Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google has added AI Max to the search match types in the Google Ads interface. If you click on the Keywords tab in the Google Ads console, and then segment by "Search terms match type" you should see it.

Google is notifying some advertisers that their ads with message assets will stop serving on September 1st, and won't be able to create new ones on August 1st, if the phone numbers remain unverified.

Similarweb released a report shows that since the launch of Google AI Overviews in May 2024, zero-click search (as coined by Rand Fishkin) grew 13 percentage points, from 56% to 69% in May 2025 - just a year later.

Last November, Google began to power some of the people also ask results with AI Overviews. Historically the people also ask were featured snippets, but now they can be featured snippets and/or AI Overviews. Data from Mark Williams-Cook of AlsoAsked said that 12.6% of the people also ask results are AI Overviews.

Google seems to be testing (or maybe it is a bug) the local panel sub-menu under the main search bar, under the search box. Normally, these sub-menu items would be grouped in the local panel on the right side of the page (normally on mobile) but here it is right below the search bar at the top.

Microsoft will be laying off about 4% of its workforce, which is about 9,000 employees. It is unclear if any of those jobs are across the Bing, Copilot or Microsoft Advertising businesses, or any search-related business.

Google has confirmed an issue with Google Ads, where there are unexpected errors, high latency and other unexpected issues with the Google Ads advertiser console. Google said access is fine but it is likely serving some errors and other issues.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...

Google announced the release of the June 2025 core update on June 30th at around 10:37 am ET. It seems as of July 2nd, we are starting to see the first signs of it actually starting to cause ranking volatility. It is early and I suspect you will all see this more visibly in the next day or so, but it does seem the core update ranking fluctuations have begun.

The past thirty days in the Google search and SEO universe was pretty hectic. We closed it out with the June 2025 core update after numerous unconfirmed Google ranking updates over the month - note we started to feel that core update today...

Google's John Mueller said that he doesn't think links play a role with how core updates work. He wrote on Bluesky, "I can't think of how these links would play a role with the core updates."

Microsoft has moved the Copilot search tab under the Bing Search box to the first position in that menu bar. With that change, it seems Microsoft renamed the "All" tab to "Web."

Google has these e-commerce or product cards that show up at the top of the search results. Now, Google is testing labeling them with not just the product category name but also now with "at a glance" added to the name.

Microsoft Advertising will soon retire Target CPA and Target ROAS as a standalone bidding strategies. Instead, those bidding strategies will be merged with Max Conversions and Max Conversion Value. This will happen on August 4, 2025, said Navah Hopkins from Microsoft.