For more than a decade, an advertiser running a Search campaign in Google Ads has faced an awkward binary over where the money goes. Search partners and the Display Network could be switched on or off, and little in between. On October 14, Google offered something in between, and the wording it chose says as much about the balance of power in digital advertising as the feature itself.

Google Ads now lets advertisers limit Display and partner spend by percentage, through two optional controls announced by Tal Akabas, director of product management for Google Ads, in a blog post that went live at 8:00 AM Pacific after an embargo. The first, channel prioritization, sorts inventory into "High priority" and "Low priority" tiers. Search partners and the Google Display Network can be placed in the lower tier, and Google funds the high-priority channels first. The second, budget allocation, sets a daily cap on the low-priority channels as a percentage of a campaign's average daily budget. Google's worked example is plain enough: a 5% allocation on a $1,000 average daily budget means the system aims to keep spend on that channel at or below $50 a day. Set the allocation to 0% and Google will not spend there at all.

"Marketers want more transparency into their ad campaigns and choice over how they direct their ad budgets," Akabas wrote. "These features give marketers more control than all-or-nothing opt-outs." The controls cover Search, Shopping and Performance Max, with channel prioritization extending to Demand Gen; budget allocation is not supported for Demand Gen campaigns. They begin to become available progressively from October 15, in the Google Ads interface and Search Ads 360, with API and Editor support described as coming soon. They cannot be set from manager accounts.

The qualifier sits in the help page. "On a best-effort basis, our tools will aim to keep spend on those channels within that limit." A cap that aims, rather than binds, is a different instrument from a cap. Prioritization also changes spend only when a campaign is limited by budget, so an advertiser with room to spare will see little difference. And there is a deadline attached. From February 2027, Search campaigns that use the Display Network migrate to the new system; Google suggests that those wishing to keep their current arrangement set Display to low priority with a 50% allocation.

The economics behind the change are not new to PPC Land readers. Intelligency Group found in June 2025 that Search partner return on ad spend ran 37% lower than on Google Search itself, and an Adalytics estimate from November 2023 put the Search Partner Network's annual value to Google at roughly $10.5 billion. Google removed parked domains from that network on February 10, 2026, and a Performance Max alpha that let advertisers pick partner networks surfaced on April 30. The question of whose revenue the platform optimises was the subject of PPC Land's essay that Google optimises its own revenue, and advertisers have to optimise theirs.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable described the same rollout on October 14 as global across Search, Shopping and Performance Max, with Demand Gen to follow, and noted that an alpha version had appeared in August. Greg Finn, a practitioner who tried to record a walkthrough for X, captured the reaction of many account managers: "I started to make a video about Channel Prioritization and Budget Allocation in #GoogleAds and it went awry."

Reports that explain what the machine chose

The budget controls arrived alongside a quieter change to what Google Ads shows about its own decisions. Natasha Kaurra, posting on LinkedIn, found a single "Search terms and ad combinations" report in one of her accounts, Schwartz reported on October 14. It joins the search terms users typed with the headlines and descriptions shown against them, the landing pages they reached, whether the traffic came through AI Max expanded matches or landing page inclusions, and whether the assets were written by the advertiser. "This report gives us another way to identify mismatches between search intent, ad messaging, and landing pages," Kaurra wrote, calling it "a useful addition for advertisers running AI Max for Search campaigns." It appears to be a test.

Microsoft Advertising moved in the same direction. PPC News Feed reported on October 14 that the platform added OR filters and custom columns in trend charts, a change spotted by Hana Kobzova. Performance tables and search terms reports can now take several criteria in a single filter joined by OR logic, tables can be filtered to selected rows, and custom columns can be plotted so that charts match the tables beneath them. The rollout is incomplete.

Google, meanwhile, is giving one class of advertiser a new format to feed. Automotive model feeds entered beta in the United States, Canada, Australia and the UK, PPC News Feed reported on October 14. Known during the beta as "Vehicle Top Ads," the units show a manufacturer's lineup in Search with images, prices and features beside the standard text ad. Eligibility requires OEM brand status, active Search campaigns and a valid model feed; Google matches the feed to queries automatically, and the only way out is to delete the feed from the Business Data section.

More ads, in more places, with less labelling

If the budget controls hand advertisers a dial, the search results page is gaining inventory to which that dial might apply. Sachin Patel spotted Google's AI Mode showing three ads at the bottom of results instead of two, PPC News Feed reported on October 14. There was no confirmation from Google. Patel also found Google testing a larger three-dot menu icon on desktop Search ads, next to the advertiser URL; the icon leads to information about the ad and the advertiser, and PPC News Feed said it was unclear whether the change was a deliberate test or a display bug.

The AI Mode interface itself is creeping onto the main results page. Damien Andell posted on X a screenshot of the AI Mode left sidebar appearing on a standard Google results page, with chat history, an option to start an AI Mode conversation and a settings icon. "Is the sidebar now the default Google sidebar for search engine results pages (SERPs)?" Andell asked. Schwartz, writing on October 14, could not reproduce it and suspected a test, while noting that such a rollout would move AI Mode closer to being the default experience in Search. Marie Haynes first reported seeing her Gemini app conversations in the sidebar, then corrected herself: "These are not my Gemini app conversations."

Bing is testing something blunter. Khushal Bherwani found a single large sponsored unit at the top of Bing's results, with a grey background, an image, a call-to-action button and the usual URL, title and description. "Bing testing a dedicated placement for sponsored ads at top of serp," Bherwani wrote. Schwartz's verdict was candid: "It almost looks like a malware ad but it is not, right?"

What may be advertised is shifting too. Google added a prediction markets section to its main Google Ads policy documentation, Schwartz reported on October 14, the first time the subject has appeared there after a string of smaller updates and an earlier ban on prediction market product ads. Ads for platforms offering event contracts on economics, sports or current events are allowed only when the advertiser is a licensed provider, the targeted location is eligible, and the account has been certified by Google. The same morning, Polymarket made the most of a looser climate. Brittaney Kiefer reported for Adweek that the prediction market hired Kathryn Bigelow to direct its first US political campaign, three ads timed three weeks before Election Day. Bigelow directed two and the Argentinian trio Pantera the third, through Smuggler. One features a campaign worker who turns whistleblower; another, a bachelorette party soured by the cost of living.

Attribution with the labels removed

Control over spend is worth little without a clear view of results, and that view narrowed on another front. OpenAI appears to have dropped UTM parameters from links in ChatGPT results with the release of GPT-6, Schwartz reported on October 14. Cedric Huesler of Adobe traced the mechanics on LinkedIn: "GPT-6 opens links with window(.)open(url, "_blank", "noopener,noreferrer") and drops ?utm_source=chatgpt(.)com." With neither a tag nor a referrer, the visit is filed as direct traffic. Comparing October 9 to 13 with the previous week across roughly 500 pages where ChatGPT drove at least 5% of visits, Huesler found ChatGPT down about 31,000 visits a day and direct traffic up about 26,000 a day. Sebastien Billard reported a "sharp drop" from October 9. UTM tagging had been added only in June, and whether its removal was intentional is unclear.

OpenAI is, at the same time, building the human apparatus of an ad business. Anthony Higman shared on X an email in which Warren Smith introduced himself as an account manager for ChatGPT Ads, offering an introductory meeting and proposing that "we can also establish a recurring biweekly check-in to review campaign performance." Higman was unenthusiastic: "Yeah Let Me Just Have Endless Phone Calls With Reps From Google, Meta, ChatGPT Ads All Day Every Single Day LOL." One reply on X put the contradiction neatly: "AI for support but humans for sales. I guess they don't trust their AI."

Meta's version of the attribution problem is a model too large to inspect. An Engineering at Meta post dated October 13, written by seven engineers, claimed that GEM, its Generative Ads Model, lifted conversions 18.9% and click-through rates 12% across its apps. PPC Land noted on October 14 that the post gave no baseline, period or methodology for either figure. It also reported conversion uplifts over the past year of 5.8% on Facebook, 4.1% on Instagram and 1.6% off-site for targeted users. GEM is trained on thousands of GPUs and passes its outputs to hundreds of smaller serving models through systems called LoopFM and Solaris. Meta called it "the industry's largest recommendation system (RecSys) foundation model". None of the mechanisms described can be adjusted in Ads Manager, which makes GEM the opposite of what Google offered the same day: performance asserted, with no dial attached.

Consumers, for their part, are buying less through the feeds that such models rank. DoubleVerify's second walled garden report, "Scroll, Stop and Shop," found that the share of consumers who bought on social fell to 25% from 30%, PPC Land reported on October 14. The share influenced by influencers fell to 48% from 54%. Sapio Research surveyed 22,000 consumers in 21 countries and 2,020 marketers in 25, in February 2026. Audience reach as marketers' top challenge dropped to 40% from 46%, which the report read as a shift in emphasis: "Marketers seem focused less on finding the right audiences, and more on proving their spend worked." Steve Mougis, DoubleVerify's global chief commercial officer, wrote in the welcome letter: "These are 'walled' gardens, after all, and transparency remains a significant obstacle." PPC Land noted that the 33-page report does not mention Nielsen's pending acquisition of DoubleVerify, agreed on August 6 at $13.60 a share, and that EMARKETER puts 2026 social ad spend at $408 billion, $13.4 billion above WARC's forecast.

Who holds the keys to the browser

The sharpest dispute over control in the window concerned Apple. Rowena Lam, senior director for privacy and data at IAB Tech Lab, argued in an essay dated October 13 that Safari's domain blocklist can be updated remotely without notice or appeal, and that publishers should move bidding and identity onto their own edge servers. PPC Land's analysis on October 14 found that several of Lam's claims about Apple's remote blocking go beyond the public record. The dynamic list update had not shipped when she wrote; the one demand-side platform on the list had been removed in an iOS 27.2 beta; and her claims about speed and privacy came with no published measurements. WebKit bug 324771 lists nine domains, one of them a test fixture, with the other eight mapping to Unified ID 2.0, The Trade Desk, ID5, LiveRamp, Permutive and Audigent. "To survive this, advertising infrastructure needs to move to the edge," Lam wrote. "And by future, I mean right now."

The Trade Desk's route off the list was quick. ID5's has not appeared. Pesach Lattin, founder of ADOTAT, argued in an October 8 column that ID5 stays on Safari's blocklist while The Trade Desk got a 13-day fix, PPC Land reported on October 14. The Trade Desk received a test build 13 days after Apple's first reply, between September 22 and October 5. Lattin contends that ID5's partner documentation describes cross-domain linking resembling what Apple's tracking policy prohibits, though that claim rests on an unnamed source. "Apple has never said why ID5 is on the list. It doesn't need to," Lattin wrote. On the public bug thread, the exchange between Apple's John Wilander and The Trade Desk's Ian Meyers ended with Meyers writing: "Thanks, John! Acknowledged I see the changes in the 24B5099f build." The block works at the level of the registrable domain, and Permutive puts the CPM penalty for impressions without an identity signal at 41%.

Apple's control runs through its contracts as well as its code. The October 13 revision of the Apple Developer Program License Agreement lets one subscriber buy app seats for a group, PPC Land reported on October 14. Schedule 2 introduces Group Purchases, sold "under a single transaction for use by multiple End-Users," with a 30% commission falling to 15% on renewals after a year of paid service. Schedule 3 adds Volume Purchases through Apple Business and Apple School Manager. The revision also carries new tax disclosure clauses, a Live Assistance API for accessibility services on FaceTime, an App Replacement Entitlement, and widget and CarPlay availability on Apple HomeView, which is not sold in the EU. Neither purchase type has a launch date. Section 4 reserves the right that underpins every other clause: "Apple may change the Program Requirements or the terms of this Agreement at any time."

Mozilla is betting that some organisations want to hold those keys themselves. Firefox Enterprise, launched on October 13 by Hermina Condei, targets France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland with a self-hosted management console, PPC Land reported on October 14. The paid tier bundles data loss prevention, controls over AI tools and support, and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. "Browser telemetry stays on the customer's own infrastructure and isn't sent to Mozilla," Condei wrote on LinkedIn. Pricing, seat counts and contract terms were not disclosed, and the compliance claims for DORA, GDPR, NIS2, ISO27001 and SOC2 remain unverified. For Mozilla, the product is also a source of revenue beyond search deals and advertising.

Unbundling the auction

Ad tech's long dispute over Google's ad server reached a technical proposal in the window. Anthony Vargas reported for AdExchanger that a Prebid working group wants to reverse the flow of the auction so that ad servers, including Google's, bid into Prebid rather than receiving Prebid's winning bid. Previewed at the Prebid Summit in New York and published on October 14, the framework would let publishers reach AdX demand without using Google Ad Manager, ending the "pre-auction" in which AdX sees the winning Prebid bid first. Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered Google last month to integrate with Prebid but declined to break up GAM and did not specify how. The group hopes to formalise the model by the end of the first quarter. "We want Prebid to be on the front foot," said Olly Burns, chief technology officer at Teal and a co-author. Two calls, one to Prebid and one to GAM, would collapse into one, "which pretty much halves the time," Burns said. His view of the counterparty was frank: "Google's got a bit of a track record of screwing ad tech stuff up." Adoption depends on Google integrating with Prebid Server rather than only Prebid.js.

Agentic buying, meanwhile, reached the television home screen. LG Ad Solutions and Magnite announced a three-year extension under which SpringServe remains LG's exclusive CTV video ad server and LG's Home Screen inventory opens to Magnite's seller agent, PPC Land reported on October 14. LG says about 97% of its smart TV users start on the Home Screen. "The Home Screen is where the streaming experience begins and where discovery can shape what viewers choose next," said Kelly McMahon, executive vice president of global operations at LG Ad Solutions. Mike Laband, group senior vice president of revenue at Magnite, said "we're replacing manual execution with automated, high-precision workflows." PPC Land noted that pricing, performance metrics and the buyer-side agent were not disclosed, and that a DataBeat study in June found conventional programmatic buyers holding a 13.4% CPM advantage over AI agents.

Alyssa Boyle's report for AdExchanger described the first campaign, for the Northern California Toyota Dealers Association with 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy. The independent agency H/L's buyer agent talked to Magnite's seller agent inside ClearLine over the Model Context Protocol, and LG and H/L approved the agent-built plan before launch. The format is a hero takeover with video on the left and a still image on the right; audio plays only when a viewer hovers over the video with the remote. "People hate advertising, but we know it works," said Jeremy Cobb, a vice president at H/L. "Just because [TV] is the biggest screen in the house doesn't mean it has the most attention." Cost per reach is the main measure of success.

Not every new screen wants ads. Square's first standalone kiosk for restaurants, a 21.5-inch touch display with a built-in AI ordering assistant trained on each restaurant's menu, will not carry advertising, Mitchell Parton reported for Adweek on October 14. Diners can ask for vegetarian options or for everything under $10. In a year when retail media has turned almost every checkout into inventory, the decision stands out.

Data as an asset in bankruptcy

The previous edition led with Disney's $20m licence for Character.ai's intellectual property. The development on October 14 concerned what that licence leaves behind. Attorneys general from 39 states and the District of Columbia filed a 28-page notice in the Delaware bankruptcy court, setting out nine conditions for any buyer of Character.ai's app or its users' chats, PPC Land reported. The notice was filed on the day of the first-day hearing in case 26-11603 before Judge Brendan L. Shannon, and reserves the right to object and to seek a consumer privacy ombudsman.

The logic is straightforward. Disney's non-exclusive licence covers code and patents but excludes user data, so any second bidder for the app would in effect be buying chats, health disclosures and device data. The notice cites "the highly sensitive nature of the conversations many users have with Character.AI chatbot characters." Its conditions include age assurance beyond self-declared birthdates, the removal of characters posing as therapists, doctors or lawyers, crisis protocols, account-level advertising opt-outs that honour past choices, no use of chats for training or advertising beyond what users agreed to, and a chance for users to delete their data before any sale. Character.ai's advertising revenue rose from about $0.5m in July 2025 to about $2.5m in August 2026. Earlier filings put the company's current and past users at about 163 million. Rival bids are due by November 20, with an auction on November 23 and a sale hearing on November 24. PPC Land drew the comparison with Spirit Airlines, whose deidentified data Google bought for $10 million.

What search engines will read

The rest of the window's search news was about how machines read what publishers put online. Google posted the first video in a series it calls The Non-Canonical Cabinet, in which Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin discussed how Google Search handles URLs, Schwartz reported on October 14. Keywords in a URL or domain are an "incredibly small signal," Illyes said; hyphens remain preferable to underscores, and Google can detect spam in URLs. The video covered internationalised domains and Punycode as well as emoji in paths and domains.

PDFs got a less certain treatment. In episode 115 of Search Off the Record, published October 13, Martin Splitt and John Mueller explained that Google converts PDFs to HTML during indexing and that converted PDFs can appear in AI Overviews and AI Mode. Asked about size, neither could name the limit. Google's own documentation lists it as 64MB, PPC Land reported on October 14, against 2MB for HTML since February 3. "I assume that we have a larger file limit, just the same as we do for videos and images," Splitt said. Google rarely refetches PDFs, so a new filename may work better than editing a document in place. Mueller's closing request was brief: "And no LLMs.txt in PDFs, please."

Brands, unable to control what chatbots say about them, are trying to control what the chatbots read. Sam Bradley reported for Digiday on October 14 that Fender and Marshall are turning to content series to improve AI search performance. Fender rebuilt its site from a transactional storefront into a storytelling platform with heritage and artist videos, including a YouTube series for the Telecaster's 75th anniversary. Marshall's "Dead Venues" series stages gigs in defunct venues such as New York's China Chalet. A Skyword survey found that seven in ten US consumers use ChatGPT or AI summaries when researching products, and a Kantar survey found 75% of marketers planning to raise spend on visibility in AI assistants next year. "AI is making it easier for consumers to find answers, but it's also making it harder for brands to be remembered," said Andrew Wheeler, chief executive of Skyword. Urvashi Manral of Attention Arc was more concise: "ChatGPT is the new word of mouth." Stephani Estes, chief media officer at The Shipyard, was more cautious: "I don't know that there is a silver bullet yet."

Commerce through those AI surfaces depends on plumbing that Google is still laying. PPC News Feed reported on October 14 that the Universal Commerce Protocol integration hub is live for US merchants in Merchant Center, after Barry Schwartz shared it on LinkedIn. The hub sets out three steps: an implementation guide for AI Mode, Gemini and Search, a sandbox, and production validation before going live. UCP enables a checkout button on eligible listings in AI Mode and Gemini; Australia and Canada follow next year. Merchant Center's video plumbing, by contrast, has a new development since the previous edition. Google has now confirmed that product video links stuck in processing are primarily a display discrepancy and that engineers are working on a backend fix, PPC News Feed reported on October 14, after Arpan Banerjee shared Google's email. Merchants are told not to edit the video_link attribute, because changes "could restart the review timeline and exacerbate delays." No resolution date was given.

Publishers, networks and the public

Publishers looking for revenue beyond search referrals are testing models with poor records. Outdoor Life, a 128-year-old title, was bought on October 7 by eFormed Ventures of Bend, Oregon, from Recurrent Ventures. Mark Stenberg reported for Adweek on October 14 that the new owner plans to turn the magazine into an AI-powered marketplace on its Resonance platform, selling on-site rather than through affiliate links. Outdoor Life drove more than $20m in purchases last year, but commissions top out around 14% to 15%, and Amazon roughly halved its rates this spring. "Content to commerce works for the consumer," said Mike Morford, a managing partner at eFormed. "Just not the businesses." His partner Tom Beusse insisted the plan was not a leap: "We are not buying a commerce business that is about to start. We are just directing it differently." Stenberg weighed it against the costly bets at Food52, Hodinkee and The Pro's Closet, which ran to hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of jobs.

Streaming's largest company is trimming too. Netflix confirmed it is laying off about 6% of its staff, roughly 1,000 jobs, Bill Bradley reported for Adweek on October 14, with product, technology, legal and HR hit hardest. It is the company's largest cut since 2022, and Netflix said it remained on track for its full-year forecast. The co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters wrote that delivering on the company's mission "requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources."

At CNN, the question of access took a different form. After Judge Timothy Kelly issued a preliminary injunction finding that the White House press ban likely violated the First Amendment, the network debuted a 60-second promo with the tagline "Freedom of the press is not optional", Mark Mwachiro reported for Adweek's TVNewser on October 14. Made by CNN's in-house marketing team, it intercuts quotes from five former presidents with CNN talent. "We will be patient, and no matter how long it takes, we will continue to protect our liberties," Mark Thompson wrote to staff. CNN, MS NOW and Politico can keep reporting from the White House while the administration appeals.

James Hercher, in an AdExchanger column published on October 14, asked whether the ad industry has lost the pulse of American consumers. Writing after Advertising Week New York and Zeta Live, he described jargon that "may as well be Martian to 99% of America," provocative AI-generated ads from large brands, and celebrity-led business marketing, and argued that the industry has outsourced its sense of public mood to data. He cited the comedian Trevor Noah, who told an audience that week that understanding why people laugh is a way of understanding who they are.

What the day added up to

Read together, the window's stories trace one argument about control, and about who decides how much of it others receive. Google gave advertisers a percentage dial for Display and partner spend, then described it as best-effort and attached a February 2027 migration. Meta reported an 18.9% conversion gain from a model that advertisers cannot see into. OpenAI removed the tags that told publishers which visits it sent, while hiring account managers to sell its ads. Apple can rewrite its developer agreement at any time and keeps a blocklist whose reasons it does not publish; IAB Tech Lab and Mozilla answered with servers that publishers and companies would run themselves. Prebid's working group proposed to take the first look at the auction away from Google's ad server, and 40 attorneys general told any buyer of Character.ai's chats what it could and could not do with them.

None of these settles the matter. Google's caps are progressive and partial, the Prebid model awaits Google's cooperation, and the Character.ai sale runs to a November 23 auction. Each, though, is a reminder that the controls advertisers, publishers and users hold are usually granted by someone else, on terms that someone else can change.

By the numbers

$50 a day
Google's own example of a 5% Display cap on a $1,000 average daily budget, applied on a best-effort basis.
Google Ads lets advertisers limit Display and partner spend by percentage

18.9%
Conversion improvement Meta attributes to its GEM ads model, published without a baseline or methodology.
Meta says its GEM ads model lifted conversions 18.9% across its apps

40
State and District of Columbia attorneys general setting nine conditions for any buyer of Character.ai's chats.
Character.ai faces 40 attorneys general over who can buy its users' chats

25%
Share of consumers DoubleVerify found had bought on social media, down from 30% a year earlier.
Social purchases drop to 25% from 30%, DoubleVerify surveys show

64MB
PDF file size limit in Google's documentation, which two of its own search advocates could not name.
Google podcast hosts can't name the PDF crawl limit it documents as 64MB