Advertising Platforms Changed A Lot in Summer 2026

Summers are full of fun, enjoyment, and the odd heartbreak if you're an England football fan like me. Whilst much of the world is heading off on vacations, major advertising platforms have been hard at work rolling out some of their biggest updates in years.

And whilst AI has been the headline for a while now, this summer has made one thing particularly clear: AI is no longer just helping marketers create ads. It's increasingly deciding who sees them, what they see, where they land, and how campaigns are managed.

From AI-powered search to automated campaign management and even AI helping marketers analyze their own data, here's what marketers should know.

Google has continued its move away from traditional search results and towards AI-powered search experiences.

Ads can now appear in AI Overviews, whilst Google is also testing new advertising formats within AI Mode. These include conversational ads and Highlighted Answers, which allow relevant ads to appear alongside AI-generated recommendations. [1]

This changes how people discover products and services.

Search is becoming conversational. Instead of typing a few keywords, clicking a result, and starting again, users can ask a question, ask a follow-up question, and continue researching within the same experience.

For advertisers, this means the old idea of simply targeting the right keyword is becoming less important.

Your website, products, creative, and messaging all need to give Google's AI enough information to understand what you offer and when you might be relevant.

Google has also continued to push AI Max, its AI-powered optimization layer for Search campaigns.

AI Max uses AI to expand the searches your ads can appear for, customize ad text and, through Final URL expansion, determine which landing page is most relevant to a particular search. [2]

This is another step away from the traditional approach of manually deciding exactly which keyword, ad, and landing page to use for every search.

And Google is making the transition difficult to ignore.

AI Max has now moved out of beta, and Google says campaigns using automatically created assets and campaign-level broad match settings will begin being automatically upgraded to AI Max from September 2026. Dynamic Search Ads are also being phased out, with their automatic migration now scheduled for February 2027. [3]

AI is changing the experience inside the advertising platforms.

Google has been rolling out Ask Advisor, an AI-powered collaborator designed to connect information across Google Ads, Analytics, and Merchant Center. It can answer questions about performance, identify opportunities, and help marketers take action. [4]

Google is also bringing more AI and "agentic" capabilities into Google Ads and Analytics. In Analytics, AI-powered features can summarize important performance changes and help marketers investigate what is happening in their data. [5]

This is an important distinction:

The campaign manager of the future may spend less time changing bids and building reports and more time deciding whether AI recommendations actually make sense for the business.

The same shift is happening with creative.

Meta has continued expanding its AI-powered creative tools, including Muse Image, which is being brought into Advantage+ creative. The technology can generate and edit images, helping advertisers create more variations and adapt creative for different requirements. [6]

Google is doing something similar. Its Demand Gen campaigns are gaining more AI-powered creative capabilities, while Asset Studio makes it easier to create different video assets from a storyboard, including horizontal and vertical versions. [7]

As a result, producing creative is becoming dramatically faster.

But this doesn't mean creative strategy is becoming less important.

Quite the opposite.

When every advertiser can produce dozens of variations in minutes, having more creative isn't necessarily an advantage. Knowing which creative to produce, what your brand should stand for, and what message you want to communicate matters even more.

AI gives options, but it can't decide what your business should mean to a customer.

Perhaps the biggest change this summer isn't a new feature.

It's the increasing importance of having good data.

As Google and Meta take more control over targeting, bidding, creative, and campaign optimization, advertisers have less direct control over the individual decisions being made inside the platforms.

That makes the information we give those platforms incredibly important.

If you're telling Google that a low-quality inquiry is a valuable conversion, Google's AI will try to find more people like the person who submitted that inquiry.

If Meta is receiving incomplete purchase or lead data, its optimization systems are working with an incomplete picture.

Google has also changed how its target-based bidding systems behave for budget-limited campaigns. The changes, which began rolling out globally from August 17, are designed to make performance more consistent with the targets advertisers have set. [8]

The more automation we introduce, the more important it becomes to ensure the foundations underneath it are correct.

If one theme ties all these updates together, it's this:

Advertising platforms are taking more responsibility for execution.

Google and Meta are increasingly deciding who to target, which creative to show, which searches to match, and how to optimize campaigns.

This changes what marketers need to do well.

The businesses that succeed won't necessarily be those with the biggest budgets or the most complicated campaigns. They'll be the ones that give these platforms the right information, creative, measurement, and business objectives.