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.
Anthropic
App Economy Insights has framed last week's events as a turning point for the AI market in its "Trillion-Dollar Off Switch" analysis. SpaceX's record IPO raised around $75bn at a valuation near $1.8tn, with its market cap surging past $2.5tn in its first two days.
Google Ads
Ales Sturala has flagged that the Google Ads plugin can once again be installed natively in Claude Desktop. Anthropic's April 2026 release had removed the option to add custom plugin marketplaces; it is back, though hidden under a "+" button within Customise, which Niels M. located.
Microsoft Advertising
Google is updating its Shopify integration (the Google & YouTube app) to use server-to-server events, fixing a long-standing gap in how order volumes and values are reported, flagged by Maz Darvish. Until now, the app relied on client-side, browser-based tracking that routinely missed purchases: an estimated 10–40% lost to ad blockers, privacy browsers, iOS restrictions, and shoppers closing the tab before the confirmation page loaded.
Google Ads
Google has begun using IP addresses for ad measurement and personalisation in the EEA and UK. The change applies after 3 August and affects how user consent requirements are handled, treating IP-derived signals as part of the data Google uses to measure and personalise ads in those regions.
Google Ads
Google is changing how Demand Gen campaigns on Discover are billed, flagged by Arpan Banerjee. From 15 July 2026, Demand Gen campaigns on Discover that have view-through conversion optimisation enabled will move from cost-per-click to cost-per-impression billing.
Google Ads
Anthony Higman noted that Google Ads has again redesigned the budget-warning buttons in their interface. This has elicited an amused response from the community: it seems the solution to flat budgets is more about redesigning the buttons rather than addressing the core issue.
Google Ads
Google has rolled out asset experiments in Performance Max, allowing advertisers to test new assets and measure success against multiple metrics, as confirmed on the Google Ads & Commerce announcements hub and via the PPC News Feed. Rather than swapping assets and hoping, advertisers can now run a structured experiment to quantify the lift a new asset delivers before committing to it.
Google Ads
Arpan Banerjee has spotted a new "Top Pages" sitelink surfacing in Google Search ads. The format groups an advertiser's most relevant pages into a single sitelink-style unit, expanding the ways Google can present those sitelinks beneath the main ad.
Google Ads
Google has announced an update to its Gambling and Games policy that, as of 24 June 2026, will allow online gambling advertisements in Vietnam by entities authorised by Vietlott to promote online lotteries. Advertisers must be an authorised agent of Vietlott and complete Google's country-specific certification before running ads.
Google Ads
Google has released version 3.0.0 of its Google Ads API Developer Assistant, announced on the Google Ads Developer Blog. The major release builds on the assistant's shift from code generation toward automated diagnostics and structured troubleshooting, helping developers query and manage campaigns in natural language, generate production-ready code, and identify failure states without manual log-diving.
Google Ads
Google has added the ability to copy Text Guidelines from one campaign and paste them directly into another, flagged by Thomas Eccel. Term exclusions (up to 25) and messaging restrictions (up to 40) now carry across with one click inside the Text Guidelines beta section.
Google Ads
Google has pushed back the automatic migration of Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max from September 2026 to February 2027, as confirmed by Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin in response to advertiser feedback requesting more time. The ability to create new DSA campaigns is being restored from 15 June, reversing an earlier phase-out, and Google is adding account-level reporting for final URL expansion alongside a fuller slate of metrics.
Meta Ads
Meta is widening access to a "Push delivery to this ad" feature. At the ad level, when an ad set contains more than one ad, advertisers can select a specific ad, open "Show more options" beneath the multi-advertiser ads setting, and enable a toggle that pushes delivery to that ad.
Meta Ads
Matias Axel Ramayo has flagged that Meta now supports two or more end pages for instant forms, branching on the user's answers. Depending on how someone responds to a question, the form can route them to end page 1, end page 2, and so on, including to options that disqualify a lead entirely.
Google Ads
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has publicly criticised Google for mixing ads into the middle of image search results, in a post that drew wide attention and was covered by Barry Schwartz. Graham said the practice degrades search quality: returning products from unrelated manufacturers for a watch query: and that he has switched to Bing for some searches.
Google Ads
Google is testing a sponsored card-style carousel in the Images tab of Search. The format presents sponsored products as a swipeable card carousel within image results, extending where ads appear beyond the standard text and Shopping placements and into image-led browsing.
Google Business Profile
Marie Haynes has flagged that you can now connect a Google Business Profile to Gemini to create a Business Notebook. It has access to customer reviews, questions, and performance data, can surface trends and new market opportunities, and can action profile updates such as changing business hours on request.
Anthropic
Anthropic has disclosed a US government export-control directive, citing national-security authorities, that suspends access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign-national Anthropic employees. To comply, Anthropic said it had to abruptly disable both models for all customers as of the evening of 12 June; access to all other Anthropic models remains unaffected.
Display & Video 360
Alphabet has raised roughly $85bn in the largest equity offering in history, priced on 2 June, flagged by Bertrand Seguin. The raise includes a $10bn private placement by Berkshire Hathaway and funds Alphabet's planned 2026 capital expenditure of up to around $190bn, the vast majority going to data centres and AI compute.
BigQuery
Luka Cempre spotted a BigQuery UI update that makes recently run queries easily accessible alongside their results, apparently independent for each tab. A small quality-of-life change that saves jumping into query history to manage jobs across many open tabs.
Industry
Google has introduced the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), a vendor-neutral open specification for giving AI agents the curated context they need, flagged by Charly Wargnier. Published by Google Cloud on 12 June and available on GitHub, OKF v0.1 represents knowledge as a directory of plain Markdown files with YAML front matter, with no runtime, SDK, or build step: "just markdown, just files."
Industry
Brad Geddes has shared an underused Google Ads custom column for brand campaigns: impressions divided by impression share, multiplied by 100. Trended over several weeks or months, it shows how many impressions each point of impression share was worth, revealing when brand search volume was rising or falling.
Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft has shipped a preview extension that lets Bing users turn Copilot-style AI answers on or off with a single click, announced by Microsoft President and Head of Search Jordi Ribas. Users can also append "-ai" to any Bing query to suppress AI-generated responses for that search.
Anthropic
Anthropic has released Claude Fable 5, its latest frontier model, now generally available on Google Cloud's Agent Platform, as noted by Google Cloud and discussed by Charly Wargnier in a comparison with Claude Opus 4.8. Fable 5 is part of a higher-capability tier and is positioned for enterprise teams building at scale, and is available across the same surfaces as other Claude models.
Industry
A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI Overviews, treating them as Google's own content rather than a list of search results. The Regional Court of Munich issued a temporary injunction (case 26 O 869/26) barring Google from spreading false claims about two Munich publishers, after its AI wrongly linked them to scams and made claims that appeared in none of the cited sources.
Google Merchant Center
Bia Camargo has flagged a Google Merchant Centre API issue delaying product submissions and feed updates across integrations. Feeds that suddenly stop updating may be affected by a platform-side issue rather than an advertiser's own setup, leaving teams refreshing diagnostics while submissions lag.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has announced that, from 27 July 2026, product titles in all categories except media must be 75 characters or fewer, including spaces, as detailed by Leszek S. A new searchable field, Item Highlights, adds up to 125 characters for comma-separated phrases such as materials and use cases, shown beneath the title in search results and on the detail page.
Display & Video 360
Walmart Connect audiences are launching in Google Display & Video 360, announced by Google Marketing Platform. The collaboration lets brands combine YouTube's reach with Walmart Connect's omnichannel audiences, built on real shopping behaviour, to target high-intent shoppers streaming video on YouTube.
Amazon Ads
Alexander Swade has flagged a new Amazon Ads bulk-sheet feature for off-Amazon spend control, which he traces to a direct exchange with Amazon staff after he posted feedback on the bulk-sheet section. An Amazon team member responded, took a follow-up feature request, and shipped it within a few weeks.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has added a disclosure step for images uploaded to A+ Content and Brand Stories, requiring sellers to indicate whether an image is AI-generated and whether it features photorealistic AI-generated people, flagged by Ivan Marynych. The information is collected as metadata during upload, with no shopper-facing AI label at this stage, and the requirement applies only to A+ Content and Brand Stories, not the standard product image stack.
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