Thursday’s cycle was a study in give and take. Google handed merchants more control over their catalog and, hours later, yanked healthy listings offline with a validation glitch. The tools for measuring visibility inside AI answers inched forward, and a phishing campaign turned the search ad slot against the business owners trying to log in. Here is what changed, and what to do about it.
Merchant Center, Both Ways: A New Control and a Costly Glitch
One change gave merchants more reach over their catalog. The other pulled healthy listings offline overnight.
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Merchant Center attribute rules now cover auto-found products Google extended attribute rules to products it discovers by crawling and structured data, not just feed submissions, closing a gap that left auto-discovered inventory ungoverned. Audit which rules now apply to your found products, especially if you rely on Product schema rather than a feed.
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Merchant Center false disapprovals: what to do before you touch your feed A wave of “product page unavailable” disapprovals hit healthy listings overnight, pointing to a validation bug rather than a real crawl block. The move that protects your revenue is to document the affected IDs and wait, not bulk-edit your feed in a panic.
Measuring the Answer Layer
As AI surfaces handle more queries, the tools for seeing your visibility inside them are starting to catch up.
- Bing Webmaster Tools AI reporting is getting more features soon Microsoft signaled that more AI performance reporting is coming to Bing Webmaster Tools, as Google builds out comparable reporting in Search Console. Neither yet exposes the click data teams actually need to value AI visibility, so treat both as directional for now.
When the Ad Slot Turns Hostile
Login-style queries are a soft target, and the people most at risk are the ones searching for their own dashboard.
- Phishing ads on Google target Google Business Profile logins A campaign buys ads on login-style searches like “my business” and routes owners to fake Google sign-in pages that capture credentials. The one-line fix is to type the login URL directly rather than clicking an ad, then turn on passkeys or two-factor.
Today’s Quick Hits
- Bing tests a bigger favicon for its top sponsored ad slot Bing is testing a favicon about 33 percent larger on the top sponsored ad, a small visual-hierarchy nudge for whoever holds the slot. It is a test, not a rollout, but worth a favicon-quality check if you bid for the top position.