I am seeing new signs of yet more Google Search ranking volatility and a possible tweak to the ranking search algorithm. Something kicked off yesterday, January 15th, that the third-party tools picked up on. With this update, there is limited chatter, unlike the previous unconfirmed Google Search ranking update.

Google Ads is doing a limited test with some advertisers to allow them to run A/B tests with different product titles and images in Shopping Ads. Ginny Marvin, the Google Ads Liaison, said it is “currently being tested with a small number of merchants."

Google Ads has reportedly streamlined the selection capability of Manual CPC bidding during the campaign setup. Now the option can be found under the “Conversions" goal, labeled as "Manually set bids."

Google Ads has made the Campaign total budgets officially live as an open beta for any advertiser to sign up and use. Campaign total budgets are now available in Search, Performance Max and Shopping campaigns within Google Ads.

Microsoft Advertising announced a slew of new features including new customer acquisition goals as an open beta, Share of voice (SOV) metrics, Asset group-level URL options and tracking templates, increased Search Theme limit, enhanced asset group import, Content Targeting now generally available, Location targeting improvements and Autogenerated assets in Responsive Search ads.

Over the past few weeks, Google has been showing AI Overviews for local packs, leading some businesses to see huge drops in visibility for their Google Business Profile and local listings. Some businesses are seeing 50% declines or more because of the local pack change.

Rajan Patel, the VP of Engineering for Search, said on X that Google is making “changes to ranking" to remove prediction content from showing up in the Google Search top stories and news sections. This comes after some sites are posting "prediction" content, predicting that some sports trades may happen, that have not happened yet, and those "stories" show up in the news section as actually having occurred.

It is another week and more Google Search ranking volatility but this was a weird one. Google launched Personal Intelligence in the Gemini app and it is coming to AI Mode in Google Search. Google AI Mode new ad format…

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