Paused for 8-months. Google actually originally announced the company was just pausing the related search experiments for a couple of months. Well, that lingered on for a total of eight-months and now over eight-months later, Google has unpaused this feature.

The original pause announcement, which was changed slightly, now reads:

We would like to inform you about a few changes that impact your ability to create Custom search style experiments, specifically for your Related search styles in your AdSense account.

Beginning May 10, 2021, you will not be able to create new experiments for your Related search styles in your AdSense account. Your existing Related search experiments that are currently in progress will also stop on May 10, 2021. Please note that this change does not prevent you from creating experiments for other elements of your styles (e.g., search ads, shopping ads).

Our engineering teams are working hard to bring this functionality back.

Thank you for your understanding and we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Where to access. You should be able to see this option under the “optimization” section and within the “experiments” tab in the AdSense console.

Why we care. If you missed using the related search experiments feature for your AdSense ads on your site, you can now re-enable it. It might be worth testing the feature if you have not done so for a while.