If your search listing showed a plain grey globe instead of your logo last week, you were not imagining it, and it was not your fault. Google confirmed on Sunday that the bug is fully fixed.
Quiet weekends are useful. Two faults that had site owners picking through their own code all week turned out to belong to Google, and both were repaired without any announcement to the people affected. Here is what changed, and what to check on your own site this morning.
Search and SEO
Google confirmed the favicon fix on Sunday
The small icon beside your result started vanishing around 20 August, replaced by a default grey globe. On Friday, Rajan Patel, Google’s VP of Engineering for Search, confirmed the fault sat on Google’s side and apologised for it. Most sites had their icons back by Saturday. On Sunday Patel said the bug was one hundred percent fixed. The whole episode ran the better part of a week.
Google repaired a second fault over the same weekend. Search Console had lost crawl stats for 15 and 16 August, leaving a two day hole in the report that Google had not filled by Friday.
Why this matters for your business: A plain globe next to your listing makes you look less established than the competitor sitting above you, and that costs clicks on a page where every listing already fights for attention. If you spent last week rewriting favicon markup, stop and look at your listing again before you change anything else. The same logic applies to the crawl gap. A hole in a Google report is far more often a Google problem than a sign your own site has broken.
Google Trends now draws demand on a map
Google added Explore Maps and a Regional Breakdown to Google Trends on 19 August. Instead of scrolling a long list of regions and index numbers, you get an interactive map that shades each area by how strongly it searches for your term. The rollout is gradual, so check whether it has reached your account yet.
Why this matters for your business: This is free demand research you can run in ten minutes. Compare two of your service terms across the provinces and you will usually find one region carrying far more interest than your ad spend reflects. That is a case for a location page, a suburb specific landing page, or a budget shift. Most small businesses skip this because the old table view made it tedious. The map removes the excuse.
Social Media
TikTok moved AI video generation into the editor
TikTok added AI video generation directly inside the editing timeline this month, so a clip can be built without leaving the app. The same round of updates brought audio messages and audio and video attachments to TikTok direct messages, and CapCut can now publish clips straight to LinkedIn.
Why this matters for your business: The effort required to make short video keeps dropping, so your competitors will post more of it. That is the real story here. Volume on TikTok and Reels is no longer limited by editing skill. It is limited by whether anyone at your business presses record. The CapCut route into LinkedIn matters too if you sell to other businesses, because it turns one shoot into two channels.
Content Marketing
You can now tell Google what you want to see
Google announced on 20 August that you can personalise Search, Discover and News by describing what you want in your own words. Tap the three dot menu on any card in the Google app and tell it which topics or sites to show more or less of. Google can ask follow up questions, and the feed adjusts on the fly and remembers the request.
Why this matters for your business: Discover already sends real traffic to South African publishers and brands that post regularly. If readers can now ask for more of a named site, being the site someone names is worth something concrete. That rewards a recognisable voice and a steady publishing rhythm over occasional keyword driven posts. It also means a reader who dislikes what you publish can remove you for good, which raises the cost of filler.
Paid Search
Google Ads is testing enhanced matching inside Customer Match
An Enhanced matching option started appearing in Customer Match settings in some Google Ads accounts, reported on 19 August. Switched on, it widens the reach of your uploaded customer list by matching consented users on that list against consented users held by publishers. Google has not said which publishers take part, or how much extra reach it actually delivers.
Why this matters for your business: Look at the setting before it is switched on for you rather than after. The wording your customers agreed to when they handed over an email address probably covers marketing from your business. It very likely does not describe their data being matched against publisher records to widen an audience. POPIA turns on purpose, so an audience feature that quietly changes the purpose is worth a conversation with whoever signed off your privacy notice.
Automotive Marketing
What regional demand maps mean for a dealer group
This is a read across rather than automotive news, because nothing new landed in dealer marketing over the weekend. The Google Trends map change is the item worth a dealer’s attention today.
Dealer groups stock to instinct and to whatever the manufacturer pushed last quarter. A regional demand map lets you test that against what people actually search for. Run a bakkie model against a compact SUV across Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape and the spread is usually wider than the group expects. Do the same for used against new phrasing, and again for finance terms.
Why this matters for your dealership: Two decisions come out of this. The first is where each rooftop’s paid budget goes, because you are almost certainly bidding the same model list at every branch regardless of local demand. The second is which model landing pages you build first. A dealer group site carrying forty thin model pages ranks for none of them. Ten pages aimed at the models your province genuinely searches for will do far more, and the map tells you which ten.
What to do this week
- Search for your own business and confirm your favicon is back. If it is still a globe, check the icon is square, at least 48 by 48 pixels, and reachable by Googlebot.
- Open Google Trends and compare your two strongest service terms by region. Note any province that over-indexes against what you spend there.
- Check your Google Ads account for an Enhanced matching toggle inside Customer Match and make a deliberate decision either way.
- Merchant Center performance report definitions change today, 24 August, and the restatement reaches back to 1 July, so expect your Q3 numbers to move.
- Microsoft Advertising removes Max CPC from new campaigns on 1 October. Build anything that needs a manual bid ceiling before then.
If you would rather have someone run those checks across your website and your ad accounts, get in touch with us and we will take a look.
Sources
- Google working on fix for broken favicons in Google Search
- Google Search Console crawl stats missing two days of data
- Google Trends gains Explore Maps and Regional Breakdown
- Personalize what you see on Google Search, News and Discover
- Google Ads tests Enhanced Matching for Customer Match
- TikTok updates, news and features, August 2026