have your products included over here. OpenAI also announced improved citations, WhatsApp…

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 uses its search engine data and signals to help train its Gemini AI models, we learned from documents from the DOJ deposition testimony. Although, we kind of knew that when Google launched SGE, they told us they used Google Search’s core ranking systems to help identify high-quality sites (although, it didn’t seem like they…

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 Advertising has temporarily suspended the ability for agencies to send out client connection requests. Instead, the agency needs to reach out to Microsoft support and wait 5-7 days to hear back to be able to manage their client’s ad campaigns on Microsoft. So instead of an agency being able to get running quickly with…

In my Friday video, I mentioned some more volatility heating up on Friday morning and I promised to cover it if I see more signs of that update. Well, many of the other tools noticed volatility around April 25th, this past Friday, in addition to the 22nd and 23rd volatility we covered earlier last week….

Google is testing a new version of the mobile search results snippets where the URL is now blue, still clickable. Also, a variation where they are switching the placement of the URL and the site name. This was spotted by Brodie Clark, who posted both variations on X and his SERPNotes – here are those…

Google’s John Mueller pretty much said that using image streaming techniques will not result in an SEO friendly outcome. He actually said, “It’s a great way to prevent your images from being found through search engines.” The question was brought up by Myriam Jessier who asked, “if I work with a client that uses image…

This week, guess what, we saw more Google search ranking volatility heat up mid-week. Several new studies have come out showing that AI Overviews hurt click-through rates from search results. Google will stop supporting the COVID special announcements structured data on July 31st. Bing said they will streamline their Bing Webmaster Tools emails. Google Posts…

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 announced they will “now allow relevant Search ads from advertisers who showed amongst top ads to also participate in the bottom ads auction.” Honestly, I thought this update happened last month when they started to allow double serving ads (well, Google now says it is not double serving, so maybe that is 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…

Google Ads seems to be rolling out the expected age exclusions feature for Performance Max, PMax, campaigns. In January, Google told us it would be coming and then we saw the Google Ads Editor add the feature in version 2.9. And now, some are seeing it in the Google Ads advertiser console user interface. Thomas…

Google’s John Mueller was quick to debunk a claim that owning an .esports domain will have no positive SEO effect. He said on Bluesky, “There’s no positive SEO effect from a TLD like that.” This came up with the ESPORTS domain posted saying that the .esports TLD will “boost your SEO.” In which John Mueller…

Google Merchant Center has added a new report named popular products report. This report will show you your popular products, popular brands, top-selling products, etc, all on Google. This was spotted by Hana Kobzová who posted about it on her PPC News Feed blog and also on LinkedIn. Hana said this will help you when…

Google recently said it made Search “much faster,” at least that is what Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering at Google Search said on X. There is a larger blog post that Google wrote up on this, which I initially decided not to cover but I changed my mind. Rajan wrote, “We recently made Search…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Google was ruled, for the second time, an illegal monopoly again by a Federal Judge yesterday. And another week and more heated volatility in the Google Search results. Google also announced they will redirect their ccTLDs to their .com, but nothing is changing with how the 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…

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…

A US judge ruled Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some ad tech. This is the second time a judge ruled Google willfully engaged in monopolistic practices. The remedies for these rulings are still being worked out but may strengthen the case to have Google’s business broken up. The 115 page PDF court…

It’s been about a week and what would be do without reporting on yet more Google Search ranking volatility… I am seeing signs of a Google Search ranking update and volatility over the past 24 hours, maybe kicking in April 15th through April 16th, today. There is both a spike in chatter within the various…

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 Financial Times has a detailed interview with the newish Head of Google Search, Elizabeth Reid. The interview can be gated, so here are some of the quotes that stood out most to me from this interview. Reid joined Google in 2003 as one of the first of 10 or so engineers at the 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 released a new Google Ads ad strength guide and best practices document. The document should help you improve your overall ad strength in Google Ads. The document is over here and says: Ad strength is a real time feedback tool to guide you on the best practices for optimal asset group set-up to maximize…

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…

A month ago, we reported that Google was testing linking words in the AI Overviews back to its own search results. We felt this set a horrible message but hey, Google did not, instead, Google made it an official feature of AI Overviews because it helps “people more easily explore topics and discover relevant websites,”…

Recently, I’ve been complaining that Google is linking many of its search features back to more search results, this is also includes the AI Overviews – in fact, Google just made it official saying it helps searchers. Well, Bing Search is also doing this for some of their AI-based answer snippets. Khushal Bherwani spotted Microsoft…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week, we covered yet again some more Google search ranking volatility. Google Discover will be coming to the desktop version of Google’s homepage. Google Search Analytics API now shows hourly data for the past ten days. Google refreshes its Merchant opportunities report in Search Console. 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…

It’s been about a week since we reported on an unconfirmed Google search ranking update and well, now I am seeing multiple signs of an unconfirmed updates of sorts. I am seeing the third-party tracking tools showing volatility and I am also seeing a spike in some of the chatter within the SEO community. 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…

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 Friday afternoon, Danny Goodwin covered a 170 or so page PDF that Search Engine Land received from an anonymous tip named “Preference Ranking Guidelines.” It looks to me similar to the Google Quality Raters guidelines that continuously leaked until Google began publishing them for all to see. But this is the Apple version… Danny…

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 this month we reported that Bing was testing ad labels in blue colors. Well, now I am seeing examples of those ads labels without the blue, but rather normal black text and icons on white backgrounds. I currently see the blue ad labels but Khushal Bherwani posted examples of the black text on white…

Mike Ryan put together the single most comprehensive third-party report on Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. It is free, super detailed, easy to read and chock-full of useful information. And guess what, Google’s Ginny Marvin responded to some of the concerns in the report. I am not going to share all the findings here, download…

This week, we covered some more Google Search ranking volatility, post-core update. I also posted some polls on the Google March 2025 core update. Google said they do not have a brand ranking system. Google is ranking AI-translated Reddit results, like crazy. Google can now also use your email content, not just website content, 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…

We are less than a week after the Google March 2025 core update finished rolling out and we are seeing some heated volatility again, maybe more heated than what we saw during the last core update. The new volatility seemed to kick off on Wednesday, April 2nd, and continued through today, April 3rd. Although 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…

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 Local Service Ads advertiser console, where advertisers go to manage their LSAs, has been inaccessible for many advertisers since this morning. Google has not yet confirmed the issue but I see a number of complaints from advertisers starting at around 8 am ET. I am told this is “Confirmed with support system update,” from…

It appears that Google is letting Reddit’s AI translated pages rank too well within its search results. This is in addition to Google letting Reddit get a lot of other search visibility, but AI translation, well, that should really not perform so well. Glenn Gabe wrote this up in detail in his article named Reddit…

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 Ads conversation started goals section, where you setup WhatsApp messages within Google Ads, has new tabs. Google added diagnostics, store diagnostics, and webpages. Conversion diagnostics is a BETA feature that lets you check your diagnostics regularly to make sure you’re correctly and accurately measuring conversions. Arpan Banerjee shared a screenshot of this on X…

Google is testing a “contactless” label in place of the curbside pickup labels in the shopping search results. The curbside label became popular during COVID and has stuck around as a convenience factor for shoppers after. Arpan Banerjee spotted the new contactless label and posted this screenshot on X: I cannot replicate this, I only…

Google announced a number of features across Google Search, Maps, Lens and other areas around travel and vacation planning. Some of the features were already out there but let’s recap some of the more interesting features. (1) Google Search AI Overviews can now give trip ideas for distinct regions and entire countries. So if you…

We’ve seen the clipable coupons within the search results for several years now and in store listings and many places, but have we seen them in local knowledge panels? Maybe, I am not sure. But Sachin Patel spotted one example of it showing up in a local knowledge panel and posted about it on X…

Google’s March 2025 core update finished yesterday, I have a standalone video on that, so check it out. The core update caused more volatility at the tail end of the rollout. Google said there is no specific date for when a specific site may surface better in Google Search, but they will continue to make…

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 March 2025 core update is now done rolling out, it took 14 days, starting on March 13, 2025 at around 12:23 pm ET and ending on March 27, 2025 at around 8:34 am ET. Google posted saying, “The rollout was complete as of March 27, 2025.” This was the first core update of 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…

As you know, the Google March 2025 core update was announced on March 13th and it should be just about done rolling out. We saw some volatility related to that core update a few days into the update, then a lot of confusion later on, and now at the tail end of the update, we…

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 are tons of complaints in the Google Business Profile Help Forums about a bug during the setup process of a Google Business Profile. When you get to the screen about adding your phone number and website address, the next button won’t take you to the next screen – it just won’t let you go…

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…

For some Google searchers the ability to go to page two of the search results is simply not possible. The classic Google pagination bar is missing at the bottom of the results for some searchers. There are many complaints about this in the Google Web Search Forums about this issue, and there have been 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…

Google Search Console’s API will soon add support for the 24-hour hourly data view, plus, this will give you access to not just the past 24 hours but the past 8-days by hour. Google added the 24-hour view to the search performance report in Search Console in December. Then a few weeks later offered a…

John Mueller from Google said on Bluesky that he sees some SEOs over-focusing on the tiniest SEO metrics and that they should spend their time focusing on more important things. John wrote, “I know some SEOs like to over-focus on tiny metrics.” He went on to say that he thinks “sites will be better off…

Google Ads now lets you quickly hide all recommendations with the click of a button. Previously you had to hide each recommendation one-by-one, but now you can hide them all with one click. This was spotted by Boris Beceric who posted about it on X and he simply wrote, “Hide all. THANK YOU!” Here is…

As a reminder, the Google March 2025 core update touched down on March 13th, and as Google said, not before. And while many sites were hit super hard in the early days, the net of this update didn’t seem as wide as other core updates. Now, I am seeing the third-party tracking tools explode this…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Google confirmed that the volatility we saw prior to the core update was unrelated to this latest core update. I also posted status updates on the Google March 2025 core update. Google is testing AI Search features beyond the new AI Mode. Google is also testing linking…

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 is a big debate in the SEO community on the topic of schema markup and LLMs. Do LLMs like Microsoft Bing’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity and others use schema markup and structured data in any way. Fabrice Canel, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Bing, said they do. At least Microsoft does. David…

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…

Bing Webmaster Tools has been down and/or loading incredibly slowly for the past couple of hours. SEOs began noticing this since around 11 am ET and as of the time I posted this story, it is still down or barely loading. Here is when I posted about this on X earlier today, after a number…

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 seems to have accidentally leaked its various AI Search options and features, that go beyond just AI Mode, which it recently launched. 47 different AI Search options are shown including Info Sleuth, Allium, QTalk, MedExplainer, Fantasy Sports Researcher, Smart Kitchen and many more. This seems to reveal some niche AI search features that…

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…

For the original iTunes version, click here. This week we covered Google’s March 2025 core update being released. Google responded to some complaints or concerns about Google’s new AI Mode. A study showed Google grew 22% over the past year, in terms of search volume. Another study said that AI search engines are confidently…

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 that implementing hotlink protections with carve-outs for search engines are fine. He added that this is not really a thing sites do that much these days, stating it was a thing in 2010’s or so but not now. Truth is, it is a topic we covered pretty much once and that…

Initially when Google Ads released the ability to add negative keywords to your Performance Max campaigns, Google limited it to 100 keywords. We asked why only 100 back then. Well, Google listened to the ad community and increased that from 100 to 10,000 negative keywords. Ginny Marvin, Google’s Ads Liaison, wrote on X, “we heard…

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 sent out an email to advertisers yesterday about changes coming to Google Tag Manager. Specifically, Google Tag Manager will send events before loading a Google tag and Google calls this a “small change” that “will not harm measurement performance.” Honestly, many advertisers are skeptical about why Google is making this change now… The email…

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…

No surprise here – Google will be testing and experimenting with ads in Google AI Mode. Google told Adweek that they will be “explore bringing ads into” Google AI Mode. Google said they it learned from ads in AI Overviews (which we barely see by the way), and they will “leverage learnings” from that. Here…

Google has shut down, turned off, and disabled, its new page annotations feature. The feature where Google hijacked your content, placed links in your content, links you didn’t add yourself, and directed your content to Google Search. It is no longer, Google shut it down. As a reminder, the page annotations feature worked in the…

Google may be bringing channel reporting to the Google Ads Performance Max campaigns. I spotted this via Kirk Williams who posted a photo of a slide from Google Think event in Amsterdam where Arjan Schoorl attended. The slide says “Channel Reporting” will be coming to PMax and Demand Gen for increased transparency and controls. It…

Google Ads has updated its interface for when you select when you want your ads running in specific regions/locations. Now, it has a button to “add locations in bulk,” which should help you add locations faster. This update was spotted by Natasha Kaurra who shared a before and after screenshot on X: I am not…

Google released its much anticipated AI Mode, which is in beta now, but it super cool. Google AI Overviews are now powered by Gemini 2.0. Google had more search ranking volatility this week. Google said they answered over 5 trillion searches per year. Google said 10% of younger searchers start with Circle to Search. Sparktoro…

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 sent out emails to Local Service Ads advertisers notifying them that their Google Business Profile accounts are not affiliated to your Local Service Ads account. That means your reviews will only be accepted through your Google Business Profile link and not the Local Service Ads link. The email received by both Alex Sparks 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 officially announced Google AI Mode, after hearing rumors about it for months and then seeing leaked screenshots of it a few weeks ago. Google said AI mode gives you more advanced reasoning, thinking and multimodal capabilities so you can get help with even your toughest questions. What Is AI Mode AI Mode 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…

Google announced a number of updates to Google Shopping and Search with AI enhancements and expansions. Specifically rolling out vision match, a new try out new looks feature and expanding the try on feature to more clothing. With vision match, Google had this in beta in the SGE days, and they didn’t call it vision…

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 time for the monthly Google Webmaster Report. We are now in March as we continue to wait for the first Google core update of 2025. We did have a number of big unconfirmed Google updates, as documented below.

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…

While we’ve seen AI Overviews in the United States for a while now, and while Google has expanded them to 100+ countries – they are still not officially launched in many European countries like Germany, Switzerland, Italy and others. Well, now we are hearing that Google is testing AI Overviews in those countries. Olaf Kopp…

Since March 1st, there are many Google Ads accounts that are not serving ads. The Google Ads forum is filled with complaints about this and as far as I can tell, I cannot find a single response from an official Google Ads representative (as of yet). There are two large threads at the Google Ads…

A couple of days ago, Google sent out an email to owners of Google Business Profile listings. The email was a reminder about the Google Business Profile policies, and it highlighted policies around reviews. I received the email myself and the subject line read, “Important reminder about Business Profile policies.” The email goes on to…

Microsoft Bing Search’s Copilot Answers now can show maps and local results, including local ads. The AI answer has a map on the left side and then on the right side it has local organic and paid listings with the company name, address, phone, website and directions – plus a photo. This was spotted by…

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…

Microsoft is testing outlining the individual search result snippets within Bing Search. So when you look at a snippet, it has this outline around it, and then when you hover your cursor over it, it highlights more. Google has done variaitons of this test over the years. This was spotted by Sachin Patel who shared…

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 had a bug with the sitelinks creation page, where the prefill functionality was not working right. Google confirmed the issue and said it was “very limited and was not widespread.” The issue was reported by Chris Brewer who posted on LinkedIn showing how Google was prefilling in his competitor’s URLs into the sitelinks….

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 seems to be testing a more fully AI-powered search engine, which may be named Copilot Search. Copilot is the name of Microsoft’s AI features, formerly known as Bing Chat. Mayank Parmar spotted this test and wrote about it on Windows Latest. If you want to try it yourself, you can by going to bing.com/copilotsearch?q=windows…

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 will soon stop placing your Google Ads on parked domain names by default. Instead, you will need to opt in to showing your ads on these parked domains. Previously, Google opted out new Google Ads accounts from showing ads on parked domains. Now, Google will do this for even older/existing accounts. Google sent this…

Microsoft has this new style for some of the Bing Search Copilot answers. They can show a card or box that has a tabbed carousel where you can swipe through different sections of an article to get different categories of answers for the topic. This was spotted by Sachin Patel who posted about this on…

Google is testing a new box that highlights that you can book the hotel at the official site, the hotel’s direct website. This does not look like a sponsored result, but just a way to highlight the official website of the hotel. This was spotted by Thom de Graaf, but Adrian Dekker posted about it…

Google posted a new Google Ads update for Response search ads (RSAs) where up to two RSA headlines can serve in the space that previously only sitelinks were eligible for when Google’s system predicted they would improve performance. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, added on X, “This is rolling out over the next couple…

For the original iTunes version, click here. We had more ranking volatility with the Google Search results, this time we reported on it on Thursday. There are some rumors of a local update where Google would remove an organic listing when it shows in the local pack as well. Jeff Dean from Google spoke…

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 been almost two weeks since I last reported on a Google Search ranking update (unconfirmed) and that may be a recent record. But that being said, I am now seeing some signs of another unconfirmed Google update. The tools are starting to spike, and I am seeing some limited chatter within the SEO community….

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 first week of January, we reported on an interesting local update we named the January 2025 local search update. Well, this might be more of a diversity update, where Google removes the URL for the core organic results, when that URL is also present in the local pack results. Update, I am told 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 said that there is no persistent shortcut to faster crawling. Yes, you can expedite crawling for specific situations and times, but there is no way to just tell Google you want them to crawl you faster, all the time. This came up on Bluesky where the question was: I work with 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…

Dwarkesh Patel interviewed Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer of Google and one topic he asked about what would it be like to merge or combine Google Search with in-context learning. It resulted in a fascinating answer from Jeff Dean. Before you watch, here is a definition you might need: In-context learning, also known as few-shot…

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 has added to Performance Max campaigns, the search themes, an indicator to tell you what is driving a specific change in your ad performance. This shows a trend icon near the campaign and then shows you why it is performing, as it is. This was spotted by Natasha Kaurra who posted a screenshot…

Google seems to have removed the minimum required budget for Local Service Ads. It is not clear if this is intentional or a bug but the box to stop you from setting a budget too low, seems to not be there anymore. Anthony Higman posted about this on X and said, “Wild LSA change I…

Google seems to be adding links to review publishers when you hover over some of the product results, popular products, snippets. The links show only after the box expands, and it includes a snippet of content and then a link to the source. To be clear, this doesn’t just show for the popular products results,…

Google has updated its Merchant Listing structured data documentation to now support, in beta, membership loyalty pricing property types. Google also updated the docs to provide more examples and instructions around active prices, sale prices, strikethrough prices, and member prices in JSON-LD. The new member price type is the price at which the product is…

For the original iTunes version, click here. Google had some more ranking volatility around the Super Bowl weekend. Reddit blamed Google for not meeting its expected user growth. Google Search is now faster for some users. Google had a reviews count bug that it later confirmed and later fixed. Google image search may be…

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 it is testing new pre-fetching methods that increase the speed (Largest Contentful Paint – LCP) of the first two results by 67 milliseconds and for the results after those by about by 9.5 milliseconds. Barry Pollard and Oleksiy Busaryev from Google wrote on the Google Chrome Developer blog, “Google Search has been making…

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 is some chatter in the SEO community that Google Image Search may be down ranking, lowering the rankings, of AI-generated images, in favor of non-AI-generated images within the Google Image search results. Zack Notes posted about this on LinkedIn and shared some charts showing a drop in image traffic from Google Image Search 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…

The big Google review count bug, that we first reported on Friday and that later Google confirmed on Monday afternoon, is now being fixed. We can now see review counts climbing again and many small business owners and local SEOs are reporting improvements. Initially, many thought Google had a bug where tons of reviews were…

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 the Google local reviews seem to be disappearing or being counted wrong. Well, Google finally confirmed the issue, just minutes ago, in the Google Business Profiles Forums. Victoria Kroll from Google posted a statement in the Google Business Profiles Forum saying: We’re aware of an issue affecting some Google Business…

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 no longer showing the price of Bitcoin when you search for it in Google Search. Google’s VP, Engineering for Search, Rajan Patel, said this is “Not intended” and he will investigate the issue. If you search for [bitcoin usd] or variations of this search, you won’t get the price chat for Bitcoin, like…

Google has updated its Google Business Profiles reinstatement emails to now include the case number on the first appeal email. Plus, Google added five proof upload boxes to upload more evidence for Google to review. Ben Fisher posted about this update on X and wrote: (1) Reinstatement now includes a case number on the first…

Google Ads has a new feature in the keyword planner tool that will auto-organize new keywords into ad groups for you. This feature will take your new keywords and auto-organize them into keyword ideas in ad groups. This was spotted by Selina Naomi Patel who posted about this on LinkedIn – she shared this screenshot:…

John Mueller from Google wrote on Bluesky, “and let’s be honest, people can tell when author bios are used purely as an SEO tactic. It’s kinda awkward, not reassuring.” This was in response to a post from Nikki Pilkington who said “Stop treating author bios as an SEO tactic and start treating them as what…

Yep, we are seeing more Google search ranking volatility mid-week. I posted the monthly Google webmaster report for February. Google Ads has a new quality update that accounts for user navigation experience. Google AI Overviews has these super detailed comparison modes. Google AI Overviews seem to be killing click-through rates for organic and paid 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…

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…

Another update in the revised Google Quality Raters Guidelines that was updated on January 23rd was that they added a section for recipe sites and said that requiring “significant scrolling” or making it hard to find the jump to recipe button is not a good thing. I mean, we expected this, Google did issue 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…

Google AI Overviews are now able to show super detailed comparison within Google Search. If you search for two very specific models, Google may give you a ton of details directly in the AI Overview. For example, if you search for [iphone 15 vs iPhone 15 pro] you get this AI Overview: As Blair MacGregor…

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 is offering some advertisers the option to book a tagging appointment with a Google Ads representation through the Google Ads console. This will help you set up an appointment to have a Google rep help you set up proper tracking of your campaigns. This was spotted by Natasha Kaurra who posted about 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 is testing a new filter for its shopping results in the mobile search results. Instead of showing a single filter menu, Google is showing a product image carousel line first and then a filter menu for additional search filters. Here is a screenshot, the new version is on the left, the old is on…

Google Search is now sometimes showing the ability to filter products in its search results by product rating. I am not sure if this is new or not, but I cannot replicate this but some are seeing the product rating filter/refinement option when searching. Sachin Patel spotted this and while I am not sure if…

Google is testing (I think again) review carousels and block units in its search results for product queries. A number of SEOs spotted these coming up over the past week or two, and they basically show product review content in a separate section within Google Search. Blair MacGregor on X posted this screenshot of…

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, has confirmed that demographic exclusions will apply to Shopping inventory in Performance Max campaigns. Marvin added that the reporting on how this is shown to advertisers is still to be determined, but the goal is to let advertisers control which age groups can or cannot see the ads. Mike…

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 Search ranking volatility spiked and heated again over the past 24-hours or so. I am seeing renewed chatter spike up yesterday, January 29th and continue through today. I am also seeing that some of the tracking tools are showing an increase in Google ranking volatility within Google Search over the past day. Previously we…

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 once again expanded the reach of its site reputation abuse policy, beyond the US enforcement from from May and beyond limited European regions last week – we are now seeing enforcement in the massive German market. I believe Christian Kunz reported this first on his German SEO blog. He told me on X,…

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…