Google seems to be showing more and more AI Overviews these days and even for many large brand names. It don't have a ton of data but Google does seems to be showing more and AI Overviews for almost every large brand name except for Google's own name and news publications.

OpenAI just sent out an email to advertisers about new ChatGPT Ads product updates that include several new features. The new features include bulk creation for product feed campaigns, product review status, report conversions beyond your campaign goal through the API, separate account, brand, and legal names and ChatGPT Ads are live in Southeast Asia and Taiwan.

Google Maps now requires you to sign in to a Google account to see all the reviews on a Google Business Profile listing. It is also required in order to sort the reviews, leave a review, and more. I assume this was done to help prevent AI, bots, and third parties from scraping the Google reviews.

As you know, Google has a small pilot named the AI contribution pilot, where they are paying some publishers for using their content in AI features like AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini. Well, according to The Information, it is about 100 publishers and those publishers are getting about "one-tenth of 1% of their advertising revenue."

Google is testing making the sponsored products search results block or grid look more like the organic products/shopping grid. Instead of showing a long carousel of products across the top or on the right, this shows a product grid format we are more accustomed to for the free product listings.

Microsoft Bing is testing adding product feature labels to product listings in the search results. This can add labels like "great for...," "effective," "performs well," "lightweight", and so on.

Microsoft Advertising now shows "consumer review" ad extensions in the Bing search results sponsored results section. These are one-line snippets of text, added under the sponsored result, that come a "from consumer review."

Google has some sort of end of summer event and at that event they had a keychain making station. I assume Googlers and their kids were able to make custom keychains to bring home with them.

Google has confirmed there are issues with Google Analytics loading the platform. Google updated its status report to say that it has "restored for some users" and Google expects "a resolution for all users in the near future."

Pietro Valetto interviewed Nick Fox, Senior Vice President of Knowledge & Information at Google. Nick Fox shared a snippet from the full video about the DMA changes that led Google to say it had to make the biggest reduction in search quality in its 28-year history. Fox said doing so made him feel "terrible" and "sad."

Google is testing showing two rows of action buttons of the local panels within mobile search. Google has been testing showing a more + sign to load more or a scrollable carousel of buttons and now here it is with two rows.

Google is testing showing citation cards at the bottom of AI Overview responses on desktop, instead of on the right side. Google tested variations of this at least twice before, once in March of 2026 and before that in September 2025.

A new bug with Google Business Profiles and Google Maps is placing some businesses' Google Maps pins in the middle of the ocean. This is reportedly happening for some service area businesses that do not list their address publicly on their Google local listings.

Google has added a new policy to the Google Business Profiles policies document. The new policy is named "Misuse of support channels."

Google has officially appealed to the European Union to stop the European Commission's Digital Markets Act (DMA) mandate requiring it to share search history data with competitors. Google said, "We're appealing decisions that will force us to share people's private search history without sufficient anonymization and weaken vital security protections on Android."

Here is another photo of a different Mariachi band, this time on the rooftop of the Google offices in London.

Google is now rolling out monitoring capabilities in AI Mode in Google Search globally for everyone. When Google first announced this feature, it was only available for Ultra and Pro paid subscribers, but now it is available to all Google users.

The first stage of the Google September 2026 Spam update seems to have been felt in a big way starting Friday, September 25th, with even more movement on Saturday, September 26th and then ending on Sunday, September 27th. There is more to come, since we are only five days into the two-week rollout.

A couple of weeks ago, Google seemed to accidentally publish its Web Search Service API documentation, then pulled it down last week. Google doesn't offer a public Web Search Service API, so we really can't access it, but I assume it does have some partners with access, like Apple.

Google has updated several Google Merchant Center policy documents late last week. The documents include Products that enable dishonest behavior, Dangerous products, Counterfeit products, Sexual content, Editorial & professional requirements, the overarching Shopping ads policies overview and probably more.

Google is testing replacing the "Show more" button under the AI Overviews with a "Loading..." button. Also, earlier this year, Google tested "Enter AI Mode" for the button text but that obviously did not stick.

Google has completely revamped the Google Merchant Center API help document page. It was previously named "API access to Merchant Center" and was renamed to "Google Merchant Center API." Plus, the content on the page has been completely rewritten and expanded.

Google seems to have removed the Follow button from the desktop search results page, but it is still on the mobile search results page. The follow button lets you quickly follow a Search profile for the individual or brand you searched for.

Here is a photo from the Google Jiu-Jitsu folks, which we covered a lot here in this Search Pics column. You can see they also have Jiu-jitsu rolling shirts.

Google continues to test variations of designs and user experiences for Sitelinks within its search results. The new design spotted has the Sitelinks listed line by line, with a horizontal line across the left side of the mobile search result snippet.

Today is Google's 28th birthday and Google has a special Google Doodle to celebrate. The Doodle takes you back in time to an early Google logo. Plus, when you click on the Doodle, you are taken into AI Mode where you can take "a fun trivia quiz about Google's company lore, historical quirks, and birthday traditions."

YouTube video by RustyBrick Barry Schwartz Search Engine Roundtable

As you know, Google has thousands of quality raters they use to help test and improve the search results and AI results. OpenAI does the same thing, with AI trainers according to a report by 404 Media.

Google seems to have made a change in which phone number they use for tracking calls, even when you tell Google to use the Google Ads number, it is still using the Google Business Profiles phone number. I am told this is a confirmed change and Google still has not changed it back, and it is unclear if Google will change it back.

Microsoft Bing is testing adding an editable icon in two formats on images within Bing Search that can be edited using Bing's AI image feature.

Did you know that you cannot edit your Target ROAS while promotion mode is active in Google Ads? Google will display a notification that reads, "You can't edit your Target ROAS while promotion mode is active" and then gives you the option to edit the ROAS tolerance instead.

Google updated two of its Google Posts help documents to allow phone numbers in Google Posts only if they are verified contact information, but if it is unverified, it is not allowed.

Microsoft is testing replacing or renaming the Copilot search tab in Bing Search with the name AI Mode. AI Mode is the name Google uses for its AI search engine, Bing uses Copilot Search, but Microsoft is testing using Google's name here.

I am a big fan of bricks, so when I saw the Google logo made up of a brick wall, you bet it caught my eye. I found this on the Google Students X account some time ago.

Google has just announced the release of the September 2026 spam update and said it should take a couple of weeks to roll out. This is a global update and is expected to impact all languages. This only impacts sites that spam, but with any update, there may be collateral damage. Google wrote: Released the September 2026 spam update...

Google has updated its video structured data documentation to support creator property and it has updated the interactionStatistic in VideoObject structured data. Google said these updates are to "to document support for the creator and author properties, and clarify supported interaction types for interactionStatistic in VideoObject structured data."

We are seeing significant volatility again within the Google Search rankings again, this time starting around September 23rd (maybe the 22nd) and throughout today. As we have been seeing, the chatter is generally slowing down as Google has been sending less and less traffic to sites, but I believe there are enough signals to say there was some sort of unconfirmed Google Search ranking update.

Google Business Profiles is testing a new feature to let it set your business hours for you automatically by just asking you to describe your business hours in text. Google will then use AI to interpret them and make them into a structured format to list on your local panel in Google Search and Google Maps.

Google Ads is showing some advertisers not just a recommendation with the ability to make a change on that recommendation but it is tied to the advertiser's forecast. It shows your projected weekly conversion value and adds that your campaign is limited by budget, and that you should spend more to hit the forecast.

We've seen Microsoft test variations of expanding sitelinks within the Bing search results before. But here is a different variation on that, one that expands and shows descriptions under the sitelinks after you hover your mouse cursor over the specific sitelink.

Google is testing a redesigned Local Service Ads design in the search results that have larger images and a highlight box under the listings. It makes the ads really stand out and in your face.

Google is testing moving the AI Overviews from the top of the page to the bottom-right location for hotel searches. So when you bring up a hotel knowledge panel, you may see an AI Overview at the bottom of the page.

Google is rolling out a new Search Console performance report filter for the web results named Multimodal. Some may see it now, when you select the Search type filter in the performance report, under the "Web" option it now shows "Text-based" and "Multimodal."

Google Ads updated its Recommended Investment Strategy tab on the Recommendations page with Strategic budget allocation using Holistic and Growth modes. Holistic mode reallocates spend from underperforming campaigns to top performers for maximum efficiency, while Growth mode adds fresh budget to top performers without cutting spend anywhere else.

Here is a Google sign and logo embedded within a bush of sorts inside the Google office in Stockholm, Sweden.

Google has released version 25.2 of the Google Ads API, this is a minor release with several of updates. This update includes competitive benchmarks percentile metrics, the ability to generate Performance Max drafts from Smart campaigns, asset group URL options, Search bid adjustment recommendations, and more.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has proposed new measures to force Google to make it easier for users of Google's Android and Chrome to use an alternative search engine or AI platform. This is "designed to give millions of Google Android and Google Chrome customers in the UK greater choice and more control over the search services they use," the CMA wrote.

Google Ads added new help documentation on how to test AI Max against Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) by using experiments. Google posted two options within Google Ads experiments including (1) custom experiments and (2) the experiment template.

Microsoft is testing placing favicons on the Bing shopping ads, product results, carousel. Normally, this ad unit just shows the site name but Bing is testing adding favicons in front of the site name.

Google has updated the localized versions of your page help document to change all the hreflang examples from lowercase codes to uppercase codes. It doesn't matter because the hreflang value is case-insensitive; Google accepts lowercase and uppercase codes.