Google turns off Search for K-12 students as EU adviser weighs Gemini

For most of its history Google has treated access to Search as something close to a public utility, available to anyone with a browser and, in schools, to anyone with a Chromebook. On Tuesday, November 3, the company said that for one large group of users the default would flip. Google Search, Gemini, Gemini Notebook and Gemini in Classroom will be switched off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators turn them on. The same day, an adviser to the European Union's highest court set out when a Gemini answer can breach the rights of press publishers, and Amazon told advertisers that from January it will count roughly 63% fewer display impressions on its own store. Each item, in its own way, is about who controls the terms on which information and attention are delivered, and each lands in a week when many of the industry's rules are being rewritten by the platforms that set them.

Google pulls Search out of the classroom

PPC Land reported that Google will cut Search for K-12 students in schools that keep AI off. The change covers Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search, each switchable separately by administrators. The detail that matters is in Google's clarification: the Search that schools can enable still includes AI Mode and AI Overviews, which Google describes as part of the product. A school cannot, in other words, turn on classic Search and leave the AI layer off. "Search and A.I. are deeply integrated," Chris Phillips, vice president for education at Google, told The New York Times. Google has given no date beyond "the coming months," while the Times reported early next year.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable reported at 9:44 Eastern that Google will turn off Search for K-12 schools and is testing a learning beta. Google said it was acting because "schools, teachers, leading researchers, and policymakers" had asked it to. "Access to these products will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until school administrators explicitly turn them on," the company wrote, adding: "Our goal is simple: provide school leaders the control and confidence to use AI products in classrooms as they see fit." Google also published a 29-page report, "AI in Education: From potential to practice," and said Guided Learning, already globally available in Google Classroom from November 3, will reach Search for student accounts through a pilot in selected US schools later in November.

The reaction was not uniformly grateful. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wrote on X: "Google is trying to use its monopoly power to force AI into our public schools." The objection is precise. A district that wants students to use Google Search must now accept AI Overviews and AI Mode as the price of entry, because the off switch is all or nothing. Google's own research, cited in the report, points to a Guided Learning trial in Sierra Leone that lifted results by 0.26 standard deviations across 48 maths classrooms and nearly 1,800 students. NotebookLM, renamed Gemini Notebook on July 16, 2026, had more than 30 million users. The scale of the education market, and the habits formed in it, explain why the default matters to Google.

An EU adviser draws a line for Gemini

The legal question of what a chatbot owes the publishers it summarises reached the Court of Justice of the EU in earnest. PPC Land reported that Google's Gemini can infringe press publishers' rights in two ways, an EU court adviser says. Advocate General Maciej Szpunar delivered a non-binding opinion in case C-250/25, Like Company v Google Ireland Limited, which the Court's press release calls the first generative AI case to reach it. The opinion runs to 240 numbered points and 243 footnotes.

The facts are small and telling. The dispute concerns a Gemini answer summarising an article on the Hungarian site balatonkornyeke.hu from July 21, 2023. Gemini's answer described a pool 25 metres long, 15 metres wide and 5 metres deep holding 1,000 cubic metres, and PPC Land reported that none of those details appeared in the source. Szpunar's test is narrow. A chatbot answer can infringe press publishers' rights only if the chatbot got around a paywall or a bot block, or if its answer copies the article's expression so closely that a reader no longer needs the original. "A trained LLM is not a database," he wrote. He advised treating the questions about training as inadmissible, while saying the text and data mining exception applies in principle. "I cannot stress the sensitivity of those questions enough," he added. The Court has not ruled, and its judges often, though not always, follow an Advocate General's opinion.

For publishers the opinion is a partial comfort. It offers a route to claims where a model circumvents access controls or reproduces expression closely, but it treats summarising, even inaccurate summarising, as largely outside the press publishers' right. The pool that never existed is a problem of accuracy, not, on this reading, of copyright.

Google Search shows its seams

Search Engine Roundtable logged a cluster of smaller Google stories on November 3. Schwartz reported that Google AI Mode only shows links to Google Flights for flight queries: in his weekend tests, across domestic and international routes, every link in AI Mode's flight answers went to Google's own service. Natzir had first flagged it on X on October 30. "Ask AI Mode for flights, get Google Flights," Natzir wrote. "This is the type of stuff governments go after big corporations over," Schwartz added, a pointed remark given that self-preferencing is exactly the conduct the Digital Markets Act targets in Europe.

Schwartz also reported that Google is testing removing the AI Mode button from the search bar for a small group of users. Len Raleigh spotted the change on X, writing that "Google took away AI Mode in incognito / Chrome," while noting it was "just a test" because the button remained on other machines. Schwartz could not reproduce it.

Search Console had a strange few days. Schwartz reported that Google's performance reports are showing a weird spike in clicks for some sites, possibly a bug. Joy Hawkins posted a chart showing clicks up while impressions stayed flat. "Based on the CTR patterns I'm seeing I'm fairly confident it's bot traffic," she wrote. Glenn Gabe said he saw it on only a few properties. One commenter reported five times the usual clicks over the weekend. Schwartz said he had asked Google for comment.

Documentation shifted too. Google updated its help text on "Crawled, currently not indexed", Schwartz reported at 4:15 Eastern. The new text says "Google doesn't index all pages across the web," that the status is common, and that it does not necessarily indicate a problem, pointing site owners to the URL Inspection tool and a form for site-wide indexing failures. "It is a bit weird there is no mention of quality issues," Schwartz wrote. That omission is notable because John Mueller of Google said the opposite in another thread the same day. Schwartz reported that a site with only its home page indexed may have a Google search quality issue. Asked by Sarah Blocksidge on Bluesky about a client site that had been hacked and cleaned but still showed only its home page in the index, Mueller replied that "this sounds like a general quality issue that might be unrelated to the hack," while cautioning, "It's impossible to say without more information." Mueller also explained how to block pop-ups from appearing in Google Search using robots.txt, responding to a Reddit question about an age verification pop-up served from a separate domain. Blocking that domain in its own robots.txt "would generally work," he said, because Googlebot would not fetch the content during rendering.

New controls inside Google Ads

The advertising interface added options for testing and timing. PPC News Feed reported on November 3 that Performance Max now lets advertisers save asset group edits as an A/B test directly from the asset group builder. A panel labelled "Save and test asset group changes" exposes control and treatment arms, a traffic split and a duration, and successful changes are applied to the original asset group by default. Feed-only asset groups get the same treatment. No rollout date or performance data was given.

PPC News Feed also reported that Demand Gen campaigns now show promotion assets on YouTube Shorts and in-stream ads for retailers running feed-based campaigns linked to Google Merchant Center, letting discount tags appear in video formats without new creative. The change surfaced in two new FAQs on Google's "About Demand Gen campaigns" help page. And Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google Ads asset scheduling now supports day grouping, so advertisers can set schedules for all days, weekdays or weekends and stack several schedules on one asset. "Google Ads now has more flexible asset scheduling," Bia Camargo wrote on LinkedIn.

Amazon recounts the impression and Reddit sells search

The most consequential measurement change of the day came from Amazon. PPC Land reported that Amazon will drop off-screen ads from impression counts and expects 63% fewer. From January 1, 2027, Amazon Ads will stop counting display impressions on its own store when an ad starts downloading and will count them only once the ad appears on the shopper's screen. The change covers display placements on the homepage, product detail, search results and order pages. Amazon expects counts on those placements to fall by about 63% on average, with larger drops lower on the page. "Today, we count an impression when the ad starts to download to the shopper's device," the notice states. It says testing showed higher return on ad spend and lower cost per acquisition, but does not say whether billing changes. Saul Jacobs, chief marketing officer at Elevate33, posted the notice on LinkedIn on November 3 and observed that "it's definitely a departure from IAB standards." By PPC Land's arithmetic, a $5.00 CPM would become $13.51 if spend and clicks stayed the same. Google's AdSense and Ad Manager move banner counting to begin-to-render on February 17, 2027, so two of the largest sellers will reprice the display impression within weeks of each other.

Reddit, meanwhile, opened a new shelf. PPC Land reported that Reddit is testing ads in its search results for the first time, in an unsigned newsroom post on November 3. "This is an initial test with a select group of eligible advertisers," Reddit wrote. Its examples were a search for "espresso station" surfacing espresso machines and mugs, and "home office setup" surfacing desks and monitors. The post gave no markets, pricing or format. Reddit reported third-quarter advertising revenue of $847 million, up 54%, on October 29, and its shareholder letter said search referrals from outside Reddit fell by more than a million a week in October. Monetising the searches that happen inside Reddit is one obvious answer to losing the ones that start outside it.

Commerce platforms reported strong quarters. PPC Land reported that Shopify's revenue rose 32% to $3.7 billion as AI-referred orders grew 3.3 times in the three months to September 30. Gross merchandise volume reached $119.145 billion, operating income rose 66% to $568 million and free cash flow was $816 million. The AI order growth came from a base Shopify called small and did not quantify. "Shopify is uncommonly good at operating in two realities at the same time," said Harley Finkelstein, president. Shares fell 6.65% in premarket trading. Shopify's merchants face a separate risk. Mitchell Parton reported in Adweek that Shopify stores face suspected AI-driven attacks, after German software engineer Roman Zipp found a checkout redirect to a fake payment screen hidden in a third-party extension from the Shopify App Store, not in Shopify's own code.

Roku, Comscore and People Inc report

Roku's quarter showed the economics of connected TV advertising in a single line. PPC Land reported that Roku's ad revenue rose 23% to $727 million as the average impression price fell 7%, in a shareholder letter and 10-Q published on November 2. Video ad impressions grew 33%, advertising gross margin reached 63.2%, and "more than 80% of our in-stream video ad impressions were delivered programmatically," Roku wrote. Net income was $183.3 million. Roku held no earnings call and gave no outlook, as has been its practice since agreeing in June to be acquired by Fox, a deal under a Justice Department Second Request since September 8.

Comscore's figures were harsher. PPC Land reported that Comscore lost $65.5 million in the third quarter after a $57.3 million goodwill write-down. Revenue fell 14.3% to $76.2 million, largely because the Movies business was sold on May 27; excluding it, revenue fell 4.1%. Cash ended at $19.5 million. Full-year guidance of $315 million to $325 million was unchanged. "We are in the early innings of executing our ROI strategy," said Mary Margaret Curry, chief financial officer.

People Inc. described the cost of losing search. Anthony Vargas reported in AdExchanger that with search traffic down 70%, People Inc. is betting on revenue beyond site visits. Google referral traffic has fallen 70% over two years, including 22% in the third quarter after 40% in the second, and chief executive Neil Vogel said AI Overviews appear at the top of 90% of Google searches tied to its content. Core sessions fell 26%. Digital revenue still rose 2% to $289 million, the twelfth consecutive quarter of growth, because non-session revenue, now 43% of digital, grew 15% while licensing grew 49%. Advertising revenue fell 8%. Chairman Barry Diller called it a "critical loss of sessions."

The Trade Desk reached into its past. PPC Land reported that The Trade Desk brought back co-founder Dave Pickles three years after his CTO exit, to establish and lead a new CTO Council with input into the core technology and product roadmap, including agentic capabilities. Pickles ran the company's technology for 13 years before stepping down in 2023. "This is a pivotal crossroads for our company and the industry," said Jeff Green, chief executive. Trishla Ostwal reported in Adweek that The Trade Desk brings back Pickles amid growing pains, noting the announcement came less than a week before third-quarter results guided to at least $650 million, about 12% below a year earlier, with the stock 91% below its peak. The company did not say whether Pickles returns full time or rejoins the board.

Apple opens Siri and repaints the web

Apple's 27.3 betas carried three changes that touch advertisers and publishers. PPC Land reported that Apple opened Siri AI to all developers, though apps cannot ship it until spring. A developer preview in the iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS 27.3 betas lets any app hand its own custom actions to Siri AI through App Intents, where previously only 13 primary schema domains were supported. App Store submission opens in the spring, and Apple has not published usage terms. "Siri AI is currently unavailable in the EU in iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS," Apple noted.

PPC Land also reported that Safari's new dark mode repaints light websites without the sites knowing. Adaptive Dark Mode in the Safari 27.3 beta inverts luminosity while preserving hue, targets a 4.5 to 1 text contrast ratio and leaves most images untouched. "Safari prevents websites from detecting when Adaptive Dark Mode has been applied," WebKit wrote. WebKit cited Chrome figures showing almost 40% of page loads come from dark-mode users while only 10% of page loads support dark mode. For brands that specify colours precisely, and for ad creative rendered as HTML, the recolouring happens without any signal to the page.

And PPC Land reported that Apple's AI Health app reached 10 languages in beta, but not German. The redesigned app works in the iOS 27.3 developer beta in global English, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese, while German, Italian, Dutch, Danish and Swedish are missing despite Apple Intelligence running in all five. It reaches the public "as a free software update later this year," Apple said.

Attention, clean rooms and the measurement plumbing

Adelaide's attention metric spread further. PPC Land reported that Adelaide gained four video curators as its AU ecosystem hit 100 partners: Pixability, Sightly, Silverpush and Cadent VuePlanner will use AU to benchmark curated YouTube, connected TV and online video against standard buys. "Reaching 100 partners shows that AU is gaining traction as a standard," said chief executive Marc Guldimann. Adelaide had counted 87 companies on October 14. Separately, PPC Land reported that Teads lets advertisers cut low-attention placements with an Adelaide AU floor, making the 0 to 100 score available worldwide in Teads Ad Manager from November 3. "Our priority is to give advertisers frictionless access to the industry's leading media quality metrics," said Neala Brown, Teads' global head of data. Teads reports third-quarter results on November 5, after second-quarter revenue fell 17%.

The standards bodies finished a long-running piece of work. PPC Land reported that IAB Tech Lab's clean room rules allow unhashed emails under technical controls. The final Guidelines for Providing ECAPI Events to Data Clean Rooms, published November 3, set a Parquet format for bulk uploads and, unlike the August draft, permit unhashed identifiers without field-level encryption where technical controls enforce the same access limits. "Sensitive plaintext data should always be protected before sharing with another party," the text says. The schema maps 101 fields by PPC Land's count.

Nielsen added two regional studies. PPC Land reported that Nielsen's CMI Journey tracks which of more than 50 media sway New Zealand buying decisions, across 30 categories and five decision phases. Consumers "don't make decisions in a straight line," said Helene Maurer, Nielsen's commercial director for New Zealand. And PPC Land reported that social ad spend rose 40% in Malaysia's festive March, as Chinese New Year, Ramadan and Hari Raya Aidilfitri ran close together. Tracked spend reached RM604.4 million, social rose to RM186 million and free-to-air TV remained largest at RM271.0 million. "Festive shopping isn't a single event," said Adrienne Wong of Nielsen.

Television's lobby made its case to pharma. PPC Land reported that pharma TV ad spend dropped 4% in 2025 as digital gained 21%, VAB data shows. The 81-page guide, released November 3, puts 2025 pharma TV spend at $6.9 billion and digital at $18.7 billion, or 73% of the total. It also counts 296 FDA letters about promotional material between September 9, 2025 and September 30, 2026, 212 of them warning letters, 201 concerning branded websites. "The evidence is compelling," said Jason Wiese of VAB.

Out of home and mobile rounded out the data. PPC Land reported that VIOOH gained 254 JCDecaux screens in the Baltics for automated buying across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, lifting its markets from 46 to 49. And PPC Land reported that US rideshare app downloads fell 20%, Sensor Tower found, over the first nine months of 2026, even as digital ad spend by Uber, Lyft and Waymo rose 8% and paid sources supplied 24% of downloads, up from 15%. "Uber's scale keeps it on top in the US, where rising ad spend has done little to boost adoption or shift market share," said Seema Shah of Sensor Tower.

Agents, from pitch decks to production

The word "agentic" was everywhere, and one essay tried to pin it down. PPC Land reported that Shelly Palmer's four questions sort real AI agents from rebranded chatbots: who decides the steps, who approves actions, whether the system learns and whom the agent works for. "'Agentic marketing' currently means whatever the vendor selling it needs it to mean," Palmer wrote. Anthony Katsur, chief executive of IAB Tech Lab, agreed on X: "A new name does not create agency."

Some products now do more than talk. PPC Land reported that Supermetrics lets Claude build ad campaigns on six platforms, paused by default, covering Google Ads, Meta, Microsoft Advertising, TikTok, LinkedIn and Snapchat, with new campaigns held until a person approves them. More than 6,000 customers have used its Claude connector since February. "We believe the next phase of marketing AI is about closing that gap," said Mikael Thuneberg, co-chief executive. James Hercher reported in AdExchanger that Chord bought its rival Zenlytic to build an agentic version of a CDP, for $5 million; the combined company has about 30 staff, some 60 customers and a run rate nearing $10 million. And Joanna Gerber reported in AdExchanger that Digital Culture Group wants to stop brands going viral for the wrong reasons, with a Resonance Studio module that scores creative before launch. Chief executive Crystal Foote said ChatGPT graded a withdrawn Converse ad a B minus while her system gave it an F, citing hate symbols.

YouTube automated a chore for creators. PPC Land reported that YouTube gives creators four AI tracks to clear music copyright claims, expanding a music generator in its Replace song tool to most countries outside the European Economic Area. Creators can generate four royalty-free instrumentals of three minutes each, and the Content ID claim is removed once the audio is replaced.

Health, testimonials and political creators

Grindr moved into healthcare. PPC Land reported that Grindr acquired PrEP provider Freddie for $250 million, completing the purchase of parent PurposeMed on November 2 for $190 million in cash and $60 million in stock, with up to $70 million more tied to 2027 targets. Freddie has helped more than 55,000 patients get PrEP. "Together, we have an opportunity to prevent thousands of new HIV infections a year," said chief executive George Arison. The announcement did not say how patient data will be kept apart from advertising.

LinkedIn argued for customers as a channel. PPC Land reported that LinkedIn says customer stories drove a 5.8x return for Rippling's AI launch, drawing on a survey of 750 B2B buyers and 700 award-entered campaigns. Testimonials appeared in 64% of high-performing campaigns against 16% of weak ones. "Every company is making AI claims right now," said Emmy Quinn of Rippling. The post did not define the return.

Michael Bürgi reported in Digiday that agency executives want retail media considered beyond the lower funnel. Aisha Khan, president of commerce for North America at her agency, noted that more than 80% of sales still happen in store while less than 5% of retail media goes to in-store media. "There's still tremendous growth to be had in the commerce landscape," she said. Laurel Burton of Instrument added: "My prediction is the exact opposite that websites are dying."

Alyssa Mercante reported in Digiday on how political creators juggle platforms for reach, revenue and rules. Aaron Parnas said 450 million Instagram views last month earned nothing, while Substack supplies about 97% of his revenue. Ryan Schram of Syracuse University's Center for the Creator Economy said YouTube shares 55% of ad revenue. "Social media is an afterthought," said Lachlan Cartwright of Breaker Media.

Election night, and the people behind the screens

Tuesday was also the US midterm election. Mark Mwachiro reported in Adweek that ABC, Fox News and NewsNation prepared for an unpredictable election night. ABC's Voter Poll covers 45 statewide polls with a national sample about three times the size of the 2024 exit poll, and Fox added an AI-powered election chatbot to its app. "Midterm elections have much lower turnout than presidential elections," said Chris Stirewalt of NewsNation.

Adweek's November issue profiled builders. Richard Lowe reported that Macro's Charles D. King is building a billion-dollar entertainment company, the 2027 Adweek and Adcolor Beacon Award winner, whose company acquired the streamer Allblk in September. "I have been looking at Allblk for 12 years," King said. Brandon Hardin presented the 2026 Adweek Innovator 50, including Tyler Denk of beehiiv, whose ad network doubled to $15 million in annual recurring revenue. And Kendra Barnett reported that martech entrepreneur Adam Robinson was among nine people killed in a Florida plane crash on November 1, when a Learjet 60 bound for the Bahamas came down in Palm Beach County. TMZ reported he was 44; his wife and two young children were also aboard.

Holiday campaigns lean on song and celebrity

The holiday season's big British launch arrived. Rebecca Stewart reported that Kristin Scott Thomas is no ordinary grandma in John Lewis' holiday campaign, a spot of more than three minutes from Saatchi & Saatchi, the 20th in the series, with Paul Whitehouse voicing a wooden dog called Pickles and Sam Fender covering a Rolling Stones song. Its line is "Don't Give Up on Giving." Stewart also reported that Gap's holiday choir tradition reaches new heights with a Jackson 5 cover, with three US choirs singing "I'll Be There" in the campaign's third year.

Hannah Bowler reported that SharkNinja's holiday ad puts David Beckham's gadgets at the mercy of his celebrity friends, with Tom Brady, Kevin Hart and Aryna Sabalenka house-sitting in the company's first global holiday campaign, made in-house. And Robert Klara reported that Ben Cohen is going guerrilla in his next push to free Ben & Jerry's from Magnum Ice Cream Company, with a campaign built around 200 miniature anthropomorphic ice cream pints, after security turned him away in Amsterdam in April with a 100,000-signature petition. In a day dominated by platforms resetting defaults, from classrooms to impression counts, the season's advertisers were still betting on the oldest default of all: a song, a famous face and a story about giving.