Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. Google Search ranking volatility is heating up now...

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.

CNBC reports Google has been sued in the UK for <<£5 billion ($6.6 billion) in potential damages over allegations that the U.S. tech giant abused its "near-total dominance" in the online search market to drive up prices.

Google.com will soon be the only way to access Google Search. The ccTLD versions of Google will redirect to Google.com. That means if you try to go to Google.ca, Google.fr. Google.co.uk and so on, those will all redirect to Google.com.

Google has released its annual Google Ads Safety report and the big number that stands out to me is that Google has suspended over 200% more advertiser accounts in 2024 than it did in 2023; 39.2 million versus 12.7 million. Google also removed 5.1 billion ads, restricted over 9.1B ads, restricted ads on 1.3 billion publisher pages and took broader site-level enforcement action on over 220,000 publisher sites.

Google is testing a "new" label in the search result snippets. Several people are noticing this "new" label next to search result snippets that have new content.

We know Google loves to link to its own search results from the AI Overviews, and we have seen those links sometimes go in a loop of sorts. But did you know Google can show the same link to a website in the AI Overviews more than once?

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web. The Financial Times interviewed Google's head of search, Liz Reid. Google AI Overviews can link to itself over and over again...

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.

As you know, Google is okay with linking its AI Overviews back to more Google Search results. But is Google okay with linking the same query, to the same query, over and over again, through the AI Overviews?

Google said it again - structured data does not help your site rank any better. John Mueller of Google said this on Bluesky, "Structured data won't make your site rank better." He said, all it is "used for displaying the search features listed in" this search gallery document.

There seems to be a bug that is impacting the first image in the product snippet image carousel set. I was notified about this a few times in the past few days by various people and while I cannot replicate this, many can.

Google is testing a new shortcut location for AI Mode in the Google App on Android. Google is placing the shortcut button directly in the search bar.