Monday, August 17, 2026

The Wall Street Journal reports Meta's future AI spending obligations may total nearly $700 billion—far exceeding previous disclosures.

Google is deploying generative AI in Performance Max to automatically resize video ads into missing aspect ratios, with an opt-out deadline of September 4th.

iPullRank's analysis of 13.1 billion searches shows ChatGPT receives more paid clicks from Google than any other top destination, suggesting paid search is becoming a key channel between Google and AI tools.

Google confirmed a logging bug in Search Console's Generative AI in Search performance report causing artificially low impression counts since August 13.

ByteDance has partnered with the Motion Picture Association to address copyright infringement risks from AI-generated content.

Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin argues advertisers must master fundamentals and align bidding strategies to business goals, not just react to platform automation changes.

Google Search Console's performance reports are showing widespread drops in impressions and clicks starting mid-August, likely due to a bug.

Google has scrapped a test that auto-generated AI images summarizing recipes in Search, after creators objected that it bypassed their original photography and content work.

Google's August 17 Smart Bidding rollout will fundamentally alter how Target CPA and Target ROAS bidding work, prompting PPC professionals to reconsider long-established strategies.

Google's research demonstrates that large language models struggle to recall facts when questions reverse the typical subject/object entity order.

Anthropic disclosed details about its AI text watermarking system and the methods that can bypass it.

Google is making view-through conversion optimization video-only in Demand Gen campaigns, expanding it to Display with CPM billing, and enabling it by default for new campaigns.

Fractl's analysis of AI model brand recall found that traditional SEO authority doesn't guarantee visibility in LLM answers—third-party coverage and category alignment matter more.

RESONEO's analysis of 1,200 ChatGPT answers reveals three distinct retrieval layers—OpenAI's own index (labrador), cached Google results, and live-fetched pages—each with different staleness and citation rules.

Google announced Friday that Search is now running on Gemini 3.7 Flash, its newest AI model designed for coding and agentic tasks.

Google is experimenting with a redesigned review star display in mobile sponsored results that makes ratings more prominent.

Apple has expanded Applebot's infrastructure with over 4,600 new IP addresses to support crawling for Siri and Apple Intelligence.

SEOFOMO News benchmarked 1,000 top websites on AI-agent readiness and found most are unprepared, with an average score of 54/100 and over a third falling below 50.

Microsoft Advertising is experimenting with larger, full-block images in Bing sponsored search results.

Google is experimenting with blue hyperlinks embedded in sponsored ad descriptions that users can click directly.

Google is actively recruiting product managers focused on content automation across two U.S. offices.

Google has refined view-through conversion tracking and billing for Demand Gen campaigns with increased emphasis on video asset optimization.

Research from Meltwater and LinkedIn analyzing 9.5 million citations found that individual profiles drive three-quarters of all LinkedIn citations in AI systems.