Google will soon support dark mode in Google Search Console. Ariel Kroszynski, a Senior Software Engineer at Google, announced this at the Google Search Central Live Deep Dive Europe 2026 in Barcelona last week.

Google spoke at the three-day Google Search Central Live Deep Dive event in Europe about why it has rolled out so many spam updates in 2026, according to John Campbell's recap at We Are Roast. He said that Google has been doing more spam updates because there is so much more new content than before. He also said Google is using AI to catch more spam.

Google Ads sent an email notifying some advertisers that it will automatically identify and extract high-quality promotions from your website and apply them directly to your campaigns starting on October 12, 2026. This is called automated promotions and only applies to Search and Performance Max campaigns with linked location assets.

Google seems to have a bug of sorts where sometimes it can show the three dots about this ad or search result button twice, instead of just once. I can replicate this for some queries but not all.

Gary Illyes from Google reportedly presented new data from Google Search on how long Google for crawling, indexing and serving on average. This is broken down by process, withing crawling, indexing and serving and shows the typical timeframe versus the slowest timeframe.

Google Ads has a new AI campaign localization tool for Search campaigns (beta), at least according to a new help document I found late last week. "You can use the AI campaign localization tool to quickly localize entire Search campaigns for new languages and regions using generative AI," Google wrote in the help document.

OpenAI announced "new visual ad format in ChatGPT" that it will be testing "later this month in the US with an initial group of advertisers." The new visual ad format is an "ad format during image generation in ChatGPT." So if you ask ChatGPT to make an image for you, it will show a special ad for that process.

At this Google event, they had a hula hoop area where children of Google employees were able to hula hoop. There is a video on Instagram of them hula hooping.

YouTube video by RustyBrick Barry Schwartz Search Engine Roundtable

Google made several changes to the about merchant loyalty program within the Google Merchant Center help documentation. The key changes are that Loyalty Customer Match expanded to AI Mode and Gemini and to more regions, but there are even more changes noted in the help documentation.

Google seems to be testing adding tracking parameters to the link URLs within AI Overviews. If this rolls out fully, this will help you decipher when you get a click from an AI Overview in Google Search or just a click from the main Google Search web results.

Google Local Service Ads seems to hide the phone number until you hover your mouse over the ad. I am not sure if this is new or not, but there is a big button that says "Get phone number" which is not needed because the phone number does show up as soon as you move your mouse near the ad.

Microsoft Bing is testing a new'ish section labeled "Recommended by" followed by the company making the recommendations. The weird thing is, the specific product thumbnails link to various retailers and not the place that recommended it.

Google Ads may have a bug or maybe it is testing, not showing images on sponsored product results. You can see from the screenshot below, the images that are generally shown above the ad titles and descriptions are missing from the Sponsored products carousel in Google Search.

Google Ads show up a lot within AI Mode these days and with that, Google is testing various ad formats to see which formats get the highest click-through rate (unlike links in AI Mode). Here is a screenshot of what may be the Google Ads Sitelinks within AI Mode.

Google Ads will update its business name policy to allow some advertisers to use a business name that differs from the ad's destination domain. This is limited to certain cases, specifically three cases and it also excludes advertisers who are not the direct verified brand.

As you know, Google celebrated its 28th birthday this past Saturday on September 27th. Well, here is a Google office that celebrated with tons of cakes and treats.

Google has updated the creating helpful, reliable, people-first content help document to primarily add two new sections. First, it added that the main content is super critical, added what is main content and then explained how Search Quality raters review content quality of the main content.

Google has updated Google Search's "guidance on using generative AI content on your website" document to tell those who use AI-generated content to "manually factcheck and review all AI-generated content for accuracy and trustworthiness before publishing."

OpenAI announced that it is rolling out virtual try-on for clothing and accessories for ChatGPT on the mobile and web interfaces. This also includes saving these to your ChatGPT Library.

About a year ago, Penske, which operates and owns Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Variety, and others, sued Google over its AI Overviews. Well, that case was dismissed because Penske failed to prove that Google entered into any formal agreement with Penske to sell its content in exchange for any amount of traffic.

Google announced the Google September 2026 spam update a week ago today on September 24th. We most likely saw the first wave of sites getting hit on September 25th, 26th and into the 27th. Then things cooled a bit but it all heated back up yesterday, September 30th. September 30th may have been the second wave, the second phase of this Google spam update.

There seems to be a bug with Google Local Service Ads showing ads from advertisers who are not targeting specific locations. With Local Service Ads, an advertiser can say they serve a specific city or location, but Google seems to be showing ads from advertisers who do not serve in those locations.

Here is the big Google webmaster report for October 2026, where I recap the most important organic and webmaster-focused Google Search news for the past month. Clearly, the Google September 2026 spam update, which started off strong and is still rolling out, is the big ticker. But we also have other unconfirmed Google updates to cover.

Google seems to be going after team rosters with the latest Google AI Overview to overtake website content for its own AI-generated version of that content. If you search for certain team rosters, Google will generate an AI answer, an AI Overview, with the answer.

Microsoft Advertising announced that optimization experiments is now generally available for Search, Shopping, Audience, and Performance Max campaigns. An Optimization experiment measures the impact of a campaign change through a controlled A/B test, Microsoft's help center explains.

Google seems to be testing dropping the historic I'm feeling lucky button for the main Google Search bar. It is totally gone for some searchers when you start to type your query, and in other cases, it is supplemented with AI buttons.

Google is testing showing three products in the more products grid within Google Search. In some tests, the grid can expand to show four or five or so products across or downsize to only show three.

Google Ads updated its destination not working policy document to "provide additional examples for destination issues for advertisers," the company said. But Google also added a new line that says "Make sure your campaign has at least one asset group configured. If an asset group is missing, you may receive an "invalid final URL" error during setup even if your destination URL is working correctly."

Here is a jar of Oreos at the Google office in Mountain View, California, labeled "Google Birthday Oreos." Yes, these were given out for Google's 28th birthday last Friday, a couple days before Google's 28th birthday which was on September 27th, Saturday

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.