Google Ads

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

Pop-art split panel: long calendar marked 11 YEARS on the left, short calendar marked 37 MONTHS on the right, Google Ads dashboard and BigQuery arrow between

Google Ads Cut Granular Data to 37 Months (17 Months After Promising 11 Years)

Google Ads will cut granular reporting retention from 11 years to 37 months on June 1, 2026, roughly 17 months after announcing the longer window. Daily, hourly, and weekly data older than 37 months will be unreachable through the Google Ads API and scripts; queries that ignore the cap return

Microsoft Advertising publisher URL report dashboard with conversion and spend columns lit up next to a muted Google Performance Max placeholder, pop-art editorial style

Microsoft Ads Tied PMax Conversions to Each Publisher URL Google Still Hides

Microsoft Advertising added conversion and spend metrics to its Performance Max Website Publisher URL report in late April 2026, exposing spend tied to specific publisher domains for the first time. Google Performance Max only added Search Partner placement visibility in February 2026, and its channel-level data remains read-only. The practical

Pop art style calendar page with June 10 marked in bold red, a Google Ads API v20 version label, and faded CRT bid manager dashboards behind it

Google Ads API v20 Sunsets June 10 and Your Bid Manager Probably Hasn't Migrated

Google Ads API v20 sunsets on June 10, 2026, after which every request hitting that version returns a hard failure. That gives agencies roughly 40 days to identify which third-party bid managers, ad servers, attribution platforms, and reporting scripts still call v20, and to confirm vendor migrations to v21 or

Google Ads Budget Allocation: A Spreadsheet You Can Steal (and the 70/20/10 Reason It Works)

Google Ads budget allocation in 2026 looks roughly like 70% to Performance Max, 20% to brand search, 10% to standard testing campaigns, with a daily cap set at 10x to 20x target CPA. The reason that split holds is not the percentages. It is that PMax controls the channel mix