Google Updated Indexing API Quota Details & More

Google has updated the indexing API documentation; this includes three different pages within the documentation. I think the big takeaway is that Google removed the old approval process and initial testing explanation, the sitemap recommendation, and, most importantly, the default quota details.

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Google Dataset Search Currently Not Returning Search Results

For the past several hours, Google Dataset Search has not been able to return any search results or matches. Google Dataset Search returns a response that says "Your search - [keyword phrase here] - did not match any datasets."

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Bing Tests Related Searches Based On Your Browsing

Bing is testing showing "Related searches based on your browsing" similar to how Google is/was showing this a few months ago. In Bing's test, this is below the Microsoft Ads in the search results.

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OpenAI Drops UTM Parameters From ChatGPT Results (GPT-6)

OpenAI seems to have removed or replaced the UTM parameters it placed on links within the ChatGPT results. This makes it harder to know if a click came from ChatGPT versus some other platform. This seems to have started with the release of GPT''6, which was a week ago.

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Google Search On PDFs: Conversion, Links, HTML, Ranking, Limits, Crawling...

Google's Martin Splitt and John Mueller just posted a Search Off the Record podcast on the topic of PDFs, it is named PDFs in Search: Indexing, AI & Pitfalls. It goes over how PDFs are converted for crawling and indexing, how Google processes links, images, what are the file limits and do they rank in search and AI search.

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Gemini 4 Argon In Google Search Via AI Mode

Google announced Gemini 4 Argon a couple of weeks ago and today announced that it is now an option in Google Search via AI Mode for Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers globally.

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Google Ads Data Strength Best Practices Updated

Google has revamped its Data Strength Best Practices help document with much greater emphasis on sending more first-party data and identifiers, using Data Manager correctly, adopting AI-powered campaigns, and supporting its recommendations with performance statistics. It is a big update to the document.

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The Industry Mourns The Loss Of Nick Wilsdon - Loved By Industry

I am sad to report that Nick Wilsdon has passed away yesterday, October 11, 2026. Nick Wilsdon has been in the SEO industry for over two decades and was a close friend to many in the search marketing industry.

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Google: Poor Image Quality Won't Stop Products From Showing In Search Or Ads

Google has updated its Google Merchant Center low image quality help document to now say that poor image quality will not stop those products from showing in Google Search or Google Ads.

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Google Search Console Performance Report Extremely Delayed

The search performance reports in Google Search Console is now over 64 hours delayed, which is incredibly unusual for this report. Generally, we see this report updated within a few hours but over the past few days, post-spam update, the report has been lagging.

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Bing Tests Removing Favicons From Search Result Snippets

Microsoft Bing is testing dropping favicons from Bing search result snippets. This makes the search results page look much less graphical.

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Google Ads Self-Services Conversion Lift Measurement

Google Ads now lets advertisers set up Conversion Lift measurement themselves. Google updated its help documentation to say that you no longer need a Google Ads representative to set up Conversion Lift measurement; you just need at least 1,000 observed conversions and a $5,000 budget.

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Google September 2026 Spam Update Has Finished Rolling Out

The Google September 2026 spam update is now done rolling out. It started on Thursday, September 28, 2026 at around 12:00 pm ET and completed on October 8, 2026 at 4:37 am ET. This was different from the previous few spam updates in that this one took two weeks to roll out whereas the others took only two days to roll out.

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Google Search Crawl Rate Doc Adds Retry-After HTTP & More

Google has just pushed some updates to the reduce the Google crawl rate documentation. Most of the changes are just organizational to the content on the page but under the "Urgently reduce crawler traffic (for emergencies)" section, Google added new information on how to use Retry-After HTTP header.

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Google Email Shares Number Of Preferred Source Subscribers

Google Search Console is sending out emails informing site owners how many people are subscribing or following them as a preferred source on Google. It says "people are choosing domain as a preferred source" and then lists the number of "Preferred source selections."

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OpenAI Tests New Product Labels On ChatGPT Results

OpenAI is testing new labels appended to the ChatGPT product results. These labels can add information about the product it is displaying, such as "best all-rounder," "best for beginners," "best cushioning," and so on.

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OpenAI To Test Visual ChatGPT Ad Format During AI Image Generation

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.

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Google Ads To Allow Some Advertisers To Use Different Business Names

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.

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Google Helpful Content Doc With New Main Content & EOT/SA Sections

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.

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Google: Manually Factcheck & Review AI-Generated Content For Accuracy

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."

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