August 2026 — PPC & Marketing news.
What changed, as it happens.
Tracked daily from primary sources. The items below are what we're watching for clients right now.
Impression limits are coming to all of Google Ads, and nothing gets disapproved
Google is expanding its Limited Ad Serving policy, previously narrower in scope, to cover all Google Ads. The update was announced on 5 August 2026, and Google says implementation "will begin gradually and will be completed by 2028." The policy limits impressions for advertisers Google does not consider qualified, on searches judged more likely than others to result in negative ads experiences, and Google states that "individual ads will not be disapproved." Seven factors decide qualification: account attributes, user activity and reports, account maturity, ad format usage, history of policy compliance, advertiser industry, and advertiser verification status. Limited accounts receive an in-account notification and can appeal through Google's Limited Ad Serving Appeals Form. Enforcement began in September 2024 and has been applied gradually across YouTube ads; the guidance now names Search, YouTube, Gmail, Discover and the Play Store.Source: Search Engine Land →
Our take: Nothing gets disapproved, so nothing looks broken. An account under limits reads like an account with a demand problem: impressions fall, volume thins, and the only signal is one more notification in an interface full of them. Most of the seven qualification factors are not settings anybody chooses. Verification status and policy history are the two an advertiser works on directly; industry, account maturity, and what users have reported about you sit outside the account.
Read our full take →Google Ads will report new customers without touching your bids
Google Ads added a "Report on new customers acquired" option inside Customer Acquisition settings, spotted by Thomas Eccel and written up by Search Engine Land on 7 August 2026. Selecting it unlocks the New customers and New customer value columns without applying any bidding adjustment. It replaces a workaround in which advertisers selected "Bid higher for new customers" and assigned a token new-customer value of 0.01, small enough to leave the auction effectively untouched. Google's documentation states that customer acquisition reporting works only with Purchase conversions, and that it depends on a new-customer parameter supplied through the Google tag, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, Firebase, Google Analytics, or offline conversion imports.Source: Search Engine Land →
Our take: The setting is the easy half. New-customer reporting reads Purchase conversions only, and only when your tag is already sending the new-customer flag through the Google tag, Tag Manager, Shopify, Analytics or an offline import. Switch the option on with nothing feeding it and every buyer files as new, which is a worse number than no number. The workaround it retires, a bid bonus of 0.01, at least made it obvious the reporting was a side effect of a bidding setting.
Read our full take →Google will move broad match and auto-created assets into AI Max on September 1
From September 1, 2026, Google Ads begins automatically upgrading eligible Search campaigns that use Automatically Created Assets or campaign-level broad match into AI Max. Campaigns arriving via Automatically Created Assets get search term matching and text customization enabled by default; campaigns arriving via campaign-level broad match get search term matching. Advertisers are being notified by email, and Google frames the change as carrying forward functionality advertisers already rely on.Source: Search Engine Land →
Our take: The upgrade is being described as carrying your settings forward, and it does more than that. Automatically created assets adds headlines Google wrote; text customization lets it rewrite the ones you wrote, which is a different permission and it arrives switched on. Campaigns coming in on campaign-level broad match get off lighter, picking up search term matching alone. Nobody has published whether you can decline, so the step available before September is a list of which campaigns currently run either setting.
Read our full take →ChatGPT Ads switches form-field matching on by default August 17
OpenAI emailed ChatGPT Ads advertisers with nine product changes. Automatic advanced matching becomes the default for existing web pixels on August 17, 2026: the pixel captures identifiers people enter into site forms, hashes them client-side, and transmits them alongside the conversion event, and advertisers who do not want it must disable it under Tools, then Conversions, then Data Source, then Edit pixel. The release also adds a conversion-optimized CPC beta for product feed campaigns with fixed or manual bidding under a positive conversion bid cap, campaign cloning and bulk creation for oCPC, dynamic URL macros for campaign, ad group, ad and account IDs, Triple Whale and Hightouch measurement integrations, fuller pixel diagnostics, and a multi-product carousel format in testing.Source: PPC Land →
Our take: Default-on collection of what people type into your forms is a consent question before it is a measurement one. Hashing in the browser limits what leaves the page; it does not settle whether your privacy policy and cookie banner already describe the practice. Only advertisers with a pixel already installed are in scope, which is still a short list. For everyone else the weight of this release sits in the oCPC beta, which lets product-feed campaigns be ranked on predicted conversions instead of clicks alone.
Read our full take →Performance Max on Microsoft can now be told to leave Audience Ads alone
Microsoft Advertising added a setting that lets advertisers exclude Audience Ads placements from within a Performance Max campaign. Search Engine Roundtable reported the change on 6 August 2026.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: Placement control inside Performance Max has been the standing complaint on both platforms, so the reflex will be to switch Audience Ads off and call it a cleanup. That reflex assumes you already know what those placements were contributing, and a blended Performance Max report is the one place that will not tell you. Inventory is easy to turn off and hard to read afterwards, because the comparison you want is against a version of the campaign you just stopped running.
Read our full take →Google's August 17 bidding FAQ: spend will not rise, and nothing gets adjusted for you
Twelve days before the change takes effect, Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin answered community questions in a video Q&A and Google published a dedicated FAQ on the target-based bid strategy update. The FAQ states that the change "will not directly result in increased spend for you" and that "your daily and monthly budget limits will always be respected." It scopes the change to Target CPA, Target ROAS, and Target CPC in Demand Gen only, on Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns carrying a "Limited by budget" status. Budget-unconstrained campaigns, Smart Bidding Exploration, manual CPC and Target Impression Share are not affected. Campaigns currently overperforming against their targets may see results change unless targets are adjusted before 17 August. Google's own worked example puts it plainly: a campaign with a Target CPA of $10 and recent actual performance of $5 will deliver closer to a $10 CPA from that date if nothing is changed. The recommended sequence is to review limited-by-budget campaigns on target-based strategies, update targets to match recent performance where those results are what you want to keep, provide a budget buffer alongside a target reflecting the efficiency you want, and allow one to two conversion cycles before judging the outcome. The FAQ also states that Google "won't automatically adjust your daily budgets or your campaign bid targets."Source: Google Ads Help →
Our take: The spend answer is the one everybody wanted and the least useful sentence in the document. Budgets were always going to hold. The exposure was never the total, it was the efficiency inside it, and a campaign quietly returning a $5 CPA against a $10 target loses that gap on the 17th. Google saying it will not adjust your targets for you is the instruction in this FAQ, delivered as a disclaimer.
Read our full take →Microsoft groups your AI citations by topic, and puts a conversion floor under PMax experiments
Microsoft Advertising shipped three changes in its first monthly product newsletter, published 4 August 2026. Topic Insights, in the Clarity AI Visibility reporting, groups AI citations by subject so advertisers can see which topics AI systems associate with their brand, how often those citations occur, and where coverage is missing. The reporting defines grounding queries as the retrieval searches AI systems run before producing an answer, citation share as how frequently a domain appears as a cited source, and share of authority as how often one domain is cited against competing sources. Performance Max gained two experiment types: uplift experiments, which measure the effect of adding Performance Max alongside existing campaigns, and upgrade experiments, which compare an existing Search or Shopping campaign against Performance Max after migration. Microsoft's guidance is to run them only on campaigns with at least 30 conversions in the previous 30 days, hold bidding targets, product groups and campaign settings constant between test and control, and wait four to twelve weeks before evaluating results. Microsoft cites an average 8% increase in incremental conversions from Performance Max campaigns. The Ad Preview Hub, previously limited to Audience ads, now covers Performance Max and Bing search-results previews, generating shareable links for review before launch.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: The 8% is Microsoft's figure for Microsoft's product, and the two new experiment types are the instrument for checking it, so the claim and the measuring device arrive in the same newsletter with only one of them belonging to you. The thirty-conversion floor is the honest part of the guidance. Plenty of the accounts most tempted by an uplift test sit under it, and a four-to-twelve-week read on a campaign that thin produces a story rather than a result.
Read our full take →Google Ads' Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool has been stuck behind a captcha for about a week
Google's Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool has been returning a reCAPTCHA "unusual traffic" screen instead of results for roughly a week, which makes it unusable. Search Engine Roundtable reports that Google has given no timeline for a fix.Source: Search Engine Roundtable →
Our take: The tool exists so you can check whether an ad is serving without searching for it yourself and inflating impressions on the keyword you are worried about. With it down, that is exactly the substitute people reach for. The campaign already answers the question without costing you an impression, since a keyword that is serving has impressions against it and a keyword that is not tells you why in its status column.
Read our full take →Four exemptions to the EU's AI labeling rule, written in undefined words
The European Commission set out four exemptions to the Article 50 AI-transparency obligations that became applicable on 2 August. The first covers deepfakes in image, audio, or video that form part of an evidently artistic, creative, satirical, or fictional work; disclosure is still required, but in a manner that does not hamper the display or enjoyment of the work, and the exemption falls away where use is authorized by law to detect, prevent, or investigate criminal offenses. The second covers AI-generated or manipulated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest, provided the content has undergone human review or editorial control and a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility for the publication. The third covers an AI system performing an assistive function for standard editing, on the condition that it does not substantially alter the input data or its semantics. The fourth removes the disclosure duty for systems that interact directly with people where the interaction is obvious to a natural person who is reasonably well-informed, observant and circumspect. Search Engine Journal notes the Commission has not defined what counts as substantial alteration, what makes an interaction obvious, what an appropriate manner of disclosure looks like, what qualifies as public interest, or what level of human review satisfies the editorial-control condition.Source: Search Engine Journal →
Our take: For a store the tempting exemption is the third one, since most AI use in a catalog is editing help rather than wholesale generation. It will not hold anyone's weight yet. Substantially alter is undefined, and the distance between tightening a description you wrote and handing a model a product name and taking what comes back is exactly the distance the Commission left blank. Exemption two is not the escape hatch it looks like either, because publishing to inform the public on matters of public interest describes journalism, and product copy does not become that because a human reviewed it.
Read our full take →The EU's AI labeling rules bind today, and the ad platforms have not shipped the buttons
Article 50 of the EU AI Act became legally applicable on 2 August 2026, and it splits into two sets of duties. Providers, the companies that build generative systems, must apply machine-readable marking through digitally signed metadata plus an imperceptible watermark for audio, images, and video, watermark free-form text longer than 200 tokens, and offer a free detection tool to deployers, end users, authorities, researchers, and media. Deployers, a category the guidance describes as covering agencies, brands, and publishers, must visibly label deepfakes and AI-generated published text using the EU's icons or equivalent wording reading "AI GENERATED" or "AI MODIFIED". Those labels have to sit at first exposure and stay visible before any overlay covers them, appearing at the start of a video and again after ad breaks, or above or near a headline or in a colophon for text. Penalties reach EUR 15 million or 3% of total worldwide annual turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is higher. Two further deadlines follow: generative systems already on the market must reach marking conformity by 2 December 2026, and a detection interoperability solution is due by 2 February 2027. Meta signed the EU's Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content on 28 July, five days before the obligations bound, having declined the separate General-Purpose AI Code in July 2025 over what it called legal uncertainties. Google signed on 24 July while warning that added regulatory complexity in an unsettled technical field could work against European competitiveness.Source: PPC Land →
Our take: The half that binds an advertiser is the deployer half: visible labels on deepfakes and on AI-generated text you publish, in the EU's icons or equivalent wording. The gap is tooling. Meta's announcement describes principles and forums, and no labeling setting has appeared in Ads Manager to point at, which leaves the obligation sitting with whoever publishes the ad rather than the platform that generated it.
Read our full take →
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