Google’s former Chief Scientist explains why AI models are less important and why context engineering increasingly matters more. The post Google’s Ex-AI Chief Jeff Dean Explains How To Improve Context Engineering appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

This week, we covered two unconfirmed Google search ranking updates, one mid-week and one over the weekend – some were pretty big.

The four arguments used to sell llms.txt would pass a text file about cats. Here’s why that matters for every GEO tactic you’re buying

Google Ads is rolling out a new customer acquisition option named “Report on new customers acquired.” This lets you “Drive purchases from new and existing customers without changing bidding,” according to Google.

Google Ads is rolling out a new customer acquisition option named “Report on new customers acquired.” This lets you “Drive purchases from new and existing customers without changing bidding,” according to Google.

Earlier this week, OpenAI sent an email to advertisers about new ChatGPT Ads Manager product updates. These updates include testing a new multi-product carousel format for product feed campaigns, plus a number of updates to the ad manager itself.

Google Ads will begin migrating or “upgrading” Automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match setting to AI Max starting on September 1, 2026. We knew this was coming and now the process is soon going to begin.

Gary Illyes from Google said that Google’s crawlers do not only send HTTP requests such as GET and POST but also for HEAD, OPTIONS, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE.

Google Ads added a “View call report” link in the Phone Call conversions leads report. This makes it easier to jump to the details of what makes up the metrics of that report and gives you access to that data in a new tab.

Google Ads is now testing the “Strongest match” and “Strong match” labels it announced back in mid-June. This is the first time I have seen this label in the wild.