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 seems to be spiking once again...

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 ranking volatility within Google Search over the past day.

Did you know there is a quick way to directly generate an access request for Service Area Businesses in Google Maps? This is apparently not so new but also not widely known.

Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, explained why Google is only letting you add up to 100 negative keywords to your campaign-level negative keywords within your Performance Max campaigns on Google Ads.

We recently covered how you can now drag and drop menu items for your restaurant in your Google Business Profiles. But Google also seemed to add the ability to move menu items between sections of your menu and the ability to batch edit pricing of menu items.

In early December, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said Google is starting to test powering AI Overviews with Gemini 2.0. Well, we may be starting to see some of that in the wild, with much deeper and detailed AI Overviews and citations.

Microsoft reported its second quarter 2025 earnings and it showed that its search and advertising revenue was up 21%. The previous quarter it was up 18%, then 19% but before than it was 12% and 8% - so things are looking more positive.

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

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.

Google may have pushed some improvements to the reporting system within Google Search Console. Now Google can show how soon the report was updated within a 30 minute interval. So instead of showing last updated 3 hours ago or 4 hours ago, as an example, Google can show 3.5 hours ago.

Earlier this month, the Google Ads industry had a lot of confusion around if and in what cases the Google Ads API accept or support placement exclusions for Performance Max campaigns. Well, Google's Ginny Marvin clarified this the other day in an email to Navah Hopkins.

Google AI Overviews, even when not signed into a Google Labs project, is providing coding and programming examples and help. This started sometime yesterday, I believe, and before, I believe you had to opt into a Search Labs experiment to trigger this.

John Mueller from Google noted that he finds it "interesting" how those who spend time in our industry "can often recognize made-for-search-engine content fairly quickly." Meaning, we are good at seeing a piece of content on the web and knowing if it was created to perform well in search or written by a normal user trying to help others.