Google AI Systems Black Box, Links In AI, UCP Checkout Expands, ChatGPT Ad Manager, Ask.com Shutters

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Hi, good morning everybody. My name is Barry Schwarz. This is the search buzz video recap. Today is May 8th and we got Google search ranking volatility. Of course, the Google AI systems are like a black box to Google. Google improves links in AI experiences. UCP checkout seems to roll out to the main search results. Chat GPT ad manager is officially live and so much more. So, you definitely want to stay tuned. And of course, like to thank our sponsor, Hrefs. Have you seen the new HREF's Agent A? A new tool that gives you reports and insights you need right as you need them. Agent A lets you build your own reporting tools through AI powered platform and you don't need to know any coding or data analysis information. So if you want to know which of your blog posts have the most untapped potential to grow and to get more traffic, just ask it. And it will use Href's deep integration to powerful AI tools to dynamically build a report just for you. It is slick. It is fun. is cool. So definitely check it out at hrefs/ aagent- a. Thank you so much HRFS for sponsoring. Deeply appreciate it.

[00:00:59]And check out agent A.

[00:01:02][music] Okay, so this morning right before this video recording, I posted a Google search ranking volatility post. It's been some time um almost two weeks uh but it definitely seems to be heating up today, May 8th. A lot of the tools are showing significant upward ticks on volatility. I'm not sure if it's a big change in terms of the user interface that's being rolled out before IO or if there's actually ranking changes. Some chatter, not as much as I usually like to when I cover these things, but I did see for my own site yesterday was pretty weird. So, if you are noticing any big changes there, um definitely, you know, take a look at that. Uh because there does seem to be some volatility going on. And there was an interesting podcast a couple a week or so ago from uh Martin Split on the search off the record. He brought in his boss actually um Nicola, director of software engineering at Google search and he basically reiterated what he said at the Google XS uh show which I was at back in December but basically talked about how um how Google's AI systems are generally isolated because otherwise it's like a black box. We covered this years ago actually where Google said they try to use AI in isolated systems because they don't really have a good way of debugging AI systems or machine learning systems because they do their own thing.

[00:02:18]So if you want to debug something, it's much easier if you isolate them and say, "All right, this is the thing that's having it problem." So this is why AI overviews are kind of like a layer on top of search. They use search, but they're a layer on top of search. Same thing with AI mode. It's a separate thing, but yet it's part of search. Um, and that's how it kind of works. They talked a lot about it. really good um interview. Um so definitely took a look at that. He also talks about what works and what doesn't in his opinion with AI.

[00:02:41]Uh but again that's you know typical stuff.

[00:02:45]And then Google announced this week that they improved links in AI mode and AI overviews. They're AI experiences in five different ways. One is suggestions at the bottom of the AI responses.

[00:02:55]They're called further explorations and they provide links to publishers and websites that try to drive more traffic to those sites. Two, highlight news subscriptions. So if you are a new subscription and if that searcher actually subscribed to you um Google will actually add another label saying subscribed which generates more clicks supposedly. In early testing they said they saw that people were significantly more likely to click a link that were labeled as their subscription. So that helps as well. three, showing names and handles for online discussion, social media, and more where Google's actually showing this expert advice section that shows the site name, the source name, but also potentially also the name of the person posting that thing um and so forth, which is pretty useful. Four, links closer to relevant text. Google said it will show more links directly within the AI responses right next to the relevant text. Um again, here's some more. Here's a screenshot of that. And then finally, five, hover over an inlink and Google will show you this quick preview of the website including um things like the name of the website, the title of the web page um and then maybe like an icon and so forth. Again, we've seen these being tested uh but these are now officially rolling out um now, which is great. Um it shows to me that Google is trying to make changes to drive more traffic to publishers through these AI experiences. We'll see how much it helps. And then Brody Clark at Service Alert noticed that Google has rolled out UCP checkout, the universal commerce protocol, which we saw initially just rolled out in AI mode now in the main search results for shopping stuff. It seems to work with Wayfi fair products where Google adds a buy button, you click it and it will buy it for you without you having to go to the Wayfair website, which is pretty cool. And then Google said they fixed the issue with Google Search Console's daily logging issue which was which happened starting between May 13th, 2025 and April 27th, 2026. Just about 50 weeks of a logging error that prevented the search console from accurately reporting impressions.

[00:04:43]Crazy. This we reported about this like a month or so ago. Um and Google said now this has been resolved. So it wasn't resolved per se, meaning only going forward was it resolved. The issue in the past those 50 weeks data is not fixed. Google is not fixing it. It's going to stay the way it is, but going forward, Google's going to track impressions correctly. So, keep that in mind. While that Google has such an issue for such a long time and they're not able to fix the data for those 50 weeks of period, but it is what it is.

[00:05:10]And Google may may just may adjust its site reputation abuse policy just for EU news websites. There's a report that Google's trying to work and come up a proposal from Bloomberg basically reported this that they came up with a proposal to make um the EU fines from the EU watchd dogs and so forth um to kind of lower their fines and one of the things was around the site abuse policy where publishers are super unhappy that Google says that's spam. We should be able to use our sites as SEO parasite sites to go ahead and manipulate the search results to rank and get money.

[00:05:45]It's a way we make money and it's not fair. So, Google's basically um didn't say much. I mean, it I don't know. It just seems weird. I don't see Google caving on this specific thing, but Google told me they sent me a statement.

[00:05:59]We are continuing to engage constructively with the European Commission regarding their inquiry. Our priority is to keep the search results helpful and useful for users and protect them from deceptive practices like parasite SEO, spam that undermines the web. That's what a Google spokesperson told me. Again, that makes it sound like Google's not going to go ahead and do this just for news publishers, but we will see. It is kind of weird, but we will see. And then Google AdSense backed down. They said, "Yeah, Google, you win.

[00:06:26]Google search team, you win." And Google ad teams loses where the vignette ads where that additional trigger for the back button. That's no longer going to work after June 15th. Google told us that starting June 15th, the back button uh feature in the browser to trigger a vignette ad will stop working because of the search penalty. So that's going to work across AdSense and ad manager. So keep that in mind. Google also came out with a new way to validate and authenticate bots. It's called web bot off. It's a new cryptographic protocol that will help websites to validate that bots are authentic. This is the future.

[00:06:58]It's currently experimental. Google's just trying it out on some hosted Google bots um or hosted on the Google platform. So keep that in mind. And also Google seems to be testing a label in the search result called called Fresh Updates. This is by Sash and Patel.

[00:07:12]Here's a screenshot of it. It's on the website which makes sense for it to be there, but again it's super weird.

[00:07:16]Microsoft posted this fairly detailed blog post about the differences between AI search and traditional search and indexing for traditional search indexing for AI and grounding and so forth.

[00:07:30]Basically saying that they need to kind of kind of like innovate their index to support AI grounding indexing and so forth. This is written by a number of of Microsoft employees um saying indexing ground indexing for grounding AI answers is not a reinvention of search. It's a major evolution of it. Groundly commits to an answer. Goes through a lot of things here. It's a really interesting read. Gets you thinking, but I'm not sure. Doesn't doesn't sound I mean, I don't think they're going to come up with a new index. I mean, they should have the same index. Maybe add to it and use it differently for AI versus traditional. I mean, I don't know. I don't know. Definitely worth a read.

[00:08:06]made me a little bit confused, but and then Microsoft confirmed that their 1 billion monthly active users hit that metric um are not agents, but they're actually humans. So, that's good to know. Mike King asked a question and Karishna at Microsoft confirmed they're humans, not not actual bots. Google Ads is expanding its smart bidding exploration, budget pacing, and also launched journey um bidding um yesterday. This was announced from the Google Ads team. It's definitely worth looking at. There's a bunch of new announcements pre Google Marketing Live.

[00:08:40]So, this is just a sampling of what's coming, I guess. But these this is big news. Google Ads also will require pass keys for certain sensitive actions after July 15th. This is spotted by Hannah Kaga PBC Newsfeed.

[00:08:53]Google Ads is also using or testing or rolling out, I'm not sure, a new way to actually add products to your Google Ads campaigns using AI. It's called use AI to add products. It's a beta.

[00:09:05]It's a onetime snapshot. This is spotted by uh Sar Sarapa. I can't pronounce X.

[00:09:10]Nice find there. Very interesting. Um I think this we knew this was coming, but it's now here. Google ads AI max content titles and exclusions on account level are coming. Jenny Marvin responded to a post by Gabrielle Benedicti um who asked like we need this ability to actually go ahead and do by content and titles and so forth. And Jin and Marvin responded, "We are also aiming to bring the content and title related exclusions to the account level later this year. This will complement AI Max's current inventory aware aware serving that automatically excludes out of stock items. It will give the ability to always exclude any other content you don't want to use in your ads on the account level. So this is coming to AI Max. So which is a big big deal. We don't know exactly when, but it's coming. Google's ads ret data retention policy was updated for the granular leveler stuff like the hourly, daily and weekly. That stuff Google will only collect for 37 months which is like 3 years in a month. The rest of the stuff will remain monthly, quarterly and annually. Data will be available for 11 years which is not a change. Uh this is supposed to change either May 1st or June 1st. I'm not sure. Uh but it's changing now or very soon. Google Ads will default its call recording for local service ads to yes starting on July 1st unless you specifically opt out. So keep that in mind. That's a change. And automatically, most people just leave it automatic. It'll just automatically call record everything.

[00:10:30]Open AAI officially launched its chatbt ads manager for everybody um in the US.

[00:10:36]I signed up. I didn't get an official invite yet, but hopefully I'll get in added to it. I know a bunch of people who are using it. They seem to be liking it so far. Um but again, it's ads.openai.com. If you're in the US, you can use it. is a beta self-s served ads manager that allows advertisers in the US to sign up and purchase ads directly from chatbt. This was uncovered earlier um as a leak and now it's actually officially live and anybody can sign up on those chatbt ads. Similar web came out with data showing the clickthrough rates of those ads. Um and basically the clickthrough rates are overall um they have a point 0.68% clickthrough rate.

[00:11:10]The top cortile is 1%, the best brands are 1.57% and the peak CTR for any ads is 5.4% which is some pretty good metrics from Shai GPT. Google business profile suspension seems to be spiking over user account restrictions. This is coming from uh Vigny over on LinkedIn and X um seems to be an issue but there's a lot of people complaining about that. It may be something that Google has to fix on their level but it's unclear. Bing for places shockingly wasn't mobile friendly until now. Bing places for business where you can manage your business on Bing um is finally mobile friendly. I got an email yesterday which is kind of shocking but again it is now mobile friendly and finally ask.com as Jesus which has been a staple in the search industry for almost 30 years launched before Google has shut down IC said hey we're done as IC continues to sharpen its focus we have continued we had made a decision to discontinue our search business which includes ask.com then it kind of attributed to Jeves um it's sad to see it go but again really there was an arbitrage search engine and so forth and not many people use In any event, thanks so much for listening to the Search Buzz video recap. My name again is Barry Schwarz. This is the search news we cover the searches around list.com. Everyone a great safe weekend and again, thanks to HRS for sponsoring.

[00:12:24]Check check out agent A for more information. Goodbye.