The changes that matter to advertisers, with the sources behind them and a practical next step. Pick a topic and catch up at your own pace.
Industry
Microsoft launched a dedicated Bid strategy report that shows strategy status and performance metrics (average target ROAS, ROAS, revenue, conversions), with a conversion delay window visualisation, and full bid strategy settings (Target ROAS, Maximum CPC). Paired with this: Cross-account portfolio bidding lets agencies group campaigns across multiple accounts under a single strategy.
Microsoft Clarity
Inside the Activate "What's Next" segment, Microsoft previewed Clarity AI Visibility: a forthcoming Clarity module tracking how AI surfaces engage with a website across three dimensions:
Industry
The Bid Strategy Report gains new metrics: Avg. Target ROAS, Avg.
Industry
Seasonality Adjustments for Portfolio Bidding: previously announced: are now fully available for portfolio bid strategies and shared budgets. It lets us as advertisers signal forthcoming demand spikes (sales events, product launches, seasonal peaks) to Microsoft's bidding algorithm, mirroring the Google Ads seasonality adjustment surface, which has been live for years.
Industry
Three Search-side budget and bidding upgrades land alongside the AI Max GA. Demand-led budget pacing uses Google AI to optimise spend toward consumer demand peaks: capturing more volume on high-demand days and reducing spend on slow days, while respecting daily and monthly limits.
Google Ads
This week features three major industry events over three consecutive days, with some overlapping schedules.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has announced that Merchant Centre for Agencies is now generally available globally as of 11 May 2026. The product was previously generally available in the US and Canada with a pilot in other markets through March 2026; the May rollout extends full GA worldwide.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has documented a new agency account conversion request workflow, giving agencies a structured path to convert legacy Merchant Centre accounts into the unified agency account model. The workflow lets agencies submit conversion requests for client accounts they manage, and Google reviews and processes each request to align the account with the current agency account architecture.
Display & Video 360
DG Media Network has announced a new collaboration with Google Display & Video 360 and YouTube, expanding how brands programmatically access premium YouTube inventory through the DV360 buying surface. The partnership extends programmatic targeting and bidding controls into YouTube inventory that has historically been less accessible through DV360, particularly for advertisers running cross-channel programmatic strategies.
ChatGPT Ads
Juozas Kaziukėnas has flagged the next major feature on the ChatGPT Ads roadmap: custom audiences. The feature will let advertisers upload raw or hashed email addresses and phone numbers to ChatGPT Ads, matching them against ChatGPT user accounts to enable targeting existing customers, retargeting website visitors with known contact details, and excluding current customers from prospecting campaigns.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has rolled out its AI Citation report to all users, surfacing which Microsoft Copilot and partner AI surfaces are citing the website inside their AI-generated responses. Navah Hopkins has flagged the launch with strategic framing; Josh Silverbauer has provided the practitioner detail: the report uses Microsoft Copilot and partner data (not just Bing) to map AI citations against the website's content, giving operators visibility into AI-referral traffic that has historically been invisible inside web analytics.
Display & Video 360
Google Marketing Platform has confirmed that Costco Retail Media is officially joining Google's Commerce Media Suite, letting brands connect with Costco Wholesale's first-party audience data through Google's commerce media stack. The partnership extends Google's retail media network: which already includes major partners across grocery, big-box, and pharmacy: into Costco's distinctive membership-based audience.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has confirmed that vehicle ads in the United States are expanding to support All-Terrain Vehicles (ATVs), Utility Task Vehicles (UTVs), Recreational Vehicles (RVs), and non-motorised trailers such as travel trailers and campers, starting May 2026. The expansion extends Google's lower-funnel, omnichannel vehicle ad format beyond traditional automobiles into the broader powersports and recreational-vehicle category.
Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Centre has rolled out a new product source option: Use AI to add products (currently in beta): that lets Google's AI automatically scan an advertiser's website and populate the product catalogue without manual feed files or API integration. Arpan Banerjee has flagged the launch (sourced from Barry Schwartz); the option appears in Merchant Centre's Add Product Source flow alongside the existing "Add products from a file" and "Use Google Sheets" routes.
ChatGPT Ads
Juozas Kaziukėnas has flagged the next major feature on the ChatGPT Ads roadmap: product feed campaigns. The feature lets advertisers enter a feed ID (the same feed used to push product data to ChatGPT) plus a set of filters: brand, condition, category: to define the product set the campaign applies to.
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI officially launched the ChatGPT Self-Serve Ads Manager (beta) on 6 May, enabling direct campaign creation in ChatGPT for any business that signs up via ads.openai.com. Thomas Eccel has flagged the launch with the most detailed structural breakdown; Bram Van der Hallen has provided the practitioner walkthrough.
Google Merchant Center
Google has updated product landing page requirements for Google Shopping, walking back the strict "grey out the add-to-cart button" rule for out-of-stock products. Emmanuel Flossie has flagged the change in its practical scope: the requirement is no longer strict; advertisers are not categorically required to use the greyed-out option; and other compliant treatments of the out-of-stock state are now acceptable.
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI has confirmed that the ChatGPT Ads pilot will expand to the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and Mexico in the coming weeks. Benji Shomair (OpenAI) has flagged the geographic expansion alongside a hiring announcement for Client Partner and Customer Success Manager roles in each new market; David Dugan (OpenAI) has confirmed the same expansion with additional team-building context.
Google Merchant Center
Emmanuel Flossie has flagged that Google Customer Reviews can now be installed natively and free of charge inside Shopify, removing the third-party connector requirement that has historically been the friction point for Shopify merchants. Google Customer Reviews provides seller ratings that appear on Shopping ads and free listings: a meaningful trust signal that Shopify merchants often leave unconfigured because the installation path is cumbersome.
OpenAI
OpenAI has updated the ChatGPT ad policy to remove the categorical block on advertising inside medical, legal, and financial advice contexts. Anthony Higman has flagged the change with its practical implication: previously regulated verticals that were structurally excluded from ChatGPT Ads can now bid, provided their creative and landing pages comply with the platform's broader advertising rules.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has launched AI Citations in beta: a free feature that shows when site content is being used in AI answers, what prompts triggered the citation, and where competitors are being cited instead. The functionality builds on Microsoft's foundational partnerships, which underpin most leading AI assistants.
Anthropic
Anthropic has released two notable additions to the Claude Platform. Memory on Claude Managed Agents is in public beta: agents now learn from every session via an intelligence-optimised memory layer balancing performance with flexibility.
BigQuery
Simo Ahava has documented unusual behaviour around >g_health=1 requests appearing alongside Google Tag Manager loads. The request loads a small library snippet from Google's CDN to log the status of a Google Tag load, but it appears only when GA or Ads tags are present in the container.
OpenAI
OpenAI has released GPT-5.5 (codenamed "Spud"), the company's newest flagship model, available immediately to ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users in ChatGPT and Codex, with API access following the next day on 24 April. The model is positioned as a step change in agentic capability: handling messy, multi-part tasks, planning, using tools, checking its work, and continuing through ambiguity without requiring step-by-step prompting.
BigQuery
Glenn Gabe has shared the slide deck and Jean-Christophe Chouinard's coverage from Google Search Central Live Toronto (April 2026). Several takeaways are directly relevant to paid media landing page strategy.
BigQuery
Alicia Williams has announced that the BigQuery Studio notebook gallery is generally available, providing pre-built templates that remove the boilerplate setup required to start a new analysis. Templates cover SQL and no-code visualisation cells, Python and BigQuery DataFrames workflows for cleaning and machine learning, Spark SQL guides for serverless analysis, and multimodal generative AI templates using Gemini.
ChatGPT Ads
Juozas Kaziukėnas has confirmed that OpenAI has launched CPC bidding in the ChatGPT Ads manager. Max bids are accepted between $3 and $5.
Google Workspace
OpenAI has launched Workspace Agents in ChatGPT in research preview, available to ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers plans. The feature is positioned as the next step beyond Custom GPTs: shared, long-running agents that can be built once, used together by a team in ChatGPT or Slack, and improved over time.
Anthropic
Linas Beliūnas has flagged that Google is reportedly committing up to $40 billion to Anthropic: Alphabet's largest single AI investment to date. The structure: $10 billion upfront at a $350 billion valuation; another $30 billion tied to performance milestones; and deeper access to Google's TPU-powered infrastructure for Anthropic.
BigQuery
Neil Hoyne has flagged the launch of Deep Research and its larger sibling, Deep Research Max, by Google DeepMind. Both are AI research assistants that work through web sources, user-uploaded files (PDFs, spreadsheets, audio, video), and specialised databases.
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