Daniel Toledo, director of group media and performance marketing at gambling group evoke, wrote today on LinkedIn that "it seems budget is the new quality score" in Google Ads, replying to a post by freelance Google Ads manager Joey Bidner that accused Google of turning budget into a performance measure.

In Short

Two people who run Google ads for a living said on LinkedIn that Google now treats how much money an advertiser spends as the main way to get better results, instead of how good and relevant the ad is. That matters because, for most of Google Ads' history, advertisers were told that a well-made, relevant ad could win cheaper clicks than a bigger budget. Google has not responded to these posts, and the argument is an opinion, but it lands nearly eight weeks after Google changed how campaigns that run out of budget are bid.

What was posted

The exchange took place over a few hours across October 9 and 10, 2026. Bidner, who describes himself on LinkedIn as a "Freelance Google Ads Manager & Coach," published a short post that LinkedIn marked as edited. When the page was captured at about 07:00 UTC on October 10, LinkedIn displayed it as eight hours old, placing it late on October 9 UTC. It showed 16 reactions, 6 comments and 1 repost at that point. All timings in this article are derived from LinkedIn's relative timestamps at the moment of capture, so they are approximate.

The post is a single paragraph and it does not mince words. "How are so many people ok with this concept that raising our budgets is the solution to fix a performance issue in this new normal of Google's stupid new bidding algo," Bidner wrote, according to the post. "have you all lost your minds? we should all be screaming from the hill tops. budget should not be a lever for performance."

The final two sentences carry the argument. "By Google making limited by budget a performance measure, they have won this monopoly and anybody who agrees with them is a toad cooking in water unknowingly," according to Bidner.

The post does not name a specific product change, date or campaign type. "New bidding algo" is not defined. Bidner does not present data, and nothing in the post shows whether the complaint rests on his own accounts, client accounts or what he has observed among peers.

Toledo's reply

Toledo's comment appeared about three hours before capture, which places it early on October 10. "I was reflecting this week, about 10 years ago conversations used to be about quality score and relevancy," he wrote, according to the comment. "Two terms I dont hear anymore, seems that budget is the new quality score. And that by default is losing!"

The comment had one reaction when captured. It is short, but it reframes Bidner's complaint in historical terms. Bidner's objection is about the present: budget being sold as a fix. Toledo's is about what has disappeared from the conversation, namely the two concepts that, in his account, used to dominate it.

The other replies

Three other comments were visible. Chris Chambers, head of paid search at RemoFirst, wrote: "There's a lot less talking bad about Google on LinkedIn nowadays, and I don't like that." His comment had two reactions.

CJ Lopez, who lists himself as a paid media strategist with "$5M in Ad Spend Managed," wrote that he was "incredibly grateful that I know enough about Google Ads to understand how to lower CPL's without changing budget, because it's become so difficult to learn these days." He continued: "Google hangs so many of these "easy solutions" in front of ads managers, and if I didn't know any better I would be inclined to follow along out of convenience." The comment was truncated in the capture, so its full text is not available. Scott Redgate, a chief marketing officer and digital marketing coach, replied with one word: "Preach!"

No one from Google appears in the captured thread. The capture shows only the comments LinkedIn ranked as "Most relevant," so other replies may exist.

Who is making the argument

Neither author is a newcomer. Toledo's LinkedIn profile, also captured on October 10, lists him as director of group media and performance marketing at evoke since January 2026, based on-site in Gibraltar. Evoke is the group that owns William Hill and 888. Before that he spent eight years and nine months at Entain, ending as global performance marketing director for UK and Ireland, Europe and Canada from August 2023 to January 2026, where, according to the profile, he "Led the transformation of three teams into one, scaling from 35 to 70."

His search career predates that. The profile lists a role as SEM account manager at 10Bet from November 2016 to May 2017, then PPC account manager from May 2017, then PPC team lead for sports and gaming from November 2017 to June 2019, where he "Built and led a team of six SEM specialists" and "Migrated operations from agency to in-house." In the profile's About section, he writes that he has "managed multi-million-pound budgets, and overseen teams of 70+." The "about 10 years ago" in his comment roughly matches the start of his own career in paid search.

Toledo has 9,249 LinkedIn followers and publishes a weekly newsletter, The Performance Edge, which the profile describes as covering "All paid media platforms" and lists with 992 subscribers.

Bidner has been one of the more consistent public critics of Google's bidding changes this year. In July, his post objecting to Google's "Limited by budget" warning drew 71 reactions and 27 comments, and he argued that some of his best accounts deliberately ran low ROAS or high CPA targets so that Smart Bidding could explore and find new customers. In August he criticized Microsoft Advertising's removal of Max CPC from new campaigns.

The change that likely sits behind the post

Bidner's post does not say which algorithm change he means. The phrase "limited by budget" does, however, match the status label at the centre of the bidding change Google rolled out this summer. That connection is an inference, not something the post states.

Google first disclosed the change on June 15, 2026, sent notifications on July 2, and released a Bid Target Adjustment Tool on July 6. The rollout began on August 17 and was staged over several weeks. It covers Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns that use Target CPA or Target ROAS and show the "Limited by budget" status. Hotel and Display campaigns already worked this way. App and video campaigns are excluded.

The mechanics matter for the argument. Before the change, a campaign capped by its budget could deliver results well ahead of its target. Google's own example was a campaign with a $10 Target CPA converting at $5, or a 200% ROAS target delivering around 400%. After the change, such campaigns drift back toward the stated target. Google said it would not alter targets or budgets automatically.

Google's advertising liaison, Ginny Marvin, said on August 5 that in budget-constrained campaigns the target would now be the efficiency lever, and that advertisers who did nothing might find their campaigns entering different auctions than before. In a podcast interview released on August 12, she described the change as affecting only a slice of campaigns: those with a target, limited by budget and beating that target.

Read against that background, Bidner's complaint has a specific shape. Before August 17, being "Limited by budget" was a constraint that could coexist with overperformance. After it, the same status changes how the bidding system behaves. The options Google listed for affected advertisers included keeping the target, lowering it, switching to Maximize Conversions or Maximize Conversion Value, or raising the budget. Bidner's objection is to the last of these being presented as a performance fix.

What has been reported since

Evidence on the effect remains anecdotal. On October 5, PPC Land reported a Reddit thread in which an advertiser running Shopping at a 300% ROAS target said sales and visibility fell after August 17, having previously delivered 3,000 to 4,000%. One commenter in that thread raised a budget by about 40% and, by their own account, got roughly half the usual conversions. Several variables changed at once, so the cause could not be isolated.

Analysts had warned that the readout would be slow. Mike Ryan of Smarter Ecommerce set a 30 to 60 day evaluation window, which put the first reliable reads between mid-September and mid-October. Bidner's post falls inside that window. Measured, a measurement vendor that sells incrementality testing, argued on August 11 that the change turns targets from loose guardrails into direct instructions, and that platform-attributed conversions are not the same as incremental business impact.

Microsoft took a different line. Navah Hopkins, Microsoft's ads liaison, said in August that Microsoft Advertising continues to let campaigns overachieve on target CPA and target ROAS whatever their budget status.

Where Quality Score went

Toledo's point is about vocabulary as much as mechanics. Quality Score has not been removed from Google Ads. It was introduced in 2005 alongside Ad Rank and quality-based minimum bids, and for years it was the main tool advertisers were given to lower costs without spending more. The logic was simple enough to put on a slide: a more relevant ad, with a higher expected click-through rate and a better landing page, could rank above a competitor bidding more.

Smart Bidding arrived in 2016. That is, by coincidence, roughly the "about 10 years ago" in Toledo's comment. Since then, Google has moved most bid decisions into auction-time machine learning, launched Performance Max in 2020 and pushed AI Max for Search in 2025. Advertisers using automated bidding set a target and a budget; the system decides the bid for each auction. Quality Score remains visible as a diagnostic, but advertisers no longer set the per-keyword bids it was designed to make cheaper.

The score is still being measured. WordStream's analysis of 15,666 accounts, covered in March 2026, put the average Quality Score between 5 and 6, with 36% of accounts scoring below 4. The same data cuts against a simple "bigger budget wins" reading: accounts spending under $1,000 a month converted at 18.8%, compared with 14.2% for those spending over $10,000. WordStream sells Google Ads software, and the figures come from its own grader tool.

Other platforms face the same question. In March, ConsultMyApp's analysis of Apple Ads auctions found the most relevant app took the top position on 43.9% of keywords, with bid strength and predicted performance doing most of the ordering once an app cleared Apple's relevance threshold.

The cost backdrop

The posts arrive as clicks get more expensive. WordStream's 2026 benchmarks, covering 13,474 US search campaigns, put the median cost per click at $5.42, up from $2.32 in 2016, although cost per lead fell year over year for the first time since before 2020, to $66.69. In Europe, Channable's data on 1.38 billion euros of Google Ads spend from more than 10,000 e-commerce advertisers showed cost per click up 15% from June 2025 to June 2026, while ROAS fell 46% on Performance Max and 43% on standard Shopping. Both datasets come from vendors and reflect their customer bases.

Rising click prices are where Bidner's word "monopoly" connects to the court record. Judge Amit Mehta found in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained its search monopoly. His September 2025 remedies ruling found that Google had raised search text ad prices through auction adjustments advertisers did not recognize as Google's doing, and required it to disclose material changes to its ad auctions publicly. In May 2026, the law firm Keller Postman began pursuing individual arbitration claims for businesses that bought Google search or display ads since August 2016, arguing the rulings show Google's conduct inflated advertising costs.

None of that establishes that the August 17 change is a pricing tool. Google has described it as making the controls clearer and has said the update alone does not change spend. The court findings concern earlier conduct. What they do show is why practitioners read changes to auction behavior with suspicion, and why the label "Limited by budget" carries more weight than a status message usually would.

Why the argument matters

For search marketers, the distinction Toledo draws has a practical edge. If relevance remains the main way to win auctions more cheaply, then account work - keyword choice, ad copy, landing pages - is where the gains sit. If budget and target settings have become the dominant inputs, then the levers an advertiser controls shrink to two numbers, and the platform that sells the inventory also decides how to spend against them. That is the conflict of interest Measured flagged in August, and it is what Bidner is objecting to in stronger language.

Google's position, through its liaison, is that the change affects a minority of campaigns and that targets, not budgets, are the efficiency control in budget-capped campaigns. Bidner and Toledo argue that the industry conversation has drifted toward spending more regardless. Lopez's comment suggests a third view: that the older skills still work but are harder for newcomers to learn when the interface keeps offering budget-based recommendations.

The posts settle none of this. They contain no account data, and their authors speak for themselves. They do, however, put a name to something that PPC Land's coverage of Google's bidding changes has circled since June. Has the industry stopped talking about relevance because it matters less, or because the tools that rewarded it are no longer the ones advertisers are shown first?

Timeline

Summary

Who: Joey Bidner, a freelance Google Ads manager and coach, and Daniel Toledo, director of group media and performance marketing at evoke and formerly global performance marketing director at Entain. Chris Chambers of RemoFirst, paid media strategist CJ Lopez and marketing executive Scott Redgate also replied. Google did not take part in the captured exchange.

What: Bidner argued on LinkedIn that Google has made "limited by budget" a performance measure and that budget should not be a lever for performance. Toledo replied that conversations about Quality Score and relevancy have faded and that "budget is the new quality score."

When: Bidner's post appeared late on October 9, 2026 (UTC) and Toledo's reply early today, October 10, 2026, based on LinkedIn's relative timestamps. The exchange follows Google's August 17, 2026 rollout of a bidding change for budget-limited Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns.

Where: LinkedIn, in a public post and comment thread. The underlying debate concerns Google Ads Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel campaigns.

Why: Quality Score, introduced in 2005, was long the main way advertisers could lower costs without spending more. If budget and target settings now dominate how campaigns perform, the levers advertisers control narrow, while click costs keep rising and courts have already found that Google raised search ad prices through undisclosed auction changes. The posts are opinion, not data, but they arrive inside the window when the first reliable results from the August 17 change were expected.