This week, we, of course, covered the ongoing Google Search ranking volatility.

Over the years, we have written that service areas are not used as a local ranking factor by Google Search. Well, the API leak document also implies this to be true.

Google is testing a new AI-powered configuration tool, as it calls it, to help you build instant reports based on your natural language questions. So basically Ads and Analytics Advisor but for Search Console, plus this just builds reports and doesn’t do actions – yet.

If you look at some of the profiles/sites in your Google Search Console performance reports, you may notice a significant increase in the average position being reported. This happened when Google removed the num=100 parameter and is likely due to scrapers not messing up your data.

Google Merchant Center is now beta testing regional member pricing, where you can offer different member prices based on the shopper’s regions. This will essentially override the member price in the regional inventory feed.

Google Ads may be testing placing an ad extension button at the top right of the sponsored result on the desktop interface. This button, in this example, shows the text “Learn more.”

Control AI visibility and server strain with a log-validated index of bots, complete with user-agent strings, official IP ranges, crawl rates, and allowlist/block best practices.

This week’s SEO Pulse examines new data what drives AI citations, plus ChatGPT launches shopping research.

Breaking news: Cloudflare is experiencing another major service disruption, causing widespread 5xx errors and connectivity issues for websites and services globally. The post Cloudflare Outage Returns, Triggering Fresh Wave Of 5xx Errors appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Has Google reached “Peak AI Overview”? In this episode of Whiteboard Friday, Tom analyzes late 2025 data, revealing a drop in AIO frequency for informational queries and a new trend of AI results appearing below position one