Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

This week, we of course had more Google search ranking volatility, this time on the 12th. Google is testing new AI buttons on its home page…

ChatGPT names brands in its own search queries before it fetches anything. Being in that query is worth 33 times more. The post ChatGPT Already Knows Who It’ll Recommend Before It Searches appeared first on Search Engine Journal .

Google Ads will roll out a change to language targeting that will remove the ability to manually adjust the language setting. This change is happening next month, in September 2026

Google Ads will roll out a change to language targeting that will remove the ability to manually adjust the language setting. This change is happening next month, in September 2026

A month ago, we reported that Google said it would be rolling out AI-generated images within AI Overviews in Google Search. Well, it seems Google is starting to roll out those AI-generated images in AI Overviews this week.

Google updated a help document within the Google Merchant Center help area to document that Google Merchant Center for Agencies can now link to up to 1,000 Merchant Center accounts. Previously, that number was not there, and now we know – up to 1,000 accounts can be linked to a single agency account.

As we know, Google has often declared that its crawlers, Googlebot, etc, come from Mountain View, California. But the truth is, that is where they self-declare the bots are coming from.

Google has a new reporting option for reviews in Google Business Profiles and Google Local. This one is called “Report owner response.” It lets you tell Google if an owner response to a review is off-topic, contains profanity, is harassing, discriminatory, hateful, or includes personal information.

Google Ads is changing language targeting for Search and Performance Max in September 2026. Learn what’s changing and what advertisers need to know