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

Practitioners value AI visibility data highly and won’t fund the platforms selling it. New survey data on what’s actually blocking the category. The post The GEO Trust Gap: SEOs Want The Data, But Not The Platforms Selling It appeared first on Search Engine Journal

PPC managers inheriting an account: verify the conversion value before touching the bid strategy. Five checks that separate real revenue from phantom value

Anthropic has revealed enough about Claude’s watermark to identify how it might work. A new research paper may be the clue. The post Why Anthropic’s Claude Watermark May Be A New Text-Marking Method appeared first on Search Engine Journal

Search referrals measure how people reach Reddit. They don’t measure why people go looking for it, and that gap is where the value sits. The post Reddit Preserved The Part Of The Internet We Broke appeared first on Search Engine Journal

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

Stable rankings, stable impressions, falling CTR: the signature of AI Overview click loss.

We saw a spike in volatility yesterday amongst the Google Search results rankings. There was a spike in ranking movement outside the day-to-day norm that seemed to start yesterday and maybe into today. The chatter is somewhat cool, but the tools showed a spike in the Google rank volatility.

Google has dropped the minimum number of followers needed to be approved for a Search Profile on Google. Previously, it was 100,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, X and Tiktok. Now it is 35,000 subscribers across YouTube, Instagram, and X but still 100,000 on TikTok.