This week, we covered two unconfirmed Google search ranking updates, one mid-week and one over the weekend - some were pretty big. Google said Reddit gets no special preference in its search rankings or AI results...

Google Ads is rolling out a new customer acquisition option named "Report on new customers acquired." This lets you "Drive purchases from new and existing customers without changing bidding," according to Google.

Earlier this week, OpenAI sent an email to advertisers about new ChatGPT Ads Manager product updates. These updates include testing a new multi-product carousel format for product feed campaigns, plus a number of updates to the ad manager itself.

Google Ads will begin migrating or "upgrading" Automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting to AI Max starting on September 1, 2026. We knew this was coming and now the process is soon going to begin.

Gary Illyes from Google said that Google's crawlers do not only send HTTP requests such as GET and POST but also for HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE. He said the latter make up for less than 1.5% of the total number of requests all Google's crawlers send. Google sends them for JavaScript, he said.

Google Ads added a "View call report" link in the Phone Call conversions leads report. This makes it easier to jump to the details of what makes up the metrics of that report and gives you access to that data in a new tab.

Google Ads is now testing the "Strongest match" and "Strong match" labels it announced back in mid-June. This is the first time I have seen this label in the wild. I am actually a bit surprised Google went on with this test after the backlash...

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. We are seeing big changes and swings with the Google Search results...

Yes, I reported Google Search ranking volatility over this past weekend, but I am seeing a large increase in the chatter within the SEO community over the past 24 hours or so. The chatter seems consistent with a big Google Search algorithm update that is underway but at this point, Google has not yet confirmed it and may never confirm it.

Google announced a number of big changes within its executive AI leadership ranks, including Jeff Dean leaving Google after 27 years, Demis Hassabis stepping down as Google DeepMind CEO to be its chair, and Koray Kavukcuoglu taking over many of his responsibilities. No matter how Google spun it, the stock was down about 4% yesterday from the news.

While the Google Search Console generative AI performance reports do not share query data, you can still try to figure out which queries are from AI Mode versus normal searches. The SEO community has been doing this for years now by looking for more conversational-style queries in your Search Console performance reports.

Microsoft Advertising is rolling out a new feature for advertisers to allow you to exclude Audience ads placements within Performance Max campaigns. There is a new setting named "Excluded content terms" within Audience Ads.

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, posted a video Q&A on the upcoming bidding update coming on August 17th. As you know, these bidding changes are causing a big stir within the PPC industry and Ginny wanted to answer some questions in a video format.

Google has a new specialized feature within Product Listing Ads within Merchant Center named Deal Ends annotation. This is experimental now but works globally, except for EEA+, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. It will add high-impact and real-time urgency signals, such as "3 days left" or "5 hours left" badges, directly below product prices.

Google Ads is testing a new security feature to disallow free domain email addresses (such as @gmail.com or @yahoo.com) from performing sensitive actions on a Google Ads advertiser account. Google will only allow those using corporate emails to perform such actions.

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