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.
Amazon Ads
Amazon is retiring the classic Get Help and Resources page, routing case creation and live agent access through Seller Assistant, the AI layer sellers already use. Live agents remain reachable, but the AI becomes the front door.
Meta Ads
A new Customer Acquisition option lets Meta advertisers choose between conversions from all audiences or acquiring new customers only, prioritising people who have never bought from you: mirroring Google's equivalent setting.
Amazon Ads
With Sponsored Products now running outside Amazon through Influencer Program creators, the long-ignored deny list is how advertisers control which creators and placements carry their products. This continues the off-Amazon expansion covered in Week 32.
OpenAI
ChatGPT now offers a native restaurant experience, returning bookable recommendations in conversation: an early glimpse of super-app behaviour.
OpenAI
A roundup of ChatGPT's ad rollout counts six formats now serving, from standard placements to the newer commerce units, though not everything announced is visible yet.
Amazon Ads
Apple proposed new commission rates for purchases made through external links: 5% for small businesses, 15% for standard transactions, and 10% for subscriptions and partner programmes: down sharply from the 27% rate a court blocked in 2025.
Meta Ads
Meta Ads now offers free Adobe Express access with more than 100 Reels templates, allowing advertisers to create and test Reels creative without additional design resources.
Google Merchant Center
Simone Parodi published the full Merchant Centre audit he runs for ecommerce clients, with real case studies, data breakdowns, and a title-audit structure.
Industry
Cloudflare's new AEO tools audit how accessible your site is to AI agents and track visibility in AI answers.
Industry
Google released an official course on vibe coding: describe the app you want and build it with AI.
Industry
Days after AI Overviews launched in France, French news publishers filed suit, arguing that the value AI answers extract from their journalism must be shared and that competition be respected. This follows the France launch covered in Week 30.
Meta Ads
Meta continued its rollout pace with two further changes. For you, this means both setup and offers keep gaining options, so revisit flows you built around Meta's old limits.
Google Analytics
Per the 11 August release notes, click-through and engaged-view conversion windows in GA4 now accept any custom integer day count instead of preset buckets.
YouTube
Google updated its YouTube and Discover Feed ad requirements in August, revising what creative qualifies for feed placements.
Meta Ads
Meta introduced a new campaign setup experience with Personalised Sales Objectives, now in beta. The system draws on your last 30 days of account data to suggest ready-made campaign strategies, with built-in creative testing and real-time optimisation.
Google Ads
As planned, Google is migrating Travel campaigns to Search campaigns for Travel in Q3 2026, with no specific date announced.
Google Analytics
Brais Calvo Vázquez updated his GA4 SPY cheat sheet with more than 220 new parameters, including additions related to the Measurement Protocol.
Google Merchant Center
From 24 August, Merchant Centre performance reports separate YouTube affiliate results from organic traffic, revise the YouTube organic traffic definitions, expand product-level reporting for Google Ads, and add segmentation, aligning definitions across Merchant Centre, Google Ads, and YouTube. Historical data back to 1 July is also restated under the revised definitions.
Industry
SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 reportedly matches Claude Fable 5 Max and GPT-5.6 Sol Max on frontier benchmarks while costing roughly 80% less, built on the same 1.5T foundation as Grok 4.5 with a longer post-training run.
Looker Studio
The 13 August release adds fullscreen viewing for individual charts, rotation controls for text, images, and shapes on non-responsive canvases, centred labels on stacked bars, and settings search in the properties panel.
ChatGPT Ads
OpenAI's Europe privacy policy, updated in June, sets out how personal data will be handled for advertising to users in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland: the clearest sign yet that ChatGPT Ads' EU launch is close.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity's Bot Analytics dashboard adds a Scrape-to-Referral Ratio, showing which AI crawlers extract your content and actually return traffic, and which only take.
Campaign Manager 360
A new reportData.The query endpoint returns Campaign Manager 360 performance data as structured JSON directly in the response, with a 60-second execution limit, for real-time dashboards and ad-hoc checks, while the Reports service continues to handle large or scheduled exports.
Google Ads
Google Ads is extending its Financial Services verification requirements to 13 additional countries. This continues the programme covered in Weeks 25 and 30.
Google Merchant Center
Merchant Centre analytics showed a dip in organic figures across multiple accounts from around 11 August, suggesting a reporting issue rather than a real change in performance.
Anthropic
Compliance API coverage now spans Cowork on desktop, web, and mobile plus Claude Code in the CLI and desktop, in beta for Enterprise customers, letting security teams pull session content and metadata from both surfaces.
YouTube
YouTube is raising the watch-hours threshold for earning from ads and subscriptions to double the current requirement, enforced from February 2027, with existing monetised creators unaffected.
Amazon Ads
Seller Assistant can now diagnose why an ASIN is not winning the Featured Offer, reviewing buyability and offer conditions instead of leaving sellers to check manually.
Meta Ads
Meta is rolling out notifications for new leads from Meta ads, configured at ad level under Automated lead delivery. Mobile alerts can arrive as Facebook app push, Messenger messages, Ads Manager app push, or WhatsApp, either instantly or after a set number of leads, while email notifications go to chosen recipients on a day-and-time schedule, with the leads attached as a CSV or XLS file.
Google Ads
Eligible advertisers creating their first Demand Gen campaign can claim up to $1,500 in credit via a promo code, subject to setup requirements.
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