Google Search Ranking Update Volatility May 16th

Since the weekend, Google has started to roll out Google Discover on desktop in many countries and regions. I personally can trigger it in Google New Zealand and some other locations but I am not yet able to trigger it on Google.com in the United States.

Google has updated its title structured data help document for Google Merchant Center to now recommend you add the product's brand name to the title of the product when it's a differentiating factor.

Google has a weird and somewhat limited and rare issue with sitemap files within Google Search Console. These sitemap files cannot be fetched and retrieved by Google Search. The issue seems to be related to 5-character subdomains that are on a Polish ccTLD, .pl.

A month ago, Google said it would soon redirect its ccTLD, country specific domains, for Google Search to its Google.com domain. So Google.de, as an example, would be redirected to Google.com. Well, that process seems to have kicked off on Friday, May 16th for some users.

Google has a bug with Google Ads where for campaigns running on New Customer Acquisition they are not able to spend the set budget. This bug was confirmed with Google and has been an issue for advertisers since May 15th.

Google AI Mode seems like it got a lot faster over the past day or so. Instead of going through the steps of saying thinking about this, searching for results, organizing results, it just now saying kicking off searches and then looking at sites and then quickly shows the AI Mode response.

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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 confirmed ads with AI Overviews make as much as ads without AI Overviews on the page...

Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that search ads with AI Overviews are at a baseline, at the same level as search ads without AI Overviews, in terms of ad revenue per query. He added, and now it is just about going up from there, and with AI, he doesn't see it to a problem.

This week, we covered, you guessed it, more Google search ranking volatility. Google also said they are rethinking its search stack from the ground up because of LLMs. Google is testing AI Overviews in more regions and languages prior to Google I/O/ Google is testing AI Mode buttons throughout Google...

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Last month we shared the spam efforts the Google Maps team announced - but did you know that in 2024 Google had almost one billion reviews published within Google Maps? That is 999 million reviews, 752 million photos and videos and 94 million place edits published just in 2024.

Apple announced this week that it partnered with MICHELIN Guide; The Infatuation and Golf Digest to provide "insights, ratings, and reviews from expert sources" within Apple Maps.

Robby Stein, VP of Product at Google Search, confirmed Google is working on making it easier to share AI Overviews within Google Search and AI Mode responses.

Microsoft is testing shading the site names, the brand names, of retailers in the Bing Shopping search results. So the name Amazon is in a blue shaded background color as opposed to just saying Amazon.com.