New advertising markets and customer journeys. Explore emerging opportunities with clear distinctions between a test, an announcement and a rollout.
Industry
AI Max for Search Campaigns is officially out of beta and generally available globally as of GML 2026. Helen Gietmann shared practitioner experience from running AI Max across multiple clients: text customisation and Final URL Expansion (FUE) have delivered strong results, while search-term matching has been the more variable component.
Industry
Product value adjustments let retailers strategically adjust conversion values for specific products based on business priorities: profit, seasonal sell-through, best-sellers: with the bidding algorithm optimising in real-time. Adjustments apply across products and attributes (brands, categories) without altering campaign structure.
Industry
Ask Advisor is being unified across Google's marketing surfaces: Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Centre, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360, Campaign Manager 360, and soon more: into a single agentic experience that travels with the user across products. The unified advisor remembers business goals and context, surfaces the right product for each conversation, and proactively suggests next steps.
Industry
Google announced what it calls the biggest upgrade to the Search box in more than 25 years at Google I/O. The new AI-powered Search box dynamically expands so users can describe what they need in more detail, suggests better ways to formulate questions (beyond traditional autocomplete), supports multimodal inputs (text, images, files, videos, Chrome tabs), and preserves context as users explore through AI Overviews and AI Mode follow-up questions.
BigQuery
Balazs Vajna has flagged that BigQuery is rolling out "chat with your data" at the dataset level: a shortcut to Conversational Analytics (the Agents feature) that's spreading across the BigQuery interface. The capability lets analysts launch a chat-based exploration on entire datasets rather than only query results.
Industry
AI Brief is the structural new layer in AI Max that lets advertisers steer Gemini's targeting and creative customisation through natural-language guidelines: Messaging Guidelines (what your ads should and shouldn't say, e.g., "never mention prices" or "focus on my fall collection"), Matching Guidelines (which searches to capture or avoid, e.g., "avoid searches for in-person degrees"), and Audience Guidelines (how to tailor messaging for different segments, e.g., "for people who are health conscious, highlight our clean products"). The interface previews sample assets and searches; advertisers iterate the brief until the previewed output matches the intended direction.
Google Merchant Center
Conversational Attributes are a new set of Merchant Centre product data fields designed specifically for discovery in AI Mode and conversational commerce surfaces. The new attributes include Question & Answer, Additional Variants, Popularity Rank, Related Products, Document Link, and Item Group.
Anthropic
Gus Pelogia and Ian Ferguson have both flagged the launch of Screaming Frog v24's MCP Server, which lets users run crawls directly inside Claude Desktop. The setup involves grabbing the MCP extension from Screaming Frog's docs, installing it via Claude Desktop settings, and restarting.
Industry
Search campaigns for travel bring travel ad formats: Travel Promotion Ads, Booking Links, travel feeds: directly into the Search ecosystem with AI Max. The change consolidates what previously required multiple campaign types into a single buying door for all travel formats, with full access to AI Max's targeting and creative automation and a unified performance view across the SERP.
Industry
New Customer Acquisition has added a third bidding mode: new prospects mode. Where traditional New Customer Acquisition focused on anyone who hadn't purchased before, new prospects mode goes further: automatically excluding users who have purchased (via Customer Match & Tags), searched for brand terms, visited the website or used the app, or engaged with content or ads across Google and YouTube.
Industry
Message Ads with RCS for Business is a new Search ad format that lets users move from a Search ad to a verified text thread with the advertiser via RCS (Rich Communication Services). Google AI instantly qualifies leads through text conversations, and the brand maintains visibility in the user's messaging app for ongoing nurture.
Industry
Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP): the open standard that makes Search, Gemini, Gmail, and YouTube into shoppable surfaces: is expanding into two new categories. Hotel booking integration is coming soon with launch partners including Amadeus, Booking.com, Expedia Group, Hilton, Marriott, Trip.com, Accor, Choice Hotels, IHG, and Wyndham.
Microsoft Advertising
Sachin Patel has spotted Bing testing a new way to show prices in search ads. The test surfaces pricing as a more prominent visual element within the standard text ad format: an evolution beyond the existing Price extension surface, which has been live for years.
Industry
Missed opportunity reporting is now generally available globally: a new reporting layer that visualises how much performance has been left on the table due to bid and budget constraints. The reporting surfaces interactive weekly charts contrasting actual performance against potential, campaign-level reporting across Search, Shopping, PMax, Demand Gen, YouTube, App, and Hotel Ads, and a Recommended Action column with real-time bid and budget suggestions tailored to current seasonality and auction dynamics.
Industry
Lily Ray has flagged that Google has rolled out AI Overviews for new query types this week, including many words that previously generated dictionary results. Typing "disregard," "ignore," or "help" no longer returns a dictionary definition: instead, it returns an obedient AI Overview that follows the instruction.
Industry
Direct Offers: the format that surfaces exclusive promotions directly within AI Mode and Search at the moment of purchasing intent: has expanded materially. New for 2026: Direct Offers move from the AI Mode product viewer to the AI Mode answer itself, allowing retailers to feature discounts alongside other products during exploration.
Industry
Microsoft previewed prompt-based Audience generation inside the campaign creation flow. Instead of manually picking attributes, advertisers describe their ideal customer in natural language ("Who's your target audience?
Industry
Google has officially launched Ads in AI Mode, a new generation of ad formats designed for the conversational, multimodal queries that now dominate AI Mode and AI Overviews. Glenn Gabe and Ginny Marvin both flagged the launch as the headline shift from the GML keynote.
BigQuery
Luka Cempre has flagged a new BigQuery Studio capability: Git repositories integration is now available in preview, providing direct integration to remote Git repositories. The setup requires enabling APIs, naming the repository, and authenticating with GitHub: within a few minutes, a GitHub repo is synced with BigQuery Studio.
Google Merchant Center
UCP setup in Microsoft Merchant Centre enables merchants to add new store settings and product feed attributes to activate AI-powered shopping experiences in Copilot. Two-part setup: (1) update store settings (Return policy, Customer support) and product feed attributes in Merchant Centre; (2) set up checkout APIs for Copilot Checkout (closed pilot).
Gemini
Google announced at I/O that AI Mode is now using Gemini 3.5 Flash globally as its default model. The model upgrade brings improved reasoning capability, faster response generation, and broader language coverage to AI Mode users worldwide.
Industry
Chris Long has flagged a significant Chrome documentation update: Chrome released documentation on its new Agentic Browsing audits, and buried in the spec is a reference to how the audit will check for the LLMs.txt file at the domain root. Crystal Carter was credited as the original finder.
Gemini
Click-to-call ads are getting a structural upgrade: Gemini now analyses what was actually said on each call to score leads more precisely, rather than relying solely on call duration as a proxy for lead quality. The system filters out misdials and low-intent calls from reporting, traces each qualified call back to the originating campaign, and feeds the lead-quality signals back into Smart Bidding so the algorithm bids for high-value callers rather than just call volume.
Google Merchant Center
Ask Advisor in Merchant Centre launched in closed beta in the US in English: a Gemini-powered conversational assistant that diagnoses account and feed issues, surfaces performance and audience insights, and provides a roadmap to improve Store Quality Score. The advisor offers performance reporting and insights tailored to business goals, product listing and issue-resolution guidance for disapprovals, and personalised, actionable recommendations such as promotion opportunities or title optimisations.
OpenAI
OpenAI for Business has launched ChatGPT for PowerPoint in beta. The integration lets teams create, edit, understand, and polish presentations using natural language directly inside PowerPoint: starting from notes, docs, spreadsheets, prompts, or an existing deck.
Google Merchant Center
AI Performance Insights is a new Merchant Centre reporting suite that shows how products are being discovered on AI Mode, Gemini, and AI Overviews. The reporting includes brand Share of Voice vs. similar brands, journey-stage breakdown (discovery, evaluation, purchase), product term popularity, and structured attribute completeness scoring.
Google Ads
If you're joining here directly, Part 1 covered Google Marketing Live 2026 and Google I/O: more than 30 launches reshaping Search, YouTube, Commerce, Measurement, and Creative. Catch up on Part 1 →
Industry
Journey-aware Bidding is a beta upgrade for Search campaigns with Target CPA that lets Google's bidding algorithm learn from every step of the lead journey: not just the biddable conversion: to sharpen predictions and improve performance. The mechanic requires advertisers to import all relevant conversion actions (phone calls, form submissions, newsletter signups, marketing/sales-qualified leads, closed deals) into Google Ads, and then Smart Bidding uses the full sequence to model conversion likelihood.
Industry
Commerce Media Suite is expanding with four new capabilities. SKU-level reporting lets brands see precise campaign impact on retail sales per product, including YouTube, and is available in Google Ads, Display & Video 360, and Search Ads 360.
Gemini
Google introduced Gemini Spark and Gemini Omni at I/O. Gemini Omni is the unified multimodal model that natively handles text, images, and video in a single workflow: flagged by Endrit Restelica as a step change in generative AI capabilities.
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