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

Weak advertising demand and competition from TikTok and other rivals yielded lower fourth quarter revenue and profit for Meta, Facebook’s parent company.

Dozens of Google’s raters, seeking raises and access to benefits, rallied at the Googleplex in Mountain View yesterday, with the goal of putting an end to “poverty wages.” Why we care.

Microsoft has revised its multi-channel strategy, which will be accessible for all advertisers on February 21st. Additionally, the audience ad bid modifier will no longer be visible in your campaign settings

I’ll just come right out and say it… SEO should be a product because it is an acquisition channel for organic traffic and revenue.

Backlinks have long been considered a crucial factor in determining a website’s ranking on search. Historically seen as a vote of confidence, plenty of backlinks pointing to a website indicated that it is a trusted and authoritative source of information. And so, the more backlinks a site had, the higher it was likely to rank on search results.

Google has updated the video indexing report within Google Search Console to add impression data and a way to filter the report by your available sitemaps.

Microsoft Bing posted a new blog post saying “for XML sitemaps, one of the most critical tags you can include in your sitemap is the “lastmod” tag.” And it will become even more critical as Bing is reworking its crawl scheduling stack to rely more on this lastmod field.

Google may be crawling the web with a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named GoogleProducer. This useragent is not listed on the official Google crawlers page but maybe it is too new to be listed yet?

CNBC reported the other day that Google is working on its own AI chatbot named Apprentice Bard. Apprentice Bard is reportedly built on Google’s AI LaMDA language model stack and while Google is being more cautious with this rollout, Google is working on testing an AI bot in search.