A few weeks ago we reported that maybe the green ad label is coming back to Google after it went live with the black ad label that the industry was not too happy with. Well, as of now, I am wrong. Danny Sullivan from Google said those seeing the old green ad label are seeing that because Google still has not fully rolled it out to all searchers yet.
Danny Sullivan said on Twitter that they leave a small percentage of searchers able to see the green ad label to do some last bit of testing. He said it should be fully rolled out in the upcoming weeks and no one should see it, but for now, Google is still leaving it open for gathering data from a subset of searchers.
I checked. It's not a test. With these types of changes, we sometimes don't roll out to a tiny percentage for some last metrics gathering. That's what's happening here; I expect it'll be complete in the coming weeks.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) July 19, 2019
This comes after more people began noticing the green ad label back in the mobile results:
Did I miss something or is the “ad” icon green again? ...and in a box? pic.twitter.com/dfhVh75Uw7
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) July 19, 2019
Google is testing black "Ad" labels 🤨 . cc:@rustybrick pic.twitter.com/rwSed4mX1Z
— Sergey Alakov (@sergey_alakov) July 14, 2019
So there you have it - it is not a test, not a bug, just a slower roll out.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
