Google's core update may run until Black Friday week

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This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Wednesday, November 11th, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice.

Today, Google starts a core update that could run right up to Black Friday. Its newest AI model arrives in AI mode. Yahoo rebuilds its whole search engine around AI answers. Reddit tests a product review section built from its forms. And Shopify starts charging merchants only when an ad makes a sale. We start with timing. Every year, retailers and publishers hope Google will leave its rankings alone before the busiest shopping weeks of the year. This year, it hasn't. On Tuesday, November 10th, Google began rolling out its November 2026 core update. That's a broad change to how Google ranks pages. And it applies globally in every language. Google says it may take up to two weeks. If it uses all of that time, it finishes on November 24th. That's two days before Thanksgiving and three days before Black Friday. And here's the catch. Google's own advice is to wait at least a week after an update finishes before you compare your numbers. So the earliest clean read lands after Cyber Monday. The weeks when rankings matter most are the weeks when it will be hardest to tell why they moved. The changes can be big. After Google's March update, the tracking firm SE Ranking found that 79.5% of the pages in the top three positions changed places. Aggregators, directories and comparison sites lost the most. And the measuring tools are shaky too. DemandSphere found spurious results in about 11% of its daily rank checks.

So, some of the volatility charts may not be measuring anything real. On the same day, Google's John Mueller offered a reminder of how slowly Google forms an opinion. Answering the owner of a new site whose indexing requests kept failing, he said, it can take time for the systems to understand the unique value of it all. His advice was quality over quantity.

That same afternoon, Google put Gemini 4 Carbon, its newest and most capable model, into AI mode in search. For now, it's only for Google AI Ultra subscribers, a plan that starts at $99.99 a month, and even some of them didn't have it yet. Google calls Carbon its strongest model for cybersecurity and long-running agent tasks. Not everyone was impressed. A recipe publisher, Inspire Taste, replied to a Google executive with an example of a flawed AI answer about roast turkey. In November, that's an awkward subject to get wrong.

Local results may lose some furniture. Google is testing a version of its AI-powered local pack on mobile that removes the website, call and directions buttons, along with reviews, photos, the address and opening hours. Local search expert, Joy Hawkins, called it probably the ugliest version she'd seen, and Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable said it cannot be good for clicks, calls and directions to businesses.

Shopping results gained something instead. Google now let shoppers filter product reviews to show only reviews that weren't incentivized. In regular search, Google Shopping and AI mode. For brands that build reviews through free samples, that's one click away from being set aside. Bing is testing a shopping tab that asks you three questions first, then personalizes the results. And in Europe, merchants who haven't picked a comparison shopping service in Merchant Center may now see their free listings disapproved right before the holidays.

Yahoo made the boldest move of the day. Its AI answer engine, Yahoo Scout, has left beta and now runs underneath all of Yahoo Search, which Yahoo calls the third largest search engine in the US. Scout has given more than three billion answers. A new feature called Pivot Search lets people switch between classic results and an AI answer in one place. It also remembers. A feature called Scout Memories personalizes answers using what you've asked before. And Yahoo says people can view it, delete it, or opt out at any time. The new experience is live in the US, the UK, Europe, and Switzerland. And Scout is moving into Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Sports too. There's also a new Scout app with voice conversations and photo questions. So now all three big US search engines put an AI answer at the center. On the ad platforms, Shopify is doing something unusual. With campaign autopilot, merchants set the price they'll pay per sale, and Shopify runs the ads on Meta, Microsoft, and Snapchat with X coming. Merchants pay only when there's a sale. Shopify takes the media risk. Its product chief, Samir Pradhan, said, keeping merchants feeling in control was a big part of the idea. Microsoft has folded its old auto-generated assets setting into AI max text customization, carrying over whatever advertisers had chosen, and Google is testing a View app screenshots link on app install ads and mobile search. Reddit made two bets on commerce. The first is Reddit reviews, a test that turns existing forum discussions into product review pages, starting with about 10,000 products in electronics, beauty, home, and fashion. The second is a deal with QLU, a company that maps how people's tastes connect. It gives Reddit more than 10 years of taste data, and Reddit says the model needs no personal data or browsing history. It also means new advertisers no longer wait days or weeks for their campaigns to learn. Reddit's example is simple. Someone shopping for an espresso machine might also be looking for a table. But Reddit is also paying advertisers to try it. New advertisers who launched before November 20 can get credits, like $1,500 in credits for $1,500 spent in the US. Its ad growth has slowed three-quarters in a row to 54 percent, and buyers told Digiday it's still a place to test, not a place for always on budgets.