Google Ads

Pop-art illustration of a Google Ads dashboard with a rising CPC line, a September calendar marker, and a DSA campaign tag being upgraded to an AI Max badge.

AI Max Holdouts Kept CPCs Flat. Their DSAs Auto-Upgrade in September.

Six agencies tracked Google's AI Max for Search through its first year and reported CPC increases of 10 to 25 percent depending on adoption depth, alongside year-over-year search spend up 7 to 15 percent. Holdouts who stayed on Dynamic Search Ads kept their search CPCs roughly flat. That

Pop-art illustration of a US map split into treatment and control regions, with three dashboards labeled GeoX, Meridian Studio, and Data Manager piping into a Google Cloud node.

Google Open-Sourced Meridian GeoX. The Holdout Now Lives in Google's Stack.

Google announced three measurement tools at Google Marketing Live on May 5, 2026: Meridian GeoX (open-source geographic incrementality), Meridian Studio (a Google Cloud MMM platform), and a Data Manager map view that visualizes data flow across BigQuery, HubSpot, Shopify, and Drive. GeoX testing begins later this year. Studio runs on

Ask.com Closed on May 1 and Quietly Trimmed Google's Search Partners Network

Ask.com officially shut down on May 1, 2026 after a 30-year run that began as Ask Jeeves in 1996. Parent company IAC posted a farewell message stating it had decided to discontinue its search business entirely, with no buyer and no spin-off announced. Ask.com was a publicly listed

Pop-art smartphone showing a Google search ad tagged with a rounded AI pill label and a sponsored product grid mixing organic and ad tiles below.

Google's Undefined 'AI' Label Just Made Your AI Max Creative a CTR Variable

Google began testing an "AI" label on mobile search ads in late April 2026, with two design variants (a rounded pill background and an information icon) and neither of which surfaces a tooltip or explanation when tapped. The label is undefined to users, which means Google can ship

Pop art illustration of a Google Ads dashboard with a glowing AI Brief preview pane, plain English instruction notes, and the Gemini sparkle icon

Google's AI Brief Lets You Preview AI Max Output Before It Ships

Google announced AI Brief on April 30, 2026: a Gemini-powered control inside AI Max for Search that takes natural-language instructions across messaging, matching, and audience guidelines. The shift that matters is the preview pane, which surfaces sample assets and search matches before any spend leaves the account. Until AI Brief,

Pop-art illustration of Google Ads PMax campaign settings with Search Partners and Display Network checkboxes, partner network toggled off, audit trail icon locked behind padlock

PMax Alpha Lets You Cut Partner Networks Without Showing What You'd Lose

Google launched an alpha test inside Performance Max that gives advertisers two independent checkboxes for the Search Partner Network and the Google Display Network, letting them exclude either, both, or neither at the campaign level. The feature was first surfaced by practitioners on LinkedIn in early May 2026, not by