u/Kseniia_Seranking

The SEO world is always full of surprises, so let's stay on top of the latest events with our news digests: 

Updates

• Google June 2026 spam update rolls out in two days

The June 2026 spam update began on June 24 and completed June 26. Global, all languages, no new spam policies attached—Google framed it as enforcement of existing rules rather than a policy shift. SpamBrain remains the underlying detection system.

According to Barry Schwartz, the update does not target link spam or Site Reputation Abuse—pointing the center of gravity at content-level violations: scaled content abuse, cloaking, sneaky redirects, scraped content, hidden text, and doorway pages. 

Source:
Google Search Status Dashboard 
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable
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SERP features / Interface

• (test) Google adds autocomplete to the Ask Anything box in AI Mode

Google is testing autocomplete suggestions inside the "Ask Anything" follow-up box within AI Mode—so when users start typing a follow-up question, Google now suggests completions just like the classic Search autocomplete does. 

Source:
SERP Alert | X
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AI

• Google Search Console AI performance reports expand beyond the UK

Three weeks after the initial UK-only test, Google is gradually rolling out the Search Generative AI performance reports to more regions, with SEOs in the US, India, Switzerland, and others now seeing the report in their accounts. 

Source:
Vijay Chauhan | X
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Documentation

• Google formalizes Subscription Linking policies for news publishers, with AI surfaces included

Google published a new policy document in the Publisher Center covering Subscription Linking—the Reader Revenue Manager feature that lets paying readers link their publisher subscriptions to their Google Accounts so subscribed content gets highlighted across Google products. 

Source:
Google Developers
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Local SEO

• (test) Google brings back the messaging button to Business Profile, with an AI agent attached

Nearly two years after Google killed messaging and chat history in Business Profile, the messages button is showing up again in the GBP dashboard inside Google Search—this time with an AI conversational agent integrated into the conversation flow.

Source:
Muhammad Hussain | LinkedIn
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Tidbits

• Microsoft Clarity adds robots.txt violation tracking to Bot Analytics

Microsoft's free analytics platform Clarity now surfaces which bots are accessing disallowed URLs on your site—violations of your robots.txt directives are now detected and reported inside the Bot Analytics dashboard. 

The new view includes a violations percentage card, a trendline so you can spot persistent offenders, filters by operator/bot/activity type, and content-level breakdowns showing which paths are attracting non-compliant crawler traffic. 

Setup requires connecting a supported CDN (Fastly, Amazon CloudFront, or Cloudflare); WordPress sites running the latest Clarity plugin get it automatically.

Source:
Ihab Rizk | Microsoft Clarity Blog

Three times this week, someone declared that "the rules of AI search just changed", and three times they were basically right. Here's what genuinely mattered in the last seven days:

• You can stop building llms.txt files for AI-search visibility

Google updated its "optimizing for generative AI search" help doc — in the section literally titled mythbusting — to say plainly that llms.txt and similar AI/markdown files "won't harm (nor help) your visibility or rankings in Google Search, as Google Search ignores them," and that you don't need machine-readable, AI, or Markdown files to appear in Search, including its generative AI features.

Days later, Ahrefs put hard numbers behind it. Across 137,210 domains: 28% publish an llms.txt file, but 97% of those files received zero requests in May 2026 — no bots, no humans. Of the 3% that were fetched at all, named AI tools made up ~19.5% of requests, and the AI retrieval bots that actually power AI-search citations (OAI-SearchBot, PerplexityBot, Claude's search crawler) accounted for just 1.1%. Tellingly, zero AI bots ever went looking for an llms.txt that didn't exist.

The nuance worth keeping: when Lily Ray pressed John Mueller on why Chrome shipped a Lighthouse llms.txt audit while Search ignores the file, he called llms.txt a "temporary crutch" for AI coding agents parsing developer docs — not something content sites need. Ahrefs' data agrees: the biggest real consumers were agentic/coding tools (Claude-Code out-fetched every AI search bot).

Takeaway for us: llms.txt is not an AI-visibility lever today. If a CMS generates one automatically, fine — but redirect any "GEO/AEO" effort toward things that actually influence AI citations.

Sources: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Louise Linehan | Ahrefs

Lily Ray | LinkedIn

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• Bing just shipped the first real way to measure your share of AI citations

 

Microsoft began rolling out (globally, in preview) four additions to the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance report that were first demoed at SEO Week in April:

• Intents 
• Topics
• Citation Share
• Compare

Citation Share is the headline metric: the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations shown across all sites for the same grounding query — so you see not just whether you were cited, but how much of the citation space you own. Microsoft is careful to frame it as "an observational metric – not a ranking system or a competitive scoreboard", it doesn't expose competitor domains or represent traffic share. Compare lets you overlay an earlier period to watch how citation activity shifts over time.

Why it matters for us: this is the closest thing yet to a Search-Console-style report for AI answers, and it lands on Bing/Copilot before Google. There's still no click or CTR data — Barry Schwartz notes he isn't expecting that from Microsoft or Google any time soon — but "citation share over time" is a genuinely new, trackable AI-visibility KPI.

Sources: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Land

Microsoft Bing Blog

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• UK regulators just ordered Google to explain how it ranks results — and to give businesses advance notice before major changes

Under the UK's digital-markets regime (Google holds "strategic market status" for search), the CMA introduced two new conduct requirements. Fair Ranking: Google must rank organic results using "objective and non-discriminatory criteria" — explicitly including AI Overviews, but not sponsored results — give businesses more transparency into how rankings work plus advance notice of significant changes, and create real processes to raise and resolve complaints. Google has 6 months to comply.

The second requirement is data portability: within 3 months, Google must let users port their search data to authorized third parties (rewards platforms, personalized-offer services), putting its existing voluntary UK Data Portability API on a legal footing and bringing UK users in line with the EU's Digital Markets Act.

The skeptical read (Barry Schwartz): Google will likely fight hard, since exposing how rankings work hands its most prized asset to competitors and spammers. But the signal to watch is bigger than one ruling — regulators are now treating AI Overviews as part of "ranking" that must be fair and explainable.

Sources: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Land

Competition and Markets Authority

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• As few as 13 words can poison what ChatGPT and Google's AI search recommend, new Cornell research finds.

A Cornell preprint — "Deep-research agents can be poisoned via user-generated content," by Hal Triedman, Tingwei Zhang and Vitaly Shmatikov — shows that a snippet as short as 13 words planted in a Reddit-, Quora- or Wikipedia-style comment can reliably steer AI agents toward spam or scam recommendations. The mechanism is brutal in its simplicity: deep-research agents cite user-generated content in roughly half of all queries, and a single poisoned comment can sway outputs across an entire cluster of related queries.

Why it works is the uncomfortable part: LLMs often use lexical similarity to the query as a stand-in for accuracy, and they "export their trust" to the moderation of sites like Reddit and Wikipedia — treating a random comment and a government source as almost equivalent. (The researchers ran their tests in a sandbox rather than on live Reddit, for ethics reasons.)

Why it matters: this is the dark side of the AEO / "get cited in AI" gold rush. The same UGC surfaces everyone wants to win are trivially manipulable, and tiny poisoned snippets are far harder to detect than obvious AI spam. Expect trust and source integrity to become a much bigger part of the AI-search conversation — and a real brand-safety risk to monitor.

Sources: 

404 Medi

 Cornell University (arXiv preprint)

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• ChatGPT's grip on the assistant market slipped below 50% for the first time — and Gemini and Claude are where the growth is.

New Sensor Tower data (its State of AI 2026 report) shows ChatGPT's share of the AI-assistant market fell below 50% for the first time, sitting around 46.4% by the end of May, with Google Gemini at 27.7% and Anthropic's Claude at 10.3%. In absolute terms ChatGPT still leads comfortably — roughly 1.1B monthly users versus Gemini's 662M and Claude's 245M — but the direction is fragmentation.

Claude was the fastest-growing challenger (Sensor Tower's "True Audience" up 452% YoY in May, US share rising from ~4.4% to nearly 14%), while Gemini's gains lean on Android and Google-ecosystem distribution across Europe, the US, Japan and South Korea.

Why it matters: "AI search visibility" is no longer a single-engine game. As usage spreads across Gemini, Claude and others, brand monitoring and citation tracking have to span multiple assistants — which is exactly why per-engine reporting (see Bing above, and SE Ranking's own AI-visibility tracking) is becoming table stakes rather than a nice-to-have.

Source: 

Sensor Tower; TechCrunch

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• Google rankings stayed turbulent into mid-June — an apparent unconfirmed update on top of an already-stormy spring

Barry Schwartz reports the SEO chatter hasn't calmed since the June 8–12 spike: tracking tools showed another uptick around June 15–17, pointing to a likely unconfirmed ranking update — separate from the May 2026 core update that wrapped on June 2. WebmasterWorld threads describe wild day-to-day swings, plus a wave of World-Cup-driven spam crowding news niches.

Why it matters: with a confirmed core update barely behind us and fresh turbulence layered on top, attribute any traffic moves carefully before reacting — and keep watching to see whether Google confirms anything.

Source: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

WebmasterWorld

If staying on top of the latest SEO news matters to you, our weekly digest is exactly what you need:

Updates

• May 2026 core update wraps with heavy volatility and a clear "intent-destination" reset

Google's May 2026 broad core update rolled out from May 21 to June 2, with heavy volatility across two weekends and especially sharp movement in YMYL niches.

A post-rollout analysis by Aleyda Solis points to what she calls an "intent-destination reset"—visibility consolidated around the source type that best matched each query's intent, market, and expected result format, not authority alone. Even highly authoritative domains lost ground when they weren't the preferred source type for the intent.

Key patterns:

• Source type beats authority. Canonical reference brands (Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, Thesaurus) gained sharply; pronunciation tools and dictionary aggregators dropped 60-70% in the UK.
• Forums and Q&A contracted, social and video didn't. Reddit, Quora, and StackExchange declined in both markets; YouTube, X, Pinterest, and Fandom held flat to positive.
• UK ecommerce rebalanced toward local entities. Amazon [dot] co [dot] uk, eBay [dot] co [dot] uk, and Screwfix gained; the [dot] com versions lost 50%+ in the UK index.
• "Aggregators lost" is too simple. Category-defining transactional marketplaces (trip.com, Skyscanner, Indeed, Booking) gained; derivative informational layers dropped.
• Health split by source confidence and result fit. WebMD and Cleveland Clinic held or rose; GoodRx (-80% UK) and UbieHealth dropped sharply.

Source:

Google Search Status Dashboard 

Aleyda Solis > Website

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SERP features / Interface

• Google officially launches Search profiles for publishers and creators

Google has officially rolled out Search profiles—claimable profile pages where publishers and creators can showcase their latest articles, videos, and social posts in one central place. 

Eligible profiles can be customized with an avatar, bio, website, social and video platform links, and other content, and claiming a profile can trigger the creation of a Knowledge Panel.

Source:

Ibrahim Badr | Google The Keyword 

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AI

• (limited) Google Search Console launches AI performance reports and an opt-out toggle for AI Mode and AI Overviews

Google is rolling out Search Generative AI performance reports inside Search Console, along with a toggle that lets site owners block their content from appearing in AI Mode and AI Overviews. 

The new reports show impressions, clicks, top pages, countries, and devices for content surfaced inside Google's AI experiences. The blocking control is opt-out only for the AI surfaces—it doesn't affect ranking in traditional Search results.

For now, both features are limited to a small subset of UK site owners, with a global rollout to follow.

• Google publishes official guidance on third-party SEO tools and AEO/GEO services

Google has added new documentation positioning its own guidance as the "ground truth" for SEO, AEO, and GEO advice, and urging caution when evaluating third-party SEO tools and services. 

Source:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Google Search Central 

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Local SEO

• Google Analytics is getting a native Google Business Profile integration

Google emailed some businesses confirming the link is coming "within the next few weeks," with a help doc already published. 

The integration brings local metrics like calls, directions, and how people find and engage with a business on Search and Maps directly into GA reports alongside website and app data—replacing the workaround of third-party connectors or manual exports that local SEOs have relied on.

Source:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

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E-commerce

• Google Merchant Center extends attribute rules to automatically found products

Previously limited to products submitted through merchant feeds, the attribute rules feature now also applies to products Google automatically discovers from a retailer's online store. Merchants are seeing prompts to apply the same rule logic to auto-found products, letting them transform and standardize that data without manually adding it to a feed.

Source:

Hana Kobzová | PPC News Feed

Our team just wrapped a study analyzing 101,574 websites across 250 countries from Jan 2025 to Apr 2026 to see how AI platforms send traffic. Claude is the standout, but not for the reason you'd expect.

The numbers:

• Claude referral share grew 386% Jan-Apr 2026. ChatGPT grew 1.53% in the same window.
• March 2026 alone was a 2.6x jump—biggest single-month gain in Claude's history.
• Claude is still only 1.40% of total AI-referred traffic. ChatGPT dominates at 78.23%, then Perplexity (9.33%), Gemini (6.85%), Copilot (3.57%).
• The US runs ~2x ahead of the EU, ~3x ahead of the UK. Other regions hit the level the US reached in April 2025 about 10 months later.
• Outside our data: Claude mobile DAU hit 11.3M in early March (+183% YTD). 71% of orgs using genAI now rely on Anthropic (was 46% a year ago).

The part that flipped our thinking: traffic share is the wrong metric to judge Claude on. People don't open Claude like Google—they open it to do work. Write, code, analyze, automate. That's also why Claude Code DAU doubled since January and business subs went 4x.

So the real visibility question for businesses isn't "does Claude cite me?"—it's "can Claude use my data as part of a workflow?" That's where MCP and Skills come in. Booking, Tripadvisor, Spotify, Instacart all connected recently—they're playing a different game than brands optimizing for citations.

Anyone actually building MCP integrations vs just tracking AI citations? What's working?

Let's be honest — the past few weeks (months, years) have all been a whirlwind for the SEO industry. We haven't seen this volume of updates, myths, and industry speculation in a long time. For marketing agencies, this is a pivotal moment for establishing long-term strategies. To help map out the right direction for the future, our team analyzed recent interviews with Google's CEO to find actionable answers:

• Sundar Pichai on the Future of Search, AI Agents, and "Google Zero”

Google CEO Sundar Pichai sat down with Nilay Patel on The Verge's Decoder podcast (following I/O 2026). Here's everything that matters for Search, AI, and agents.

• Search, Gemini, and Agents Are Becoming One Product

Asked whether Google's AI search box, app-building tools, and agent products should become a single product, Pichai gave a one-word answer:

"It will."

He added that Google is still laying the groundwork:

"We are laying a lot of the primitives of what we need for agents to work end to end, and more importantly, for AI to work."

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• Agents Are the Next Evolution of the Web

"I look at agents, and that is the next evolution of the web. I think it will evolve the web pretty profoundly."

Agentic tools are already being built across Search, Gemini, Spark, and Antigravity. Pichai envisions agents working in the background — planning trips, completing tasks, building things on the user's behalf. He has previously described Google Search as evolving into an "agent manager."

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• Google Pushes Back on "Google Zero"

Patel pressed Pichai on Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch's recent statement that the publisher is planning its business as if search traffic will fall to zero:

Patel: "That is Google Zero. Condé Nast is saying, 'We're assuming that search will go to zero.' How would you respond to that?"

Pichai reframed the picture, pointing to a broader information ecosystem:

"The information ecosystem is so much broader beyond Google, by far. We see it in the data, you see it everywhere."

"It's exceptionally dynamic, and so it makes sense to me every publisher is adapting to this new world."

When asked directly what publishers should do, Pichai declined to advise:

"I'm not in a position to tell such an iconic publisher what they should think about their business or plan. If they are building content that is high-quality and people like it, I expect us to reflect that in our products. That much I can commit to them."

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• Clicks Are Going Away — and Google Admits It

The single most important quote for the SEO community. Pichai openly confirmed that some traffic is being filtered out by design:

"As the technology improves, low-quality clicks get filtered out. That's a natural evolution we see. We see it in our metrics. Bounce clicks are going down."

In other words, Google is deliberately filtering "low-quality clicks" — and the trend is accelerating. For SEO strategy, this means raw traffic volume is becoming a weaker signal of value. The relevant user matters more than the click count.

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• How Google Is Adapting to Publishers: Subscriptions

One of the few concrete mechanisms Pichai pointed to:

"One of the small features we have done, but very important I think, is if you've subscribed to something, we reflect that as a preferred source for you as a user."

"We are adapting to the fact that publishers are increasingly turning to subscription offerings, too."

A telling gap in the interview: Patel didn't ask why publishers moved into subscriptions in the first place. The implied answer — because they could no longer rely on search traffic the way they once did.

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• Why Google Reorganized Search

"Search needed to move faster, and Search was split across many leaders."

Search now sits under Elizabeth Reid, with Nick Fox leading the broader area. Josh Woodward is leading Labs and Gemini work. The goal — "set up well for this moment where we need to move faster as a company, which means we need to make faster decisions."

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• The Mantra Running Through the Interview

Pichai returns to one line repeatedly when talking about publishers and the open web:

"Through it all, we are very committed to both meeting user expectations and also connecting them to what's out on the web."

But the context of his answers tells a different story: Google is moving Search toward conversations, agents, and AI tools that complete tasks without a click.

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What this means for SEO

1. The end of the "search box" as a standalone product — Search, Gemini, and agents are converging into a single AI layer.
2. "Low-quality clicks" are officially being filtered — Google said it out loud. Time to rethink what counts as valuable traffic.
3. Agents are the new interface to the web — and it's no longer theory, it's the CEO's roadmap.
4. AI Mode isn't the default yet — but the direction is unmistakable.
5. Subscribers = preferred sources — a meaningful signal for publisher business models.

Source: 

Nilay Patel | The Verge

Our SE Ranking team just wrapped up a study on whether domain age actually matters for rankings, and the numbers explain a lot about why new sites feel invisible:

• 57% of TOP 10 results are 15+ year-old domains (62% in the TOP 3)
• Median age of a TOP 10 domain: 17.3 years
• Domains under 2 years old: only 2.03% of TOP 10 spots

But here's the part that flipped our thinking - age itself isn't a ranking factor. It's the authority of older domains stacked up over time. Look at the gap:

• Typical new domain (0-2 yrs) in TOP 10: 85 backlinks, 45 referring domains
• Typical 15+ yr domain in TOP 10: 10,875 backlinks, 1,204 referring domains

That's 128x more backlinks. The ‘old domain advantage’ is really just a 15-year head start on link building.

The interesting outlier we found: young domains that DID crack TOP 10 for competitive terms had ~21,700 backlinks and 1,921 referring domains. Basically punching at established-site weight, compressed into under 2 years.

For everyone else (most of us), the realistic playbook based on what we saw:

• Target long-tail keywords with KD under ~15
• Build topical clusters instead of chasing broad terms
• Prioritize pages already sitting at pos 11-20 (Google's already testing them)
• Keep a steady backlink pace, no spikes

One case we looked at: a new domain ranking for 668 keywords but only 75 in TOP 10 - and 34 of those sit in ONE tight content cluster. That's the model.

Anyone else finding cluster-based attacks working better than going broad?

• AI Content Strategies That Backfire

Lily Ray dropped the results of research, which backs up several of our findings while adding some fascinating nuances. Specifically, she looks at how different types of posts actually "perform" in search and what that means for AI-content enthusiasts.

In our digest, we’re only scratching the surface of this massive article. It’s packed with incredible insights, but there’s one specific section you can’t afford to miss. It serves as a major red flag for content creators, highlighting exactly where you need to watch your step:

“Eight Recurring Content Patterns that Are Risky for SEO and AI Search

1. Comparison pages at scale.

2. The “What is X” glossary.

3. The “Best [X] for [Y]” listicle.

4. The self-promotional listicle.

5. The competitor-vs-alternatives page.

6. Programmatic location and language scaling.

7. The FAQ farm.

8. Off-topic content published at scale.”

Source:

Lily Ray | Substack

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• Adding Schema Did Not Improve AI Citations

Barry Schwartz recently highlighted a fresh study from Ahrefs that effectively shuts down the theory that structured data is a "cheat code" for AI citations. Despite the SEO chatter, the data shows that adding schema (specifically JSON-LD) doesn't actually help you land more spots in AI-generated answers.

Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that implemented the schema between August 2025 and March 2026, comparing them against 4,000 control pages. The results? "No major uplift in citations on any platform," according to the report. Whether it was ChatGPT, Google’s AI Mode, or AI Overviews, schema didn't move the needle in a meaningful way.

Google AI Overviews: Actually saw a 4.6% decline in citations for pages with schema—a small but statistically significant drop.

ChatGPT & AI Mode: While treated pages technically performed slightly better, Ahrefs dismissed the gain as "random noise" rather than a result of the schema itself.

So, if you’re adding schema solely to "rank" in AI results, you might be wasting your time.

Sources:

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Louise Linehan, Xibeijia Guan | Ahrefs Blog

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• Googlebook: The Evolution from Search to "OS as AI Agent"

If you thought adapting to AI Overviews was the final boss, think again. Google just unveiled Googlebook—a new category of laptops where Gemini isn't just integrated into the browser, but baked directly into the "DNA" of the device.

For SEOs and content creators, this is a clear signal that the playground is expanding once again.

We’re used to optimizing for search engines. Recently, we started learning how to land AI citations in chatbots. Now, a new challenge is on the horizon: Device Ecosystem Optimization.

Magic Pointer & Contextual Awareness: The new Magic Pointer feature allows Gemini to "see" whatever the user points to on their screen and suggest immediate actions. If a user hovers over your product review, the AI could instantly pull specs or pricing without the user ever clicking through to your full article.

Prompt-to-Widget: Users can now generate custom widgets via prompts. This means your content (whether it’s event schedules, pricing guides, or "top 10" lists) needs to be structured so perfectly that the AI can "snatch" it from your site and pin it to a user’s desktop as a dynamic widget.

The New Challenge: Optimizing "For the Cursor"

We are entering an era where AI acts as the ultimate intermediary between content and the user at the operating system level.

Probably soon we won’t just be debating how to "rank #1." We’ll be strategizing on how to make sure Gemini picks your content to build a personalized AI widget on a customer’s laptop.

So, focus on entities… AI devices work with objects (dates, locations, prices, brands). The more clearly you define these entities in your content, the easier it is for the Magic Pointer to identify and surface them.

Source:

Alexander Kuscher | Google Blog

A reminder worth repeating: staying on top of industry news isn't optional. The shifts that reshape your strategy almost always surface there before anywhere else.

AI

• AI Overviews and AI Mode run on separate, isolated systems

Nikola Todorovic explained that Google deliberately keeps AI features as isolated modules rather than fusing them into one stack: AI Overviews sit on top of traditional retrieval and ranking to summarize results, while AI Mode runs on its own conversational platform built for longer interactions and citations. 

• Google rolls out five link improvements for AI Overviews and AI Mode

Hema Budaraju stated that Google is making links inside AI Overviews and AI Mode more prominent and contextual with five changes: 

• suggested in-depth articles at the end of AI responses
• a "Subscribed" label on links from a user's news subscriptions
• more inline links placed next to the specific text they support
• hover-over website previews on desktop
• discussion/perspective previews pulled from public conversations and firsthand sources

Source:
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Hema Budaraju | Google The Keyword

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SERP features / Interface

• Google drops FAQ rich results from search

Barry Schwartz said that Google no longer shows FAQ rich results in search, and Search Console will stop reporting on FAQ structured data. 

Google will drop the FAQ search appearance, rich result report, and Rich Results Test support in June 2026, with Search Console API support for FAQ removed in August 2026. 

Site owners can leave the FAQ structured data in their code (other search engines may still use it) or remove it.

Source:
Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Land

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Tech SEO

• (test) Google launches Web Bot Auth to cryptographically verify bots

Google published developer documentation for Web Bot Auth, an experimental IETF-draft cryptographic protocol that lets bots sign their requests so site owners can verify they're authentic instead of relying on user-agent strings and IP addresses—which are easy to spoof. 

They are currently testing it on some AI agents hosted on its own infrastructure, not every request gets signed yet, and Google says site owners should still fall back to the established user-agent and IP verification methods.

Source:
Google developers > Crawling Infrastructure
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Local SEO

• Google pulls Reddit threads into Google Business Profiles

Darren Shaw posted that a new "About this place" section is appearing on some Google Business Profiles on desktop—primarily for food and drink businesses—pulling in Reddit threads that mention the business.

Source:
Darren Shaw | LinkedIn

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E-commerce

• Google's UCP checkout expands from AI Mode into main search results

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol checkout has started appearing in the main search results, not just AI Mode—logged-in users see a "Buy" button on product listings that auto-loads their Google Pay billing and shipping details and completes the purchase without leaving Search.

Source:

SERP Alert | X

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Tidbits

• OpenAI officially launches a self-serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT

OpenAI announced a beta self-serve Ads Manager that lets U.S. advertisers sign up, set budgets, upload ads, manage pacing, and view performance directly. 

• Bing explains how indexing for AI grounding differs from indexing for search

Microsoft's Bing team argues that indexing for AI answers is a different optimization problem than traditional search, even though both share the same crawling and quality infrastructure. 

Search asks which pages a user should visit and treats the document as the unit of value, with humans able to self-correct; grounding asks what information can responsibly support a claim, treats discrete facts with clear provenance as the unit, and must track factual fidelity, attribution, freshness, contradictions, and when to abstain if evidence is insufficient. 

Bing frames grounding as building on search, not replacing it.

Source:
OpenAI > Product 
Krishna Madhavan, Knut Risvik, Meenaz Merchant | Bing Blog

It’s 2026 and everyone’s still trying to crack the ultimate marketing mix code. Things are moving quick, so we’ve rounded up the biggest industry changes from the last seven days to save you some time:

• Navigating the AI-Driven Shift in Digital Marketing

ALM Corp has rounded up the top trends you need to know to stay ahead of the curve in online promotion this April:

1. AI-assisted search is reducing low-intent traffic and raising the value of high-intent visits
2. Brand trust is becoming a performance variable, not just a brand variable
3. First-party data and consented measurement are becoming the foundation of sustainable marketing
4. Speed of execution is now a growth driver, but speed without creative distinctiveness is a risk
5. Integrated search, paid, content, and CRO strategy is replacing channel-by-channel marketing

One section of the article stands out in particular, as it clearly reflects the current mood of the global marketing community:

“What is the biggest digital marketing trend in April 2026?

The most important trend is the shift from simple search visibility to full ecosystem visibility. Businesses now need to be understandable and credible across traditional search results, AI-generated summaries, branded follow-up searches, reviews, maps, video, and landing experiences. The brand that is easiest to understand and verify often has the advantage.”

Source: 
ALM Corp | Blog
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• How AI is Turning Microsoft’s Search Engine into a Formidable Competitor

For a long time, the search engine market seemed like an unshakable monolith dominated by a single player. But times have changed. Microsoft's latest earnings report confirms it: Bing has stepped out of the shadows to become one of the industry's primary newsmakers.

What do the numbers and facts say? According to the latest report, Microsoft’s search and advertising revenue has grown significantly. They wrote, "Search advertising revenue excluding traffic acquisition costs increased 12% (up 9% in constant currency)."

Also, Microsoft reports Q3 revenue up 18% YoY to $82.9 billion, operating income up 20% to $38.4B, and net income up 20% to $31.8.

This is a clear signal that AI integration is not just a "gimmick" for geeks (as some skeptical analysts claimed), but a powerful business tool that is genuinely shifting the balance of power.

Why does Bing look more advantageous than its competitors in certain aspects?

1. Boldness vs. Caution. While some former market leaders tried to implement AI features with extreme caution to avoid damaging their core monetization models, Microsoft went all-in. The result? Bing was the first to offer a full-fledged conversational interface that has now become the standard.
2. Speed of Iterations. The company introduces updates almost weekly, turning search from a simple list of links into a personalized assistant.
3. Ecosystem. AI integration into Windows and the Office suite puts Bing "at your fingertips" displacing long-standing user habits of using other browsers and services.

The company is celebrating 1 billion monthly active users, and they truly deserve all the attention they are receiving. Industry figures like Michael Schechter, Krishna Madhavan, and Fabrice Canel have already shared their insights, and the hype shows no signs of slowing down.

Sources: 

Barry Schwartz | Search Engine Roundtable

Microsoft | Investor Relations

Michael Schechter | X

Krishna Madhavan | X

Fabrice Canel | X

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• Google Reports Record Revenue and Surge in Advertising Profits

Do you think Microsoft is the only one who can boast about its profits? Do you think the fact that they have become a more prominent industry player weakens the positions of others? Glenn Gabe shared a post on his X that can be considered an excellent overall summary of Google's news:

"Here we go -> Alphabet reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $109.9B, vs. $107.2B est., Google advertising revenue of $77.2B, Google Cloud revenue up 63% to $20B, vs. $18.05B est., YouTube ads at $9.8B, net income up 81% to $62.58B

*Google Services revenues increased 16% to $89.6 billion, led by 19% growth in Google Search & other, 19% in Google subscriptions, platforms, and devices, and 11% in YouTube ads"

More information can be found on the Alphabet report pages.

Sources: 
Glenn Gabe | X, 
Alphabet | First Quarter 2026 Results