Google's John Mueller went off again on programmatic SEO, this time saying that programmatic SEO can "often leads to a site that's either spam, borderline spam, or low quality," he wrote. These tactics can often lead Google's "systems have possibly lost faith in your site providing good value to users based on the old pages."
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today...
Google Ads posted a new help document about automated promotions that describes how Google Ads can and does automatically identify and apply active promotional offers directly from your website.
Google's new DMA booking search widgets now carry a disclaimer to explain that the prices listed in that block are customized "based on factors such as your device type." It is unclear what other factors are being used outside of "device type," but you'd have to assume the users location, language and other factors.
Google accidentally showed the prompts it uses for some of the insights reports within Google Merchant Center. Instead of providing an easy-to-digest summary of the top product that drove your performance within Merchant Center, it spit out the prompts and actions, like "thinking," "role," "Formatting," and so on.
Since Google added AI Overviews to Google Search, many of us have been experiencing what some call the crocodile effect, also known as the great decoupling. But according to new data, the opposite may be happening with Google Shopping Ads.
Apple has updated its help documentation for Applebot over the weekend and added a single line at the end that reads, "Site rules for Applebot-Extended are not considered in ranking for Search." Applebot-Extended is not new; we covered it in April 2025, but here Apple is making it clear, like with Googlebot-Extended, that Applebot-Extended is separate from Search.
Google will now give you an interactive widget within AI Overviews for when you are looking for a simple character counter website. Websites that offer character counting service features are in trouble.