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.
Google Ads
Google has made Display inventory accessible through Demand Gen campaigns, signalling the end of the standalone Display campaign. Thomas Eccel flagged the change, noting that the move had been widely expected and that it follows the earlier migrations of Video Action campaigns and uploaded display banners into Demand Gen.
Google Ads
The new prospects bidding mode announced at GML is now surfacing in real accounts, and practitioners are testing how strict it actually is. Maggie Humphrey and Arpan Banerjee both dug into the setting this week.
Google Ads
Thomas Eccel has detailed how the new Search campaigns for Travel work in practice, following the GML announcement. Format selection lives at the ad-group level rather than the campaign level: a Formats panel inside ad-group settings lets advertisers independently enable Text ads (now able to pull from a travel feed), Travel Promotion Ads, and Booking Link Ads.
Google Ads
Google Ads will enforce its 37-month data retention policy starting 1 June 2026, with Arpan Banerjee reiterating the deadline. Hourly, daily, and weekly data will be available for 37 months; monthly, quarterly, and annual data are retained for 11 years.
Google Ads
Ginny Marvin, Google Ads Product Liaison, has published a backstage edition of Ads Decoded from Google Marketing Live 2026, sitting down with Google's Head of Ads and Commerce Vidhya Srinivasan and product leaders Chris Monkman, Josh Moser, and Christine Turner to unpack the day's biggest announcements. The piece is organised around four themes.
Google Ads
Google has confirmed the Google Ads API will move reach metrics to a "Total Co-view" definition starting 2 June 2026. The change aligns Google Ads reporting with offline media and third-party measurement standards across the API, UI, and Editor.
Google Ads
Google Ads has given AI Max campaigns a dedicated Branded Searches control, surfaced by Thomas Eccel. Advertisers can now choose exactly how AI Max handles brand queries with three settings: show ads on all relevant searches (the default), control branded searches through brand inclusions and exclusions, or show ads only on unbranded searches.
Google Ads
VIVEK GUPTA has flagged a new Sync Columns feature inside Google Ads: letting users keep table columns, and segments synchronised across all accounts viewed from a Manager Account (MCC). Set up one account's columns and segments as you want, then apply the same configuration to other accounts in a single action.
Google Ads
VIVEK GUPTA has surfaced a limited-time 2x Google Ads Credit offer rolling out to eligible new advertisers. Reported offer tiers: spend $500 → get $1,000 credit, spend $680 → get $1,360 credit, spend $1,400 → get $2,800 credit.
Meta Ads
Meta has added the ability to group Ads Manager tables by funnel stage and other dimensions, surfaced by Bram Van der Hallen. The option appears in the Breakdown menu via a "Group table by" toggle, available at the campaign and ad-set levels.
Meta Ads
Google has expanded its Preferred Sources feature into AI Overviews and AI Mode, as announced by Google Search product manager Duncan Osborn and flagged by Glenn Gabe, Leigh McKenzie, Louisa Frahm, and Barry Schwartz across the community. Links from a user's selected sources now appear with a clear label inside AI responses, mirroring how Top Stories already highlights them.
Meta Ads
Felipe Vergara Cediel has flagged that, from 30 May, the Meta Pixel automatically collects nine additional categories of web data: basic page information, multimedia content, business contact and location details, event and journey data, content classification, authorship, product and entity identification, product and entity attributes, and reviews, ratings, and prices. Matias Axel Ramayo added that Meta is also surfacing signals on how much is being wasted due to low-quality events sent through the API and Pixel.
Meta Ads
David Vargas has flagged that Instagram is testing a version that loads Reels first when the app opens, ahead of the Feed. If the change sticks, it would materially shift placement distribution, particularly for Gen Z and Millennial audiences, and change how impressions are allocated across Meta placements.
OpenAI
OpenAI has shipped a set of Codex updates this week, flagged by Corey Ching. Workspace plugin sharing now lets teams distribute custom plugins, reuse internal tools and workflows, and manage what is available across the organisation: available for Business users, with early access for Enterprise teams on request.
Meta Ads
Chris Long has flagged that Google has officially published an LLMs.txt page on the Chrome Developers site, describing how the file helps AI agents understand a site's primary content. The documentation notes that, without the file, agents may spend more time crawling a site to understand its structure and primary content, and also describes LLMs.txt as an emerging protocol.
Meta Ads
Google has added an experimental Agentic Browsing category to Chrome's Lighthouse audit tool. Instead of auditing only for human users, the new category tests whether AI agents can read a site, navigate key pages, understand actions and forms, and reliably interact with elements.
Meta Ads
Meta is removing the option to run Page Likes campaigns, flagged by Bram Van der Hallen. Previously, advertisers could run ads with an integrated one-click Follow button, which produced high-volume, low-cost follows.
Industry
Creative insights and experimentation capabilities land inside Asset Studio with three structural additions: One-Click "Save and Set Experiment" turns any PMax ad or asset group edit into a structured A/B test automatically; Creative Capabilities in Ask Advisor provide real-time asset-performance diagnostics and thematic-coverage analysis; and Asset Optimisation for Demand Gen delivers proactive AI-driven nudges, asset suggestions, and one-click AI fixes for issues like logo placement, video trimming, and aspect ratio coverage.
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has updated its AI Bot Activity feature with an enhanced Bot Analytics dashboard, giving teams more detail on how AI crawlers and automated agents interact with their content. The dashboard now measures AI bot requests (total volume from crawlers and automated systems), AI bot traffic share, the proportion of pages crawled, a request status breakdown showing which requests succeed, redirect, or fail, and CDN violations that detect bots accessing paths disallowed by robots.txt.
Google Tag
Two foundational measurement tools get GA-level upgrades. Enhanced Conversions is being unified: combining the previously separate web and lead conversion tools into a single streamlined Enhanced Conversions module with end-to-end diagnostics, flexible setup via website tags or API imports, and a unified workflow.
Google Analytics
Tamás Geiger has flagged two related GA4 updates landing this week. A new Source grouping dimension is rolling out across Google Analytics properties: a slow rollout that may take weeks to appear in individual accounts.
Google Merchant Center
The Gemini-powered Business Agent previewed at GML is now live for eligible merchants, flagged by Khushboo Aulakh. The agent sits on a brand's profile in search results and answers product questions in the brand's voice before a customer clicks through: handling queries such as sizing or quantity calculations that would otherwise reach the customer service team.
Industry
Google announced new information agents at I/O: letting users delegate ongoing research tasks like price monitoring directly to Search. Sander Roose's read: pricing transparency shifts from reactive to proactive, with every shopper getting a personal scraper running 24/7.
Industry
App Connect (formerly Web to App Connect) becomes the unified suite of tools that transforms apps into high-performance growth engines connected to Google Ads. The 2026 expansion includes agentic implementation workflows: intelligent assistants that find opportunities to improve setup and guide advertisers through automated processes for tracking, bidding, and deep linking.
Amazon Ads
Destaney Wishon has spotted a new "Shop by feature" sponsored ad placement appearing in Amazon search results. The format surfaces sponsored products organised by feature rather than strictly by the search term entered, expanding where sponsored products can appear beyond the direct intent of a query.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has begun selling its conversational shopping assistant technology to retailers it competes with, as Roger Dunn has flagged. The announcement is the AWS Agentic Shopping Assistant (ASA), built by the AWS Generative AI Innovation Centre, which packages the architecture, starter code, and lessons learned from Amazon's own Alexa for Shopping: recently rebranded from Rufus: for external retailers.
Amazon Ads
Christian Otto Kelm has flagged that Amazon's Brand Tailored Promotions are now available from a minimum audience size of 500. The promotions let sellers select audiences based on the shopping behaviour customers have shown with their brand; audiences that fail to meet the 500-member minimum are not eligible.
Amazon Ads
Amazon has introduced Disburse on Demand, allowing sellers to request disbursement up to once every 24 hours rather than waiting for the standard pay cycle, as flagged by Nik Hall. Three conditions must be met: a positive available balance at the time of request, an active linked bank account in Seller Central, and at least 24 hours since the last request.
Amazon Ads
Muhammad Muzamil has flagged that Amazon has started showing review highlights: actual phrases pulled from customer reviews: directly in search results, before shoppers click into a listing. Examples include phrases such as "Positively reviewed for quality" and "Loved for design."
Meta Ads
Meta Platforms began notifying staff worldwide on Wednesday, 20 May 2026, about layoffs as part of a restructuring aimed at reducing costs while investing heavily in artificial intelligence. The cuts started in Asia at 4 a.m.
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