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

Google has expanded the attribute rules feature in Google Merchant Center to work for automatically found products. Before, attribute rules only worked for products added through your merchant feeds, but not it works for products Google finds by itself and adds to Merchant Center.

Here is the monthly Google webmaster report - the June 2026 edition - where I cover all the larger SEO and webmaster related Google Search news that you may want to catch up on over the past week. Yes, we had the big Google May 2026 core update, with a number of unconfirmed updates as well.

Microsoft's Fabrice Canel confirmed on LinkedIn last night that more features are coming sooner rather than later around Bing Webmaster Tools AI performance reporting and AI reporting.

Google Merchant Center may have a bug in its automated validation of products and landing pages. Last night, some Google Ads merchants received disapproval notices for "Product page unavailable" even though the product page was indeed available.

Microsoft Bing is testing using a larger favicon format for sponsored ads in the top position. The favicon is about 33% bigger in the top sponsored ad position than in an organic or lower sponsored ad position.

It is not that uncommon, unfortunately, to see Google Ads that are designed to steal your login credentials for various platforms, including your Google account. Now, when you search for "my business," which is how many businesses login to their Google Business Profile account, you are presented with a Google Ad that will attempt to grab your login credentials and take over your account.

Google has announced the new Google Pay & Wallet Developer MCP server, an open-standard tool designed to securely connect AI development assistants and IDEs with real-time API and account context. The server allows developers to remain within their development environment to search official documentation, validate Wallet pass definitions, check integration status, and manage merchant accounts. Ultimately, this integration aims to reduce friction and accelerate development workflows by minimizing context switching and providing up-to-date, grounded AI support.

We are excited to bring Express checkout with Google Pay for Android native apps enabling developers...

India’s video story is no longer defined by metros. Today, daily engagement spans cities, towns, and villages alike, signalling a new phase of truly nationwide digital behaviour. New insights from Meta-commissioned studies by IPSOS show that video has become the default mode of content consumption across the country, with Reels emerging as India’s primary screen for discovery, culture, creator engagement and commerce.

This shift is happening at a remarkable scale: at least 97% of surveyed users in India now watch videos on our platforms daily, reflecting the country’s rapid move toward mobile-first, video-first behaviour. Importantly, this is no longer an urban-only trend. Daily video engagement is now nearly identical across urban India (98%) and rural India (94%), signalling that India’s video-first transformation is being shaped as much by Bharat as it is by metros.

Surveying 4000+ respondents across 23 cities including Metros, Tier 2/3 and Rural India, the study highlights that we have emerged as the primary daily video platform across audiences, with 97% daily usage among Gen Z, 97% among women, and 98% among NCCS A audiences – reinforcing our leadership across both mass and premium consumer segments. 

At the centre of this shift is Reels, which has rapidly evolved into the defining short-form video surface for the next generation of consumers.

Increasingly, Reels is becoming India’s personal and primary screen – a place where people discover content, creators, communities and brands throughout the day. Among Gen Z audiences, 89% use Reels daily, making it a primary destination for content, culture and self-expression. Daily Reels engagement is similarly strong among women (85%) and NCCS A audiences (88%), reflecting how short-form video, led by Reels, is increasingly and democratically shaping how India discovers trends, creators and brands. 

“India’s video boom isn’t urban-led anymore — it’s nationwide, cutting across GenZ, women and premium audiences. Creators, culture and commerce are converging on Reels in ways we haven’t seen before. For brands, this isn’t just a content play — it’s a always on Content-to-Commerce play. Reels are where discovery starts, trust is built, and purchase decisions are made.” – Saugato Bhowmik, Director, CPG & D2C, Automotive, (India) at Meta

Gen Z and Bharat Audiences Driving Next Wave of Digital Growth

One of the strongest signals emerging from the insights is the role of key demographic groups in shaping how India consumes and discovers content online.

Reels has become a key discovery engine for these audiences, deeply embedded in everyday entertainment and exploration habits. Among younger users, 84% of Gen Z consumers discover new products and brands through our platforms, underscoring the role of short-form video in influencing preferences, trends, and purchase journeys. Similarly, 73% of rural users discover new products and brands through our platforms, highlighting how creator-led content is resonating far beyond metropolitan markets.

The findings signal that the next chapter of India’s internet economy will increasingly be shaped beyond metros – by mobile-first users consuming culturally rooted, creator-driven video content.

Lifestyle, Comedy, Fitness and Sports Are Emerging as India’s Most Engaged Reels Genres

The study also reveals that strong engagement around content categories is rooted in everyday interests and aspirations.

Beauty and makeup (52%), Fashion and trends (52%), Lifestyle (42%), Fitness & Wellness (42%), Comedy & Humour (39%), Sports (38%), and Travel (37%) have emerged among the most engaged genres on Reels, highlighting how audiences are gravitating toward culturally relevant and highly relatable content experiences.

Creators are playing a central role in driving this engagement. Reels delivers nearly 60% higher creator engagement than other surveyed short-form video platforms, reinforcing the growing influence of creator-led storytelling in shaping conversations, trends and brand discovery. Importantly, the influence of the ecosystem itself is evolving. 

They are no longer just content producers – they are trusted entertainment and discovery engines. Rural India, Gen Z, Women, and NCCS A audiences actively engage with creators on our platforms, making creators a key driver of culture, trends and brand discovery.

Reels Is Becoming a Key Driver of Discovery and Decisions

Beyond entertainment and engagement, the studies reveal Reels’ growing influence across the consumer purchase journey.

Reels influence the consumer journey end-to-end, driving 81% product discovery, 66% consideration, and 47% purchase influence among users, positioning short-form video as a critical driver of modern commerce behaviour.

The platform’s influence is particularly strong across high-intent categories including e-commerce, auto and financial services.

Even in financial services, there is a pronounced effect in Bharat markets. 76% of rural financial services users engage with our platforms daily, underscoring how financial inclusion and product discovery are increasingly unfolding through mobile-first video experiences.

Women are also emerging as a powerful audience within this category, with 54% of women financial product owners engaging with creators on our platforms daily – one of the highest among all audience cohorts studied.

The auto category reflects a similarly full-funnel pattern. Our platform leads across the entire automotive purchase journey – from Discovery (82%) to Consideration (68%) and Purchase (50%) – reinforcing how car-buying decisions are increasingly being shaped through short-form video and creator-led influence and impact.

Key Stats from the IPSOS Reports: 

• India’s Video-First Reality

• • • 97% watch video on Meta at least once a day – video isn’t a trend, it’s the default.   
    • This isn’t a metro story: 98% urban and 94% rural daily usage shows video has gone truly pan-India.
    • Meta leads daily video usage across India’s most sought-after audiences – Gen Z (97%), Women (97%), and NCCS A (98%).

• Reels: The Next-Gen Screen

• • • Reels is where Gen Z lives – 89% use it daily, making it the defining surface for youth culture and content.
    • For Women (85%) and premium audiences (NCCS A, 88%), Reels is now the primary short-form video screen.

• Genres & Creators

• • • Beauty & makeup, Lifestyle, Fitness, Comedy, and Sports are driving outsized engagement on Reels – proof that culturally rooted content wins.
    • Reels drive ~60% higher creator engagement than other short-form video platforms, making it the go-to surface for creator-led storytelling.

• From Discovery to Purchase

• • 81% stronger product discovery on Reels – it’s where consumers first meet brands, build an interest that further leads to review and commerce.
  • 47% influence on purchase decisions – short-form video is now a commerce engine, higher than other surveyed short-form video platforms and TV
  • Reels leads the full path-to-purchase across Gen Z, Women, NCCS A and categories including Online Shopping, Auto, and Financial Services.

The post Reels Is Shaping India’s Video-First Future Across Gen Z, Women & Bharat appeared first on Meta Newsroom.

SpaceX set its IPO price at $135, putting the company on track for a record public listing and a valuation near $1.77 trillion.

The post SpaceX Sets $135 IPO Price at $1.77T Valuation appeared first on TechRepublic.

The Google Tunix Hackathon on Kaggle challenged developers to transform small, non-reasoning base models into general reasoning engines using Kaggle TPUs and a limited compute budget. The winning teams achieved this by implementing multi-stage post-training pipelines that combined Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with advanced alignment techniques like GRPO and SimPO. Ultimately, the competition democratized AI development by proving that highly capable, structured reasoning models can be successfully trained by the community using accessible, open-source resources.

Google has announced the general availability of Gemini Embedding 2, a unified model that maps text, images, video, audio, and documents into a single semantic space. This model allows developers to process interleaved multimodal inputs in a single request, significantly improving performance for tasks like agentic RAG, visual search, and content moderation. By supporting over 100 languages and offering features like task-specific prefixes and Matryoshka dimensionality reduction, the model provides a highly efficient and accurate foundation for building complex AI agents.

The newly released Gemma 4 12B is a dense, multimodal model designed for high-performance local AI execution on consumer devices. By introducing a novel, encoder-free architecture, it bypasses traditional visual and audio encoders to feed multimodal data directly into the LLM backbone.

Google DeepMind’s Gemma 4 12B model brings agentic, multimodal AI capabilities to everyday laptops with 16GB of RAM, enabling local data processing and visual insight generation. Users can leverage this model on macOS through the Google AI Edge Gallery for dynamic Python code execution and visualization, as well as via Google AI Edge Eloquent for completely offline voice dictation and text editing. Additionally, developer workflows are enhanced by the LiteRT-LM CLI's new serve command, which creates an industry-compatible local endpoint to power fully-local AI tools and agents.

Google is unifying its AI terminal tools by transitioning the community-focused Gemini CLI into Antigravity CLI, a new agent-first platform built for complex, multi-agent workflows. This new Go-based tool offers faster execution, asynchronous processing, and a unified architecture that syncs with the Antigravity 2.0 desktop application. While enterprise customers will maintain existing access, individual and free users must transition to the new platform before Gemini CLI stops serving requests on June 18, 2026.

The Google Cloud and NVIDIA developer community is celebrating its first anniversary with 100,000 members and a renewed focus on providing builders with advanced AI infrastructure and resources. To accelerate development, the community offers curated learning pathways for mastering LLM optimization, GPU-accelerated data analytics, and monthly expert-led webinars. Moving into its second year, the initiative will expand to include hands-on labs, engineering events, and specialized content focused on the growth of agentic AI.

Google announced the transition from assistive AI to independent agents, highlighting the launch of the Gemini 3.5 series and major updates to its Antigravity agent-first development platform. For mobile developers, the post introduces new Android CLI tools, the Android Bench evaluation leaderboard, and an automated Migration agent designed to rapidly convert various frameworks into native Kotlin code. Web development is also being transformed through Chrome DevTools for agents, the HTML-in-Canvas API, and the proposal of WebMCP, an open web standard that enables browser-based AI agents to execute complex tasks.

The Google Tensor ML SDK is graduating to its Beta phase, allowing developers to build and deploy high-performance machine learning models directly onto the TPU of Google Pixel 10 devices. By integrating with LiteRT, Google's edge deployment framework, the SDK provides a unified workflow for developers to convert, compile, and run PyTorch or TFLite models with robust fallback options. Additionally, a new model garden offers over 100 classic and generative AI models, including Gemma 3, enabling low-latency, private features like speech recognition, computer vision, and text generation.

The Google AI Edge Gallery app has expanded its on-device AI capabilities by introducing experimental support for the open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) on Android, allowing Gemma 4 to coordinate complex tasks across external data sources like Google Workspace and Google Maps. To enable more proactive and persistent user interactions, the update adds a "Schedule Notification" skill for automating routines and a persistent chat history feature that restores long session contexts nearly instantly. Driven by an open-source toolkit, the platform encourages community developers to build and share custom utility-focused workflows, prompt configurations, and tool integrations via its GitHub repository.