Access to other people's data got a price list this week, and in several places it got a deadline too.

The pattern showed up first in a federal court in Alexandria, where the Department of Justice and Google handed Judge Leonie Brinkema a single document containing two different versions of the same remedy, and left her to choose between them line by line. It showed up again at Cloudflare, which published a rate card for reading the web on behalf of an AI agent, with a 28-fold spread between the cheapest provider and the most expensive. It showed up at Reddit, which set March 2027 as the month its free public Data API stops existing. It showed up at T-Mobile, which decided that the only way to sell mobile network data for outdoor advertising was to give one buying platform an exclusive on it. And it showed up at Apple, which told Mac developers that the permission allowing an application to read nearly every file on a computer will soon require something more deliberate than flipping a switch.

Underneath all of it sat a quieter set of findings about what the money already spent actually bought. A study of 1,934 Kroger advertisements concluded that roughly half the retailer's historical spend on two platforms went to the weaker half of its creative. A survey of 121 senior US marketers found 9% willing to say they practise unified measurement extremely well. And a survey of about 300 marketing and SEO professionals found that 7% of those using AI now publish content that is more than three-quarters machine-written and unedited, which is up from 4% a year ago.

Two versions of the same order, bracketed side by side

The next stage of the United States ad tech case arrived not as a ruling but as a 41-page exhibit in which both sides wrote their preferred language into the same paragraphs, in brackets, for the judge to referee. AdExchanger reported the filing on October 5, describing a document lodged late on the preceding Friday evening. What has changed since this newsletter last covered the Virginia case is the shift from argument to drafting: Brinkema's proposed remedies were unsealed on September 16, and the parties were then told to turn them into an enforceable order. They have not managed it.

What they agree on is substantial. AdX must connect to Prebid, the open-source header bidding project, and must accept bid requests from non-Google publisher ad servers on equal terms. Google Ads will be barred from bidding directly into DFP and will have to route through AdX or Prebid like anyone else. DFP and AdX must be sold as separate, untethered contracts. First look and last look cannot be reimplemented inside either product for programmatic open web display auctions. Unified pricing rules are banned, which removes Google's ability to stop publishers setting different floors for different buyers. Publishers get the right to export DFP configuration data and historical bid data within three months of the order taking effect. Both sides accept a six-year monitoring period with full system and source code access.

The disagreements are about time, triggers and teeth. On opening AdX to Prebid, the DOJ wants six months; Google wants twelve. On integrating AdX with rival ad servers, the same split. On geography the gap is wider: the DOJ wants the order to apply globally from day one, while Google asks for an additional 24 months to roll the changes out internationally. That is a request to leave most of the world's inventory under the existing arrangements for two years after the American market has changed, and it sits oddly beside Google's own argument during the remedies phase that the technical work is the binding constraint. PubMatic's chief executive put the engineering estimate at up to 15 months when the question was last litigated in public.

The data-access condition is narrower still. The DOJ wants publishers to be able to pull their DFP history while they are considering or evaluating an alternative ad server. Google wants the data to become available only once a publisher has committed to switching. The practical difference is whether a publisher can price the move before making it, or must make the move to price it.

Then there is the monitor. Both sides accept one; neither wants the other to pick it. The DOJ proposes that the government supplies a candidate list from which Google must choose, and Google proposes the reverse. On cooperation, the DOJ's language requires Google to "cooperate fully" and to provide "full and complete access" to documents, code and personnel, current and former, within 14 days. Google's substitute language commits it to take "no action to interfere" and to provide "reasonable assistance". On raising disputes, the DOJ allows 15 days and Google asks for 30. And on what happens when the order is broken, the DOJ wants an explicit definition of malfeasance serious enough to trigger contempt proceedings. Google's version of that subsection reads, in the filing, "[Google omits this subsection]".

A 60-day implementation clock starts once Brinkema signs. The case has been moving through the courts since January 2023, the liability ruling landed on April 17 2025, and Google is widely expected to appeal whatever is finally entered. A year ago, in the final remedies proposals filed on November 3 2025, the DOJ was still asking for AdX to be divested within twelve months and for DFP's auction logic to be open-sourced under a neutral body; Brinkema declined the divestiture and rewrote the auction rules instead. What remains in dispute now is not whether the pipes open, but how fast, how widely, and who gets to look inside afterwards.

TikTok puts its targeting signal into 400,000 other apps

At Advertising Week New York on October 5, TikTok opened its global ad network to US advertisers and gave it a new name. What was Pangle is now TTAN, the TikTok Ad Network, and it reaches close to 400,000 apps worldwide. Digiday's Krystal Scanlon covered the pitch, which is straightforward in commercial terms: the same bidding and optimisation that buyers already run inside TikTok, pointed at inventory that is not TikTok.

The scale argument is in eMarketer's numbers. TikTok's US advertising revenue was $14.12bn in 2025 and its global figure $34.62bn, with the forecast for the end of 2026 at $17.69bn and $43.89bn respectively. A network that extends the same auction into other developers' apps is one of the few ways to grow faster than the feed itself.

Buyers split on whether the signal travels. Bryce Hamlin, vice-president of data intelligence at Power Digital, allowed that running the same tactical algorithms against wider inventory would lift budgets if it worked. Zea Hirsh, performance media supervisor at Collective Measures, called TikTok's signal one of the strongest in the market and framed the question as whether carrying it off-platform drives results. Farhad Divecha, group chief executive of Accuracast, was blunter: "There are already widely available platforms that do this." Lindsay Baker, associate director of social at Crossmedia, put the counterpoint most compactly: "The real value of TikTok is still TikTok itself." Shamsul Chowdhury, executive vice-president of paid media at Zeno Group, wanted guardrails, a clear whitelist or blacklist, and control over which app categories a campaign can land in. That is the standard anxiety about any mediation waterfall extended on a platform's terms, and it is why DoubleVerify's extension of brand suitability data to Pangle across 48 markets on August 13 matters more than it looks.

TTAN did not arrive alone. The same announcement carried Buy Direct, an in-app checkout that completes a purchase from the main recommendation feed in one click; a conversational Shopping Assistant covering products, shipping and sizing; Agentic Leads, which captures and qualifies leads through direct message and web forms; a Search Ads campaign type powered by Smart+; a unified creative approval flow that mixes advertiser assets, Symphony output and creator material; and an expansion of GMV Max to account for affiliate commissions, coupons and referral fees. TikTok says use of its Ads MCP server rose more than 200% between July and September 2026, though it gave no base figure. David Kaufman, global head of monetization product partnerships, framed the whole package around AI changing how advertiser content is created and scaled. Pricing for TTAN was not disclosed, and the app count was given as "more than 400,000" in August and "nearly 400,000" in October.

Cloudflare prints a price for reading the web

Two Cloudflare releases, four days apart, turned web access for machines into a metered line item with published rates.

The first was a Web Search API inside AI Gateway, announced on October 2, which lets an AI agent run a live search through one of three partner indexes rather than guessing a URL and fetching it. Cloudflare's own framing of the problem is that an agent needing a live page usually guesses the address and then curls it, "which explains why some web fetches come back as 404 Not Found". List prices per 1,000 requests are $0.25 for Ceramic.ai, the default, which claims more than 40 billion pages and 8,000-character descriptions; $5.00 for Linkup; and $7.00 for Exa. Ceramic.ai and Linkup offer zero data retention and Exa does not. Queries run from 1 to 1,024 characters and return between one and ten results. Michelle Chen, Sam Else and Gabriel Massadas wrote the announcement.

Two conditions attach to every provider: crawlers must identify themselves and respect robots.txt as verified bots, and every result must link back to the original content. Neither requirement is new for Cloudflare, which deployed Robotcop in December 2024 to enforce robots.txt at the network edge and narrowed its verified bots definition in July 2026, then turned on default blocking and a disallow-AI-training option on September 15. What the post does not say is which crawler category applies to these three, whether each already holds verified bot status, how ongoing compliance is checked, or what happens when it is not. Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs on August 11 2025, which is part of why a billing and logging layer over someone else's index is a product at all; Microsoft's own Web IQ launched on June 2 2026, and Brave's Search API sits at $5 per 1,000 requests.

The second release was AI Search, which announced on October 1 that billing starts on November 1. Base ingestion costs $0.75 per million tokens, image processing adds $0.50 per million, stored data runs $2.00 per GB-month, semantic queries cost $0.75 per 1,000 and full-text queries $0.10 per 1,000. Every Workers plan includes a free monthly allotment: 5 million tokens of base ingestion, 5 million tokens of image processing, 10 GB of storage, 1,000 semantic queries and 1,000 full-text queries. Gabriel Massadas, Nelson Duarte and Ashish Vinodkumar wrote that announcement, which added native image embeddings using Qwen3-VL-Embedding, OCR for scanned PDFs, and a file size limit raised from 4 MiB to 10 MiB. Cloudflare's stated design goal was that a bill can be estimated before a single file is indexed.

Set the two together and the shape is clear. A company that spent eighteen months building the tollbooth has now published the fares on both sides of it: what a crawler pays to come in, and what an agent pays to look out.

Reddit names the month the free API ends

Reddit told developers on September 30 that free public access to its Data API and its RSS feeds is ending, and PPC Land set out the full timetable on October 4. New public API requests stop being accepted on October 31 2026. RSS feed support ends on November 13. Registration for the migration bounty closes on November 30. Access begins to close for unregistered apps on January 12 2027, and the public Data API shuts down completely in March 2027.

More than 14,000 apps and bots have registered to migrate to Devvit, Reddit's Developer Platform. The inducements are a $1m migration programme in total, $1,000 per eligible migrated app, and up to $167,000 per app through Reddit Developer Funds. The obstacle is language. Most existing Reddit bots are written against PRAW, the Python wrapper, and Devvit runs TypeScript only. An administrator posting as u/pl00h conceded that extending language support "has not been a scalable thing" and that Python is not on the roadmap. One moderator, u/emily_in_boots, reported 551,703 human moderation actions over six months and 300,000 lines of Python holding community bots together. Another administrator, u/judy-funnie, described RSS plainly as another common surface for scraping, with no replacement outside moderation workflows.

The commercial logic is visible in the quarterly numbers. Reddit's other revenue line, which is mostly data licensing, reached $43m in the second quarter of 2026, up 24% year on year, against $762m of advertising revenue and $804.9m in total. Licensing began with Google at a reported $60m a year in February 2024 and an OpenAI agreement in May 2024, and the July 2024 robots.txt change left Google as the only major search engine indexing recent Reddit content. Cloudflare's chief executive said on September 26 that Reddit earns seven to fourteen times more per token than The New York Times. Reddit is also litigating the other route to the same content: Anthropic lost its bid to keep Reddit's scraping claims in federal court in late September.

The affected parties are not only hobbyists. Academic researchers, social listening vendors, aggregators, alternative clients and moderation tooling all read Reddit through the same two doors that are now closing, and some of them have no licence to replace them with. Rule 8 enforcement tightens alongside: apps may not show deleted or removed content, pose as human accounts, hide promoted posts, or automate unsolicited outreach. Logged-in access to old Reddit will be limited to users who were active there in the previous six months, with moderators exempt, and automod enforcement functions will be switched off for newly created communities.

T-Mobile makes its network data exclusive to one platform

T-Mobile Advertising Solutions said on October 5 that its mobile data is now available for out-of-home targeting exclusively through Vistar Media, the programmatic DOOH platform it bought for $600m in January 2025. Advertisers get off-the-shelf and custom audiences built on first-party data that includes mobile location and anonymised information about which apps are installed and how often they are used.

The mechanism is the network itself. Jess Zhu, head of advertising products at T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, explained that any internet-connected mobile app needs access to the carrier's network, and that T-Mobile examines those network requests to infer app usage and build audiences from it. Regular use of pet applications, in the example given, places a device in a cat-lovers segment. No panel, no SDK, no cookie syncing: the carrier sees the request because the request travels over the carrier.

The exclusivity has a stated cause. Zhu attributed it to tightening regulation around location data, which prevents sharing the data with third parties the company does not own. That is an unusually direct account of how privacy rules reshape market structure. The constraint does not reduce the amount of location data in circulation; it concentrates it inside companies large enough to own both the network and the demand-side platform, which in T-Mobile's case also includes Blis, acquired in the same year. Testing with selected advertisers, including the agency Kepler, began in 2024. Hannah Grobmyer, vice-president of client solutions at Kepler, suggested better targeting data could pull clients who currently buy premium placements through direct deals into programmatic digital out-of-home. Agentic and self-serve tools are promised for early 2027, with DOOH measurement on the 2027 roadmap, which is to say that the targeting is available now and the proof is scheduled later.

Apple warns that one switch is about to become harder to flip

On October 2 Apple published a developer notice titled "Updates to Full Disk Access in macOS", and PPC Land covered it on October 4. The substance is a commitment with no date attached. Apple said some developers use Full Disk Access in ways that expose "files, mail, messages and browsing history without users' full knowledge and understanding", singled out increasingly autonomous AI agents as the reason this now matters, and said it will add controls requiring "very explicit user action" before the permission is granted.

What the notice omits is nearly everything operational: the macOS version, the release date, the mechanism, the affected applications, how mobile device management profiles will be treated, and whether Apple's own assistant features fall inside or outside the new gate. That last point is not pedantry. Today Full Disk Access is a single switch in System Settings under Privacy and Security, and an organisation using MDM can grant it through a configuration profile with the SystemPolicyAllFiles key, bypassing the interface entirely. A control that requires explicit user action in the graphical flow but leaves the profile route untouched would change very little for managed fleets.

The timing follows a specific incident. On September 28 AppleInsider reported that Meta's Muse agent had synced roughly 187,000 lines of a user's local Messages database despite the user declining message access and leaving Full Disk Access off. Meta disputed the account and said the Messages integration is opt-in and functions only when both Full Disk Access and a Messages connector inside the app are enabled. Regulators have been circling the same question from the other direction: Spain's data protection authority has warned that uncontrolled agent access risks breaching data minimisation, the Council of Europe's draft guidelines recommend separating read permissions from write permissions for agents, and the Dutch authority has flagged open-source agents as a breach and account-takeover risk. Apple's announcement is the first move by a platform owner to put the permission behind a deliberate act rather than a toggle, and until a version number appears it remains a statement of intent.

Struck through and still legible is not erased, an EU adviser says

A man baptised in the parish of Bijloke, Ghent, on June 26 1955 asked the Diocese of Ghent on March 25 2021 to delete him from its registers. On April 2 the diocese struck his entry through and left it legible. On April 7 it confirmed his departure had been noted on a church-leavers list. He complained on April 14, and on December 19 2023 the Disputes Chamber of Belgium's Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit ordered erasure within 30 days in Decision No 169/2023. The diocese appealed to the Court of Appeal in Brussels, which referred the matter to Luxembourg.

On October 1 2026, Advocate General Laila Medina delivered her opinion in Case C-12/25, Bisdom Gent VZW v Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit, accompanied by press release No 139/26, after a hearing on June 30. Her central conclusion is narrow and consequential: striking data through while leaving it legible, with a note of departure attached, does not constitute erasure under the GDPR. Storage, retrieval and use of baptismal registers must be in line with the regulation. Where the person has objected under Article 21(1), the church must show compelling legitimate grounds to keep the record, and basic difficulties in identifying a method of deletion cannot excuse the controller from finding one.

The articles in play run across most of the regulation: Article 4(6) on filing systems, Article 5(1)(a), (b) and (c), Article 6(1)(f) on legitimate interest, Article 9 and the Article 9(2)(d) exemption for religious organisations, Articles 12 and 13 on transparency, Article 16 on rectification, Article 17 and its (1)(c), (1)(d) and (3)(d) limbs, Article 89(1) on archiving safeguards and Article 91 on church oversight. Medina's framing of freedom of religion included the observation that it is "a precious asset for atheists, agnostics, sceptics and the unconcerned", which is the point on which the archiving defence turns.

The opinion binds nobody. No judgment date has been published, and the Brussels court makes the final determination. For anyone operating a database that keeps records of people who have asked to leave, the operative sentence is the one about legibility. A tombstoned row with a flag on it is a processing decision, not a deletion, and the same reasoning applies whether the record is a sacrament or a suppression list. German courts have gone the other way on an adjacent question, holding that data subjects cannot demand proof of deletion, which leaves the burden of showing what happened sitting awkwardly between the two.

Kroger finds half its spend went to the weaker half of its creative

Kroger, Vidmob and MMA Global published a whitepaper on September 30 analysing 1,934 Kroger video and image advertisements, 1,062 of them on Meta and 872 on DV360, run between January 2025 and January 2026. PPC Land's account on October 4 carries both the findings and the inconsistencies.

The headline number is that approximately 50% of Kroger's historical media spend across those two platforms went to lower-performing creative. The model built to sort high from low converters was validated against unseen first-quarter 2026 data and reported 81% accuracy. High-scoring creative is credited with up to a four-times higher conversion rate and roughly 70% lower cost per conversion, and the paper argues that reallocating existing budget without producing a single new asset would yield 2.2 times the conversions. On DV360 the weaker advertisements carried both lower conversion rates and higher CPMs, which is the costly combination.

The filtering was severe. Of 231 attribute levels tested, 105 passed statistical testing and 22 survived every filter, a pass rate of 9.5%. Seventeen of the surviving guidelines apply to DV360 and five to Meta. The Meta findings that were itemised point in one direction: 87% of advertisements featuring a relatable human scenario ranked above the median, against 38% without it, and 76% of advertisements showing people reacting or enjoying ranked above median, against 45% without. The seventeen DV360 guidelines were not itemised publicly.

Alex Collmer, Vidmob's founder and executive chairman, put the argument this way: "Every brand can produce more creative than ever. The advantage now belongs to the ones who know which creative will drive the outcome they need." Vas Bakopoulos, head of insights and research at MMA Global, added that as AI makes creative production ten times faster, judgment has to scale with it.

The caveats are not small. The data is observational, with no randomisation, so high-scoring assets may simply have received better targeting or placement. The 81% accuracy figure comes without a stated classification threshold or confidence intervals. The 4x improvement is described as "up to", "roughly" and "average" on three different pages, the 70% saving is stated two different ways, and the validation window appears as both one month and a full quarter. The five Meta guidelines are labelled validated in one place and directional in another. The planned in-market test has not happened. And the share of Kroger's $1.18bn 2025 advertising spend that ran on these two platforms is not disclosed, which means the 50% figure describes a proportion of an undisclosed base. Most marketers say creative matters and almost none actively optimise it, which is the gap this paper is written into.

Nine per cent say they do unified measurement extremely well

Winterberry Group surveyed 121 US marketing executives at vice-president level and above during July and August 2026, sponsored by Lifesight, and published on September 30. Budgets ranged from $5m to more than $250m a year across financial services, insurance, retail, direct-to-consumer, CPG, travel, automotive, telecoms and consumer technology. No margin of error was published.

The headline is the gap between priority and practice. Eighty-three per cent rated cross-channel spend optimisation a leading priority, scoring it six or seven on a seven-point scale, and 40% named unified measurement their single top priority. Nine per cent said they practise it extremely well.

Underneath that, the stack is crowded and the dependency is obvious. Respondents run 4.74 measurement methods each: platform-native reporting at 93%, marketing mix modelling at 71%, multi-touch attribution at 69%, data-driven attribution at 62%, incrementality testing and panel research at 52% each, custom methods at 43% and last-click at 32%. Eighty-two per cent run data warehouses, 66% use BI tools, 65% run custom models in Python or R, and close to half operate clean rooms or MTA platforms. Alphabet, Amazon and Meta took 59% of trackable US advertising spend in 2025, up from 47% in 2020.

Satisfaction with single channels is high and confidence in the joins is not. Seventy-seven per cent rate their ability to measure individual channels at five or above on a seven-point scale, average satisfaction sits at 7.0 out of 10, and 73% say measurement insight drives all or a substantial part of their decisions. But on a priority-versus-ability basis every capability shows a deficit, widest at spend allocation across paid and owned, where priority scores 6.1 and ability 5.2. Eighteen per cent have all the people and skills they need; 74% need outside help; 69% cite an inability to translate results into budget recommendations.

AI is now inside the measurement function itself, with 79% using it, 16% calling its role central, 48% describing an AI-assisted and human-led approach and 25% describing something purely AI-led. The barriers are prosaic: 55% poor or inconsistent data quality, 50% limited system integration, 40% lack of trust in results.

Tobin Thomas, chief executive of Lifesight, framed the problem as structural: "Every platform grades its own homework, and marketers are left reconciling numbers that never were meant to reconcile." Jonathan Margulies, managing partner at Winterberry, took the gentler reading, arguing that brands are not starting from scratch and that the shift now is from better measurement to better optimisation. An anonymous consumer technology SVP quoted in the report put it more sharply, noting that walled garden platforms increasingly function as both the media seller and the sole source of truth.

The report should be read with its own construction in mind. It blends survey responses from 121 executives with unverified Lifesight client estimates, including an average sales lift of approximately 9.8% and a claim that platforms overcount contribution by 20% to 50%, plus a composite narrative built around a fictional marketing VP named Maya. Lifesight cited more than 500 global brands in June 2026 and more than 300 in this report, without explaining the change. The independent evidence pointing the same way is stronger: a Zalando researcher found conventional MMM overstating paid search ROAS by 2.5 times against a geo experiment, and Facebook's own 663 tests put machine-learning lift estimates at a median 83% for upper-funnel campaigns against 29% in randomised tests. Meridian GeoX left beta on September 9, and Google cut its incrementality testing minimum from about $100,000 to $5,000 in November 2025, which lowers the price of checking the homework considerably.

Seven per cent now publish AI output largely as written

Ahrefs fielded a survey of about 300 marketing and SEO professionals in August 2026, published the full report on September 30 and issued a press release on October 1; PPC Land covered it on October 5. Of 301 recorded responses, 280, or 93%, use AI for content creation, up from 87% a year earlier. The 6.98% who do not cite accuracy problems and general distrust.

The movement is at both ends of the distribution. Seven per cent of AI users now publish content that is more than 75% pure AI with no editing, up from 4%. Forty per cent say none of their output is pure AI, down from 50%. Sixty-nine per cent overall publish more AI content than last year, rising to 74% among AI users. On quality, 57% still rate human writing higher, down from 65%, while 24% rate AI output better, up from 14%. That average hides a seniority split: 43% of founders and business owners believe their AI content beats human writing, against 17% of junior and mid-level marketers.

Review practice is tightening even as volume rises. Eighty-nine per cent manually check AI output, up from 80%, and 66% trust AI text only after human review, with fewer than 1% skipping checks entirely. Forty-three per cent involve subject-matter experts and 33% use editors. The most striking movement is in machines checking machines: 29% now ask an AI to evaluate AI-written material, double last year's 14%.

Speed is the reported payoff. Eighty-five per cent produce content faster, 49% much quicker and 36% slightly quicker, with upper management at 62% for much quicker, thirteen points above the total. Only 2.5% report a slowdown. The money is less clear. Forty-one per cent report zero savings on writers and freelancers, 26% do not know, and among those reporting savings the typical range is $1,001 to $2,000 a month, which is consistent with the fact that only 28% work with outside writers at all. Disclosure remains the exception: 22% tell site visitors that AI was involved, up from 16%.

Ryan Law, director of content marketing at Ahrefs, read the trend as confidence without abdication: "Marketers are clearly becoming more confident in what AI can produce, but that doesn't mean they're handing over the keys." Louise Linehan, a content marketer at the company, described the limits of automated checking, saying that even when an AI quality check flagged issues it made her wonder what else had been missed. Mateusz Makosiewicz, a marketing researcher there, offered the competitive framing: "It's Cold War logic: once one side escalates, everyone else has to keep up or lose ground." Karen Robinson, VP marketing at Shorthand, drew a task-based line, excluding homepage messaging and the annual engagement report from anything machine-written.

The 7% figure has a regulatory edge in Europe. Article 50 of the EU AI Act took effect on August 2 2026 and requires labelling of AI-generated content on matters of public interest published without human editorial review, with penalties reaching 15m euros or 3% of worldwide annual turnover. Seventy-eight per cent of surveyed marketers do not disclose.

Google says a sitemap may simply not be worth its crawl

Episode 114 of Search Off the Record, published October 1, produced the most practically useful Google statement of the week, and PPC Land wrote it up on October 5. John Mueller and Martin Splitt were discussing the familiar "couldn't fetch" error on sitemaps that are valid and reachable, and Mueller gave two explanations that are not technical faults at all. The first is host load: "It could be the case that we don't have any time to crawl this sitemap file because we're too busy." The second is crawl demand, and here the phrasing is the part worth keeping. Crawl demand, Mueller said, "is very often based on the perceived quality of a website", and that "can have a really large impact on how much we crawl and index".

That reframes a diagnostic. A sitemap error on a small site is conventionally read as a configuration problem, and this says it can instead be a quality signal surfacing through an unrelated report. It is consistent with Google's own published crawl logic and with the 20-hour median discovery time for new URLs reported last week, where some pages are never found at all.

The rest of the episode was housekeeping with teeth. Priority and change frequency are deprecated, the first because everyone set it to maximum and the second because it was usually wrong. Lastmod survives in what Mueller called a weird love-hate relationship, evaluated case by case and ignored without penalty when unreliable. Only URL and lastmod are prioritised. The limits, quoted from memory, are 50,000 URLs and 50 megabytes uncompressed per file, with one level of nesting through a sitemap index. RSS feeds submitted to Search Console work similarly and have the advantage of showing recently changed pages at a glance, which is a small irony in the same week Reddit switched its feeds off. HTML sitemaps are a map for users and replace nothing. On llms.txt, Mueller's answer was no: Google's systems cannot process it as a sitemap because it lacks the strict format, and he advised against treating it as a priority. Supporting figures make the point: ProGEO.ai found in March 2026 that 76% of Fortune 500 companies declare a sitemap in robots.txt while 7.4% have an llms.txt file, Ahrefs found in July 2026 that 97% of llms.txt files received zero requests in a month, and Cloudflare and IAB Australia data puts 52% of AI crawler requests on model training.

Opella rebuilds pharma media on FMCG lines

Over-the-counter pharmaceutical sales in the United States reached $58.2bn in 2025, up from $44.3bn in 2024, and the FDA has signalled willingness to move more prescription drugs to over-the-counter status. Digiday's Sam Bradley reported on October 6 on what that does to media plans built for a prescribing audience.

Opella, spun out of Sanofi a year ago into an 825m euro, or $927m, business with Sanofi retaining 48%, is the clearest case. First-half 2026 net sales rose 3.6% on e-commerce expansion, and e-commerce has gone from 4% to 12% of revenue in three years. The hiring tells the story: Albert Hernandez as chief growth officer after seventeen years at Nestlé, Victoria Tiffin as chief sales officer from Procter and Gamble in July 2026, Gonzalo Balcazar as president for Europe and Latin America from Reckitt in March 2026, and Murali Rao running brand and innovation for Africa, the Middle East and Turkey from Reckitt and FrieslandCampina. Hernandez said 60% of the company's media investment now sits in digital channels, with 40% remaining in pharma staples such as television and out-of-home. An 85-person in-house team uses generative AI for rapid digital creative production and versioning.

Sandy Weag, client president at CMI Media Group, described the behavioural shift driving it: "people are taking a much more proactive approach to their health, and are making product decisions as a shopper, similar as they would any other consumer product." Hyun Lee-Miller, chief media officer at Good Apple, added the channel consequence: "When people make personal health decisions, they trust peer-to-peer lived experiences more than traditional ads." Pharmaceutical digital advertising spend is projected at $26.3bn this year, with Kenvue and Hims and Hers moving the same way; Hims and Hers ran a Super Bowl spot in February.

The destination is not obviously comfortable. Adopting CPG tactics means inheriting CPG problems, including retail media budget-ownership disputes and the newer question of visibility inside AI answers. Major CPG brands have underperformed the S&P 500, and American supermarket sales of food and consumer packaged goods have fallen by 9.3 billion units over five years. Categories that are YMYL by definition also carry an editorial standard that a versioning engine does not resolve.

Also noted

  • October 5 Microsoft extended availability of its Advertising SOAP API to January 31 2027 after customer feedback on migration time, and said all new features will ship on both SOAP and REST until then. PPC News Feed
  • October 5 Google is testing an AI campaign localization tool in beta for Search campaigns, translating text assets and keywords from English (US) into ten unnamed languages, stripping and replacing embedded text in images, and translating landing pages through a Tag Manager snippet; Dario Zannoni found the support page. PPC News Feed
  • October 4 From October 9 free Gemini accounts keep only Flash-Lite, losing Flash and Pro, while the $4.99 AI Plus tier loses Pro and the $19.99 AI Pro tier gains Deep Think. PPC Land
  • October 5 Brian Monahan left Albertsons Media Collective amid a leadership reshuffle at the grocer's retail media arm, which runs on Criteo technology. Digiday
  • October 5 Prime Video's October schedule carries 26 live sports events across five properties, including five Thursday Night Football games, four NBA games, thirteen Seattle Kraken games limited to Washington, Oregon and Alaska, three NWSL matches and one ONE Championship card. PPC Land

By the numbers

  • 2X Comcast Advertising's claimed incremental return for campaigns running linear and streaming together against single-tactic buys, measured January to June 2026 without disclosed absolute returns or sample sizes. Source
  • $0.75 per million tokens The base ingestion rate Cloudflare starts charging for AI Search on November 1, alongside $2.00 per GB-month for stored data. Source
  • 7% Share of AI-using marketers who now publish content that is more than three-quarters machine-written with no editing, against 4% a year earlier. Source
  • 76% Proportion of Fortune 500 companies declaring a sitemap in robots.txt, against 7.4% carrying an llms.txt file. Source
  • 26 Live sports events on Prime Video's October slate, spread across the NFL, NBA, NHL, NWSL and ONE Championship. Source