Gary Illyes confirmed that external signals like social shares are not used as a ranking signal because they are out of Google’s control. The post Google Explains Why They Need To Control Ranking Signals appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Google’s Gemini now personalizes replies from past chats and adds Temporary Chats, rolling out now with controls you can manage. The post Google Gemini Adds Personalization From Past Chats appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

OpenAI restores GPT-4o to the ChatGPT picker for paid users and promises advance notice on future deprecations. The post OpenAI Brings GPT-4o Back For Paid ChatGPT Users appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

YouTube’s Promote tool now lets you choose specific calls to action for website traffic campaigns, like “Book now” or “Get quote.” The post YouTube Lets Creators Pick Exact CTAs In Promote Website Ads appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

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

Two distinct approaches are shaping how brands show up in AI responses: prompt tracking or entity influence.

Google has launched the Preferred Sources top stories feature fully in the US and India, after testing it in Search Labs for a bit over six weeks. As I said then, this is a nice feature for publishers and hopefully will lead to more traffic from Google Search for some.

Google Ads has added the gender exclusions feature for Performance Max campaigns. This was previously announced last week and is now showing up in the Google Ads interfaces for advertisers.

Google and Bing are busy testing changing the search results snippets title. In one case, Google is expanding the title of the search result on mouse hover

Google has removed some of the restricted countries from the list of countries not allowed to serve Dating and Companionship ads. Specifically, Google removed Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan and the UAE from the list.