Google set out fourteen changes to Display & Video 360 in a Help Center roadmap last updated on August 21, 2026, and only one of them carries a hard cutoff: on October 26, every remaining legacy maximum cost-per-view and Video reach 1.0 line item, active or paused, is archived automatically and stops serving.

The roadmap sits under the Display & Video 360 announcements section of the Google Marketing Platform Help Center and is titled Coming soon: Display & Video 360 updates in Q3 2026. It is organised in three blocks: reporting updates, other updates, and cross-platform updates shared with Campaign Manager 360 and Search Ads 360. Some entries carry precise dates. Most carry a month or a quarter. One reaches into February 2027.

Thirteen of the fourteen items require no advertiser action, and Google says so in almost every entry. The fourteenth requires manual work with a fixed expiry, and it is the item that determines whether campaigns keep delivering.

The October 26 archive

Google is phasing out legacy maximum cost-per-view, abbreviated mCPV, together with legacy Video reach line items 1.0. Active campaigns must be transitioned to Video reach line items 2.0 and Video view line items by hand. The roadmap states that on October 26, 2026, all remaining active and paused legacy line items will be auto-archived and will stop serving.

Two words in that sentence do most of the work. The first is manually: no automated migration path is described, which means the burden falls on whoever built the campaign, and there is no fallback for accounts nobody is actively watching. The second is paused. Paused line items are frequently the archive of an advertiser's own campaign history, kept for structure, for naming conventions, or for reactivation in a later flight. Archiving them removes that reference material along with the live inventory.

This mechanism has precedent inside the same platform. When Google removed bid multipliers from Display & Video 360 in May 2025, line items that had not been transitioned to auto bidding or custom bidding were archived rather than left in place. The pattern is consistent: a deprecation notice, a manual transition window, then an automatic sweep on a stated date.

The roadmap does not say how many line items are affected, in aggregate or by advertiser. No estimate of the transition workload accompanies the deadline.

Brand suitability collapses into three modes and ten themes

From October 1, 2026, inventory mode and content theme exclusions automatically cover all YouTube and programmatic Display & Video inventory. Sensitive categories and digital content labels are deprecated for programmatic inventory, with one carve-out for content not yet rated.

Google gives two reasons in the announcement. Under the heading consistent protection, the document states that programmatic display, video, Connected TV and audio line items will use the same machine-learning-driven inventory mode suitability protections as YouTube. Under streamlined workflow, it states that duplicative digital content label and sensitive category settings are consolidated into three core inventory modes, named Maximum, Moderate and Limited, and ten content themes.

The consolidation reduces a checkbox list of named categories to a tier and a theme. Those are not equivalent instruments. A buyer with a contractual prohibition on a specific content type cannot express that prohibition as a suitability tier without accepting a blocking footprint that is either wider or narrower than the contract describes.

The June 2026 roadmap for the second quarter had already flagged this deprecation, placing it at an estimated August 2026 with no automatic migration. The October 1 date represents a slip of roughly two months against that earlier estimate. The tiering itself has independent validation on the YouTube side: the inventory mode implementation received Media Rating Council brand safety accreditation in June 2026 for in-stream and Shorts inventory bought through Google Ads and Display & Video 360. Accreditation covers the classification. It does not restore category-level exclusion.

The naming change reaches the bulk-upload layer as well. Advertiser-level inventory mode settings in Structured Data Files are renamed, with Expanded becoming Maximum and Standard becoming Moderate. That entry is dated Q2 2026, a quarter that had already closed when the page was last updated on August 21.

Bulk-upload teams are carrying a second deadline through the same window. Google set a single sunset date of January 28, 2027 for Structured Data Files v9, v9.1 and v9.2 on June 29, 2026, after which requests specifying those version strings fail. Column handling for the renamed inventory mode values and the version migration land in the same files.

Audio targeting realigned to IAB categories

Display & Video 360 has expanded audio content type targeting to match Interactive Advertising Bureau standards. Four options are added: Catch-up radio, Web radio, Video game, and Text-to-speech. Two existing options are renamed. Online radio becomes Live FM/AM broadcast, and Streaming music becomes Music streaming service.

The consequence is buried in a note. Inventory previously classified as "Unknown content type" may now fall under the new categories, and line items that do not explicitly target unknown content type may see a reduction in inventory if the new options are not selected. The note instructs advertisers to review and update audio line item targeting to maintain reach.

That is a reach change disguised as a taxonomy change. An audio line item that has been running unchanged for months, with unknown content type unticked, can lose inventory without any setting inside it being altered. Nothing in the interface signals the shift; the classification underneath moves and the targeting stays where it was.

The exposure is concentrated in a channel that already struggles for budget. Digital audio commands roughly 20% of adult time spent with digital media while attracting 2.9% of digital advertising revenue, a gap the sector has cited repeatedly. The taxonomy alignment follows a broader standards effort at IAB Tech Lab, which has been rebuilding its content taxonomy and mapping layers for programmatic buying since 2024.

No date is given beyond Q3 2026, which was more than half elapsed when the page was updated.

Three audience dimensions leave the reports

Several legacy dimensions are being removed in September 2026 from Instant reports, Inventory Availability reports and the Bid Manager API. Three are named: Match Ratio, Eligible Cookies on Third-Party Audience List and Interest, and Eligible Cookies on First-Party Audience List.

All three are artefacts of a cookie-indexed audience model. Match Ratio expressed how much of an audience list a platform could recognise. The eligible cookie counts expressed how much of it was addressable at a given moment. As third-party cookie coverage has contracted, those figures have measured a shrinking denominator rather than audience quality.

Google states that no action is required for reports, but that teams using the Bid Manager API should update scripts to remove dependencies on the dimensions. That distinction matters for anyone running scheduled extracts into a warehouse: an interface that silently drops a column is a cosmetic change, while a scheduled query referencing a removed field is a broken job.

The removal continues a long reporting rationalisation. Display & Video 360 eliminated 41 deprecated dimensions and metrics in September 2025, and reshaped reach, frequency and Floodlight reporting across the third quarter of 2025.

Floodlight and inventory reports move to Instant reporting

Also in September 2026, Floodlight and Inventory Availability reports migrate from legacy Offline reporting to Instant reporting. The roadmap describes the migration as automatic and encourages advertisers to begin using Instant reporting ahead of the transition.

Inventory Availability reports have historically required a request-queue-download cycle. Google announced in April 2026 that these reports would gain instant access, estimated for April 2026, alongside new campaign-level and placement-level dimensions in Unique Reach Overlap reports. The September migration completes the move by retiring the offline path rather than running both.

Two exchanges change name on September 21

Connatix becomes JWX in Display & Video 360 reporting, and Seedtag becomes Seedtag NeuroX, both on September 21, 2026. Google states that exchange IDs remain unchanged.

That last clause determines who is affected. Integrations keyed on the identifier continue working. Dashboards, supply-path reports and allowlists keyed on the display string do not, and they will show a discontinuity dated to September 21 that reflects a label rather than a change in trading.

The Connatix rename reflects a corporate consolidation rather than a new counterparty. JWX is the video technology company formerly known as JW Player, which brought JW Player and Connatix player and monetisation infrastructure under one name after acquiring the latter. For buyers reconciling supply paths across a quarter boundary, the practical effect is that a familiar seller appears under an unfamiliar heading in the same report.

Passkeys reach the buying platform

Display & Video 360 is implementing a phased rollout requiring passkeys for sensitive actions, such as managing users, in September 2026. The entry gives no exact date, no enumeration of which actions qualify, and no enrolment guidance.

The requirement is not new inside Google's advertising stack. Google Ads began requiring passkeys for sensitive account actions on July 15, 2026, covering account linking updates and user access changes, and surfaced the state to developers through a passkey_enabled boolean field in Google Ads API v24.1, released on May 13, 2026. The operational friction in that rollout was timing rather than technology: a newly created passkey can take up to seven days to become available at sign-in, with a separate 48-hour synchronisation period applying to sensitive tasks.

Agencies operating on shared logins are the population most exposed, because a passkey cannot be shared. Extending the same requirement to the demand-side platform brings the buying interface into line with the search platform, and reproduces the same enrolment lead time for teams that rotate staff onto accounts.

Three cross-platform measurement items are dated Q3 2026 and share a rationale. Google Marketing Platform is expanding app-to-web and web-to-app conversion measurement coverage across Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360 and Search Ads 360. It is deploying support for CHIPS, cookies having independent partitioned state, in Floodlight attribution. And Floodlight tags will use first-party browser local storage alongside conventional cookies to attribute click-through conversions.

CHIPS is Chrome's partitioned cookie standard. A partitioned cookie is written and read within a single top-level site partition, so state survives inside one publisher's domain but cannot be joined across sites. Local storage is a standard browser feature that holds first-party data on the device across sessions. Both are described as recovering conversion measurement rather than extending it, which is an accurate framing: they restore signal lost to cookie restrictions rather than adding new observation.

None of the three requires advertiser action, and none carries a quantified recovery estimate. Recovery-rate claims elsewhere in the market vary widely enough that the absence of a figure is notable rather than surprising.

Age and gender split into targeted and adjusted

Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 now support serving label-based reach reporting for age and gender. New metrics are based on the information available at the time of ad serving and targeting, and carry the labels "Age (Targeted)" and "Gender (Targeted)". Legacy age and gender metrics are relabelled "Age (Adjusted)" and "Gender (Adjusted)".

The two families answer different questions. Targeted describes the demographic signal used at auction time. Adjusted describes a post-hoc estimate of who was actually reached. Reports that have historically shown one number will now show two, and the pair will not match. Any dashboard, client report or automated summary that treats a single age or gender figure as canonical needs a decision about which of the two it means.

Billed impressions move to begin to render in February 2027

The furthest-dated item in the roadmap is also the one with direct revenue consequences. In February 2027, Campaign Manager 360 and Display & Video 360 update their billed display impression counting methodology from on-downloadto begin to render.

The mechanics are precise. Under the old standard, an impression was counted when the ad code payload started executing in the browser or app. Under the new one, an impression is recorded only when the creative assets have finished downloading to the browser. Everything that falls between those two moments disappears from the count. Google states that impressions recorded via begin to render are more likely to have had a tangible opportunity to be seen, and that advertisers can expect a slight decrease in overall billed impression volume. The word slight is the only quantification offered.

Google cites alignment with Media Rating Council standards to support continued accreditation. The announcement abbreviates the body as MCR, a transposition of the standard abbreviation MRC.

There is a dating discrepancy worth flagging. PPC Land's coverage of the September 2025 Display & Video 360 update recorded display impression counting moving from on-download to begin to render at that point, with Campaign Manager 360 following in November 2025. The Q3 2026 roadmap places the same shift in February 2027 and describes the current standard as on-download. The distinguishing word in the newer entry is billed. The most plausible reading is that the 2025 changes affected reported impression metrics while billing continued on the older basis, and that February 2027 aligns the invoice with the report. Google's document does not state this, and offers no explanation for the gap.

February 2027 is also the month Google Ad Manager and AdSense adopt begin-to-render counting for banner display, which places sell-side and buy-side billing on the same footing in the same window.

Why this matters

Most of this roadmap is housekeeping. Renamed columns, retired dimensions, an exchange changing its trading name, a reporting path being consolidated. Individually, none of it would justify a calendar entry.

Three items do.

The first is October 26. It is the only date in the document behind which campaigns stop serving, and the migration it demands is manual. Agencies running long-lived video buys on legacy line item types have roughly seven weeks from the start of September to complete a rebuild, and the deadline catches paused inventory as well as active.

The second is the audio taxonomy note. A reach reduction that arrives through reclassification rather than through a setting change is difficult to detect in flight, because the line item looks identical before and after. Audio buyers who do not add the new content types will see delivery move without an obvious cause.

The third is February 2027. A change in what counts as a billed impression is a change in what an advertiser pays for, and it lands on both sides of Google's stack in the same month. Year-over-year comparisons that cross it will reflect a definitional break rather than a shift in demand, and any pacing alert calibrated on the old volumes will fire on the transition.

Running underneath all three is a pattern the roadmap makes plain: Google increasingly announces platform changes in quarterly blocks, with month-level or quarter-level precision, and reserves exact dates for the items that carry enforcement. Reading the document for its deadlines rather than its feature list is the only way to separate the two.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google's Display & Video 360 team, publishing through the Google Marketing Platform Help Center. The changes affect media buyers, agencies and in-house programmatic teams running display, video, Connected TV and audio campaigns in Display & Video 360, along with the Campaign Manager 360 and Search Ads 360 users covered by the cross-platform items and any developer maintaining Bid Manager API scripts.

What: Fourteen platform changes across reporting, targeting, brand suitability, security and measurement. The enforcement item is the deprecation of legacy maximum cost-per-view and Video reach 1.0 line items, which requires manual transition to Video reach 2.0 and Video view line items before remaining line items are auto-archived. Other items include IAB-aligned audio content type targeting, the removal of Match Ratio and two eligible cookie dimensions, migration of Floodlight and Inventory Availability reports to Instant reporting, exchange renames for Connatix and Seedtag, a phased passkey requirement, consolidation of brand suitability into three inventory modes and ten content themes, CHIPS and local storage conversion recovery, split age and gender metrics, and a change to billed display impression counting.

When: The roadmap page was last updated on August 21, 2026. Dated items run from September 21, 2026 through February 2027, with the auto-archive of legacy video line items on October 26, 2026 and the brand suitability consolidation on October 1, 2026. Several items carry only a month or quarter.

Where: Display & Video 360 globally, with cross-platform items extending to Campaign Manager 360 and Search Ads 360. The reporting changes reach Instant reports, Inventory Availability reports and the Bid Manager API; the naming changes reach Structured Data Files.

Why: Google states that the brand suitability consolidation applies YouTube-grade machine-learning suitability protection to programmatic inventory and removes duplicative settings, that the audio changes align targeting with Interactive Advertising Bureau standards, that CHIPS and local storage recover conversion measurement lost to cookie restrictions, and that the impression counting change aligns the platforms with Media Rating Council standards to support continued accreditation. The line item deprecation is presented as the retirement of legacy formats superseded by Video reach 2.0 and Video view.