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
Business Agent for Leads is a new Search ad format that replaces the static lead form with a conversational AI agent built on Gemini. Instead of filling out a form, a prospect researching, for example, an MBA programme can click "Chat" directly within the ad to ask questions, with answers grounded in the advertiser's website content.
Industry
AI Max for Shopping campaigns is rolling out to retailers, bringing the AI Max toggle to standard Shopping campaigns as a one-click upgrade.
YouTube
Checkout Links: the format that routes Demand Gen viewers directly to a merchant's checkout page: is generally available in the US, CA, GB, DE, JP, IN, with rollout coming to AU, KR, ID, MX, AR, FR, IL, CH, PL. Checkout Links have also expanded to YouTube Shorts and in-feed ads in Demand Gen.
Google Ads
Affiliate partnerships boost is a new advertising solution that lets merchants discover and boost organic YouTube Shopping affiliate videos within Demand Gen campaigns. The structural value: merchants leverage existing creator trust at scale, with the licensing and discovery workflow streamlined inside Google Ads.
Google Ads
AI-assisted Demand Gen campaign creation is a new workflow that uses account-level intelligence to pre-fill Demand Gen campaigns with optimal budget, bidding, and audience settings based on existing Performance Max campaigns. The system uses historical performance to recommend campaign best practices, provides a clear rationale for each setting, and reduces manual entry errors.
Gemini
AI-powered Shopping ads use Gemini to identify the most relevant products for a shopper's query and instantly write a custom explainer highlighting why each product is the right answer. The mechanic transforms Shopping ads from product-only listings into product + expert summary results, replacing standard product results with a Gemini-powered shopping experience for considered purchases such as espresso machines, fridges, or TVs.
Google Ads
Anthony Higman has flagged that the ability to apply for Google Ads Ad Certifications is now available directly inside Google Ads accounts: what was formerly the standalone Google Ads Advertiser Verification Page. The integration removes a friction point in the certification application workflow, with the certification surface now appearing within the account UI rather than on an external page.
YouTube
Arpan Banerjee discovered that brand names are now appearing in YouTube product Ads: including the YouTube Shorts Shopping ad surface: a finding flagged by Adriaan Dekker on LinkedIn. Where YouTube product Ads previously displayed product images, price, and store name, the brand name now appears as an additional surface element.
Google Ads
Product videos at scale eliminate the previous 5-video upload limit, enabling Demand Gen campaigns to leverage the entire Google Merchant Centre video library. The system dynamically serves product-specific videos based on real-time user intent and interest, reducing creative overhead and improving relevance through AI-driven video-to-user matching.
TikTok Ads
TikTok announced on 11 May 2026 that it is rolling out TikTok Ad-Free: a new ad-free subscription tier: to UK users aged 18+ over the coming months. The subscription costs £3.99 per month and provides an ad-free experience.
Reddit Ads
Matt Navarra has flagged that Meta has launched Forum: a new standalone iOS app turning Facebook Groups into an AI-powered answer engine to compete with Reddit. Forum heavily pushes questions, recommendations, and "real answers from real people."
YouTube
Multimodal Video Creation lands inside Asset Studio, letting advertisers go from creative brief to storyboard to final video production in a single workflow: powered by Gemini, Veo, and Nano Banana. The capability streamlines Google's AI models into a single workspace for ideating, storyboarding, and generating video campaigns.
Google Meridian
Meridian Studio is a new Google Cloud-built enterprise platform that empowers measurement teams to build, manage, and customise Meridian models at scale through a UI-based workflow. The platform offers faster compute, enterprise-level model deployment, and the ability to run hundreds of models simultaneously: maintaining the open-source Meridian methodology while adding data security, automation, and ease-of-use features.
Industry
Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) is rolling out by the end of May 2026: an attribution model that assigns conversion credit across the full customer journey for specific Microsoft Ads bid strategies. Brings Microsoft attribution capability closer to Google's DDA standard.
Industry
Qualified Future Conversions (QFC) is one of GML 2026's most discussed measurement launches. Thomas Eccel ranked it #1 in his top five GML picks; Georgi Zayakov flagged it as the most intriguing new measurement feature.
Industry
Microsoft confirmed at Activate that a Conversions API server-to-server integration is coming for real-time data sharing across web, app, and offline first-party data sources. Alongside it: simplified conversion tracking and management workflows.
Google Tag
Google Tag Gateway: the first-party server-side tagging architecture: is expanding with new in-UI integrations to Google Cloud (beta), Fastly, Akamai, Webflow, Duda, and Cloudflare. The integrations enable advertisers to upgrade tags to serve from their site's own server without retagging, improving measurement signal performance and resilience while adding confidential computing by default.
Industry
Custom Columns now supports all conversion metrics: including goal segmentation and metrics like CPA and ROAS. Build formulas using CPA, Conv., Conv. rate, Revenue, Return on ad spend, and the All-conv. variants.
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.
Amazon Ads
Florian Nottorf has flagged that the Amazon Benchmark Report is now live globally, including Germany, after launching as a US-only beta in February. The report provides detailed competitor CPC and CTR benchmarks by campaign type and category: with up to 90 days of data available via the Ads Console at daily granularity.
ChatGPT Ads
Tariq Mohammed has flagged that ChatGPT Ads are coming to the UK in the next few weeks. OpenAI confirmed on 7 May that UK users on the Free and Go tiers will start seeing ads in the coming weeks: in the shopping, retail, and travel categories first.
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