Top Stories roll out in Google AI Overviews

This is now live in the United States for mobile users and will expand to more in the future.

Source:
Search Engine Land

Daily Search Forum Recap: July 17, 2026

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.

Google Ads smart bidding update is ragging in the PPC community…

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable

Bing Testing Black Magnifying Glass Icon In Search Bar

Microsoft Bing is testing using a black colored magnifying glass in the search bar and box. This is instead of a gray or black outlined icon, the test is a fully colored in icon.

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable

Google Maps Turn Off OpenTable Reservations

Google has removed its help document named "Make OpenTable reservations in Google Maps" yesterday. It looks like that implies that Google Maps removed the integration it has with restaurant listings and making reservations with OpenTable.

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable

Video: Google 7/11 Update, Bing Penalties, Google Images, AI Overviews AI Images, Google Ads Updates, ChatGPT Ads Features & Apple Maps

This week, we saw some Google Search ranking volatility around July 11th, so I called it the 7-Eleven update. Bing said it does not do one-off search penalties because it is not scalable. Google Images celebrated its 25th anniversary…

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable

Google StoreBot Accessibility Issues Help Doc Updated

Google has updated the help document named How to fix: Google StoreBot crawler can’t access your in-store product page. The document has a number of big updates with a lot of clarifications including the user-agents, checking robots.txt, blocking IP addresses, page speed issues, reprocessing and how long it takes for your landing pages to be reprocessed.

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable

Google Renames NotebookLM Useragent To Google-GeminiNotebook

As many of you know, Google has user-triggered fetchers including Google-NotebookLM. But with NotebookLM being renamed to Gemini Notebook, Google had to update the user agent name of Google-NotebookLM to Google-GeminiNotebook.

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable

Google says AI Search features send billions of clicks to websites each week

Nick Fox, SVP at Google, said Google continues to send billions of clicks to the web every day and within AI Search it is billions weekly.

Source:
Search Engine Land

Meta Business Agents are here. Marketers should pay attention

What if customers never reach your website? See how Meta’s AI agents turn messaging into a powerful sales and service channel.

Source:
Search Engine Land

How to report SEO results executives actually care about

If your reports still lead with rankings and traffic, you may be proving SEO performance while failing to prove business value.

Source:
Search Engine Land

Google brings business data feeds to Demand Gen campaigns

Google is bringing business data feeds to Demand Gen, enabling dynamic ads without Google Merchant Center.

Source:
Search Engine Land

Heather Robinson talks about a £50 PPC ad that cost £1,000

A £50 Meta campaign that accidentally spent over £1,000 became a valuable lesson in transparency, process, and why honesty matters.

Source:
Search Engine Land

How ad platforms count and report conversions differently

Your ad platforms don’t have to agree to be useful. Learn what different attribution methods are actually telling you.

Source:
Search Engine Land

Google Ads Making Broader Smart Bidding Updates?

The PPC community has been going wild over the change that is coming to Google Ads around bidding for campaigns limited by budget on August 18th. There is some belief that this is going to be a broader smart bidding update than what Google communicated.

Source:
Search Engine Roundtable