Search Engine Journal

Twenty-five years ago, Google launched a modest advertising product that would evolve into one of the most influential tools in digital marketing.

Back then, it was called Google AdWords; today, it is Google Ads.

Over that quarter-century, the platform has transformed in format, scope, and ambition.

While the technology behind Google Ads has evolved dramatically, one question continues to spark debate among marketers: “Was Google Ads better back then, or now?”

To answer that, let’s first look at the major moments that shaped its evolution.

The…

Google’s Preferred Sources tool is meant to let fans of certain websites tell Google they want to see more of their favorite sites in the Top News feature. However, Google is surfacing copycat spam sites, random sites, and parked domains. Some of the sites appearing in the tool are so low quality that only their home pages are indexed. Shouldn’t this tool just show legitimate websites and not spam?

Google Preferred Sources

Google’s Preferred Sources feature gives users control over which news outlets appear more often in Google’s Top Stories…

Google warned against relying on tool-generated scores for technical SEO audits.

Search Relations team member Martin Splitt outlined a three-step framework in a Search Central Lightning Talk that emphasizes site-specific context over standardized metrics.

The Three-Step Framework

Splitt outlined the core objective in the video:

“A technical audit, in my opinion, should make sure no technical issues prevent or interfere with crawling or indexing. It can use checklists and guidelines to do so, but it needs experience and expertise to adapt these…

Google Finance is rolling out Deep Search capabilities, prediction markets data, and enhanced earnings tracking features across its AI-powered platform.

The updates expand Google Finance beyond basic market data into multi-step research workflows and crowd-sourced probability forecasting. Google announced the changes today, with features rolling out over the coming weeks, starting with Labs users.

Deep Search For Financial Research

Deep Search handles complex financial queries by issuing up to hundreds of simultaneous searches and synthesizing…

Google adds Waze ads to Performance Max for store goals in the U.S. and rolls out channel performance reporting, with search partner reporting coming soon.

• Waze ads are now available in PMax for store goals.
• Channel performance reporting is rolling out across PMax, with search partner reporting and MCC access coming soon.
• No extra setup is required.

Search isn’t ending. It’s evolving.

Across the industry, the systems powering discovery are diverging. Traditional search runs on algorithms designed to crawl, index, and rank the web. AI-driven systems like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT interpret it through models that retrieve, reason, and respond. That quiet shift (from ranking pages to reasoning with content) is what’s breaking the optimization stack apart.

What we’ve built over the last 20 years still matters: clean architecture, internal linking, crawlable content, structured…

Search is moving from queries typed into a box to conversations held with systems that understand intent, context, and outcomes. People no longer look for pages. They look for solutions, guidance, and confidence that they are making the right choice.

Agentic AI pushes this shift further. Instead of waiting for instructions, agents act on goals. They discover information, compare options, trigger workflows, and adjust based on feedback. For digital leaders, this means visibility is no longer only a ranking problem. It becomes a problem of influence…

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman sat for an interview where he explained that his vision for the future of ChatGPT is as a trusted assistant that’s user-aligned, saying that booking hotels is not going to be the way to monetize “the world’s smartest model.” He pointed to Google as an example of what he doesn’t want ChatGPT to become: a service that accepts advertising dollars to place the worst choice above the best choice. He then followed up to express openness to advertising.

User-Aligned Monetization Model

Altman contrasted OpenAI’s revenue…

This post was sponsored by Market Brew. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

If your AI-generated articles don’t rank but sound fine, you’re not alone.

AI has made it effortless to produce content, but not to stand out in SERPs.

Across nearly every industry, brands are using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and more to scale content production, only to discover that, to search engines, everything sounds the same.

But this guide will help you build E-E-A-T-friendly & AI-Overview-worthy content that

Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million to integrate its AI answer engine into Snapchat’s chat interface, with rollout starting next year.

• Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over one year to integrate its AI answer engine into Snapchat.
  
• Snap calls this its first large-scale integration of an external AI partner directly in the app.
• Perplexity handles 150+ million questions weekly, so the integration…