Google's ad growth slows to 10.5% as AI Mode ads go to 10 more markets – PPC Land

Alphabet's Q3 ad revenue rose 10.5% to about $82 billion as AI Mode squeezed search ad slots, and Google said ads in AI Mode would now reach 10 more markets.Alphabet’s quarterly results, published after the market closed on Wednesday, October 28, contained a number large enough to reassure almost anyone: revenue of $127.6 billion, up 25% from $102.3 billion a year earlier, and a revenue run rate that Sundar Pichai described as half a trillion dollars. “We had a strong quarter and are now on a half-trillion dollar revenue run rate,” the chief executive said. Investors were not reassured. Shares fell about 7% in after-hours trading and later by more than 11%. The reason sat inside the advertising line, which for two decades has paid for everything else Google does.Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google’s ad revenue rose 10.5% while overall revenue rose 25%. Adweek’s Kendra Barnett put advertising at $82 billion, short of the $83.5 billion analysts expected, with total revenue also slightly below the $127.93 billion consensus and earnings per share of $2.12 against expectations of $2.99, a decline attributed to an unrealised loss on Alphabet’s stake in SpaceX. Search growth slowed to 12%, from 17% in the second quarter. James Hercher of AdExchanger, writing under the headline asking whether Google is even an ad business any more, put search advertising at $63.4 billion, up from $56.6 billion a year earlier, and YouTube ads at $11.2 billion.The cloud business is where the growth went. Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion. “Google Cloud revenues grew 103%, powered by huge demand for our AI infrastructure and AI solutions,” Pichai said. Adweek reported $561 billion in contracted future cloud revenue and capital expenditure of $51.4 billion in the quarter. Pichai said first-party model APIs now process 32 billion tokens a minute, more than four times the rate a year earlier, and that the Gemini app has reached 1 billion users. Hercher counted that terms such as “Argon”, “Carbon”, “PyTorch” and “Genie” came up 21 times on the call, while the network, DV360, mobile, connected TV and web display businesses barely came up at all.The awkward explanation for the slowdown came from Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer. He cited foreign exchange, one-off pullbacks by Asia-Pacific advertisers after the EU ended its de minimis customs exemption, and AI Mode, which is growing fast and carries fewer ads than a conventional results page. “The strong growth in AI Mode queries had an impact,” Schindler said. He insisted the company was comfortable: “To be clear, we feel very good about our trajectory here.” Chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi argued that “our AI investments in search are driving our highest query growth in half a decade”. Pichai said AI Mode queries are on average three times longer than standard searches, and that Google handles more than 50 billion visual searches a month.Google’s remedy for fewer ads in AI Mode is more AI Mode with ads. Hours after the results, Schwartz reported that Google is expanding ads in AI Mode to 10 more countries and launching multiturn ads in the United States. The new markets are Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore, with Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom to follow in the fourth quarter. Multiturn ads can appear on responses to follow-up questions as a conversation continues. “Multiturn ads show up on responses to follow-up user queries as users engage in back and forth conversations with AI Mode,” Google said, adding that they will be labelled “Sponsored”. Google also claimed that “click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode”, a statement Schwartz questioned for text links. Ads first appeared in AI Mode in May 2025.Microsoft had an easier evening. Schwartz reported that Bing search advertising revenue rose 12% while Microsoft’s overall revenue rose 19% in its fiscal first quarter of 2027, which ended in September. Search and news advertising excluding traffic acquisition costs accelerated from 10% growth in the previous quarter. Group revenue reached $92.3 billion and operating income $45.9 billion, and the shares rose more than 7% after hours. “We are delivering greater capability, choice, control, and cost efficiency for customers across our entire stack,” said Satya Nadella.Third-party traffic estimates tell a less flattering story for Bing. PPC Land reported on October 28 that the SEO agency OneLittleWeb, ranking 7,202 websites with estimates from Semrush, Ahrefs and Aitools.xyz for October 2025 to September 2026, found Bing’s browser visits down 45.64% to 23.97 billion, the largest decline of any site tracked. Google took 1.21 trillion visits, a 31.11% share, and ChatGPT ranked fifth with 70.78 billion, up 35.86%. AI sources sent 7.46 billion visits to tracked sites, about 0.2% of the total, against 481.3 billion from search engines. “People may use AI tools heavily, but much of that activity stays inside the AI product itself,” OneLittleWeb wrote. PPC Land noted that the figures count estimated visits rather than people, class YouTube as a search engine and conflict with Microsoft’s claim of five straight years of share gains.The more Google can keep inside its own surfaces, the less it depends on sending people elsewhere. On October 28 the company announced a preview of its Connected Apps Platform, which lets developers build apps that run inside Google Search and the Gemini app. Developers connect through a cloud-hosted MCP server, or through Android’s AppFunctions APIs, and register and submit apps in a new Google Connected Console, choosing whether each goes live in Search, Gemini or both. Google described it as a way to “build once and reach high-intent users across both Search and the Gemini app.” More than 50 Connected Apps already exist across the two surfaces, and Adobe, Experian, Localiza and Peloton are live in Gemini and coming to Search “in the coming weeks”. Searchers see an app only after adding it in their personal settings. PPC Land reported that the “more than 50” figure is hard to reconcile with a Google help page that listed 41 Gemini connected apps in August, and that the post omits fees, ranking logic and data-sharing terms. John Mueller of Google, who does not work on the product, was cautious: “It’s still extremely early, so I’m curious how it all works out.”Google DeepMind went further from the results page entirely. PPC Land reported that Genie 4, announced on October 27, is a real-time world model that generates explorable environments, lets users redirect a running scene with typed instructions and is the first in its line to generate native audio, including dialogue. “Genie 4 is our first real-time world model to generate audio natively,” the DeepMind blog said. Access is limited to trusted testers, and Google gave no date, price, resolution, frame rate or session length for the promised release to AI Ultra subscribers. It conceded that “visual details and object permanence can still shift or drift over time”. All outputs will carry SynthID watermarks.Smaller experiments filled out the day. Schwartz reported that Google has added a “Fan POV” button to some sports queries: a search for the World Series shows a blue button that opens a dialog for picking a game and a team’s perspective, then hands the question to AI Mode. Mordy Oberstein, who spotted it, called it “personalization + trying to break down the emotive barrier that exists with stoic AI results.” Google is also testing a “Save” button that appears when hovering over thumbnails in Image Search, rather than only in the preview pane.The commercial tests were more pointed. Schwartz reported that Google Ads is testing sponsored results with an “Apple Messages” button, a bright green button that opens Apple’s messaging app with a prefilled text. Anthony Higman, who spotted it, wrote: “Apple Messages in Google Ads? Definitely sticks out with the bright green.” PPC News Feed, crediting Sachin Patel, reported that a Shopping ads carousel inside AI Mode has now appeared on mobile, after first being seen on desktop in September, and that Google is testing a new mobile design for Featured Store ads that moves the section below Shopping ads, shows two or three stores and expands to five or six behind a “More stores” button.Messaging is becoming a sales channel in its own right. PPC Land reported that Invoca released Messaging Agents For Google Ads in beta on October 28. The agents answer, qualify and book customers who tap a message button in Google Search ads or in organic results such as sitelinks and featured snippets, then send conversations that become sales back to Google Ads for bidding. The product runs on Google’s RCS for Business and is aimed at financial services, telecoms, home services and travel. “Today’s consumers expect instant advice and support while making their most important buying decisions,” said Gregg Johnson, Invoca’s chief executive. No pricing or customers were disclosed, and Google already offers its own Gemini-powered agent for message ads.The plumbing changed too. Schwartz reported that Google Ads API version 26.1 is out, a minor release that nonetheless adds network budget controls letting advertisers rank Google properties, Search Partners and the Display Network into two tiers with optional caps on the second, household income exclusions for Performance Max, a method for checking Local Services eligibility and eight new reporting segments for vertical ads. And YouTube is selling creators for the holidays with numbers it cannot source. PPC Land reported that Google’s 35-page 2026 holiday playbook claims creator partnership boosts deliver a 30% average increase in conversion lift at steady cost per acquisition, with no source note, after Google cited 20% for the same product in May, August and September. A 16% incremental return claim points to a footnote that does not exist. “Brand ad or creator content? Don’t guess,” the playbook says.Local search, where Google, Microsoft and Meta compete for the same phone call, had its own run of changes. Schwartz reported that Google Business Profiles finally added third-party ordering controls, letting restaurants switch off providers such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, Instacart or Grubhub for pickup, delivery or both, instead of asking each platform to remove its feed. “One of the most frequent requests we hear from restaurant operators is simple: more control over their ordering links,” wrote Google’s Lisa Landsman. Google is also asking some businesses for their Employer Identification Number and a privacy policy link before they can receive messages, with a partner review taking three to four working days, and automatically adding Facebook Messenger m.me links to Business Profiles, which Schwartz said he had not seen before.What happens to reviews on those profiles is murkier. PPC Land reported on a study by Reviewflowz and the Paris consultancy Cartelis, which crawled every review on 9,048 Google Maps profiles daily from August 11 to 24, covering 4,876,933 reviews. It found that 1.95% of new reviews vanished within a week, with 1-star reviews deleted fastest at 5.7%, and that the top 1% of businesses accounted for half of all deletions. Testing Google’s April rule against soliciting reviews that name staff, it found such reviews were deleted at almost exactly the same rate as others. “Google’s April rule against reviews that name staff isn’t enforced,” said Axel Lavergne, founder of Reviewflowz, which sells review software.Microsoft is copying where Google led. Schwartz reported that Bing is testing a phone icon in the desktop local pack that shows a scan-to-call QR code, a feature Google introduced for ads in 2023. PPC News Feed reported that Bing Shopping ads now carry promotional labels such as “High quality”, “Small business” and “Buy now pay later”, previously limited to text ads, and that Microsoft Advertising has opened a pilot of audience exclusions for Performance Max, available through account teams, as announced in Microsoft Advertising’s October product roundup.Google also tried to calm site owners about errors. In a Halloween episode of its video series, Gary Illyes and Cherry Prommawin explained why 404 errors are not frightening. “Googlebot encounters a 404, realizes the page is gone, and eventually we drop it from the index,” Illyes said. A 404 carries no penalty and does not consume crawl budget, the pair said, while server errors and rate limits matter far more. Mass redirects of dead pages to the homepage are discouraged.Meta used the day to explain how its ad system now works, and the answer is that it increasingly decides for advertisers. Allison Schiff of AdExchanger reported on October 28 that Meta has a new ad ranking system built on large language models, alongside upgrades to its Andromeda retrieval system and its GEM recommendation model. The company now scores every eligible ad for every impression, at more than a billion ads a second. GenRecs, the new generative recommendations model, replaces identifiers for advertisers, campaigns and products with shared “semantic tokens” such as brand, colour, fit and style read from ad text and images, which eases the problem of new ads that have no history. Andromeda was overhauled with Nvidia to keep more ad data on GPUs, and the new GEM reads twice as long a user history and has delivered about a 19% conversion improvement since last year. Meta said its ranking improvements produced 8.3% more clicks and a 15.7% conversion lift on Facebook in the second quarter. “The more advertisers are willing to use automation levers, the faster they’ll see performance improvements,” said Matt Steiner, Meta’s vice president of ads infrastructure, who described targeting as “diminishing” in importance.Meta’s own engineering account put a sharper number on it. PPC Land reported that the post describing the second generation of Andromeda claims the rebuilt system scores every eligible ad at more than a billion ads a second on a single GPU server, 100 times the rate at its December 2024 launch, and that it has delivered a 2.4% increase in Facebook conversions since 2025. Meta gave no baseline, period or method, and its third-quarter earnings had credited Andromeda with a 1.4% lift. “Ads retrieval has an outsized ROI on incremental quality,” the post said. Advertisers have no controls over any of it, and Meta’s average price per ad rose 14% in the third quarter.Agents are being let into the platforms through new doors. PPC Land reported that Meta added six tools to its Social Technologies MCP server on October 26, allowing AI coding agents to create Meta apps, list or create Business Portfolios, link apps to portfolios and add use cases such as WhatsApp Business messaging. Four of the tools write changes and ask for confirmation, app and portfolio creation are each capped at 15 calls a day, and secrets are never returned through the agent. “Secrets will not be shared via an agent conversation,” Meta’s documentation says. The blog says the tools are rolling out gradually; the documentation says “coming soon”.Adform published the first usage figures for its own server. PPC Land reported that Adform claims a 9.5 out of 10 recommendation score and a usefulness rating of 4 out of 5 from early users, with campaign reporting making up almost a third of queries, but gave no respondent counts or period. “It drastically cuts down our Excel preparation time, but the value goes beyond just speed,” said Silje Sandsbakk of Publicis Norway. Adform did not say whether agents can edit live campaigns. Sprinklr, meanwhile, opened a beta of six marketing AI agents on October 27 covering ideation, creative adaptation, execution, compliance, community engagement and budget optimisation, and a day later published a survey of 807 practitioners in which 91.8% of those running AI said results met or beat expectations but only 27.2% could quantify them precisely. “The question we wanted to answer wasn’t whether organizations believe AI is working. Most already do,” said Justin Robbins of Metric Sherpa, which produced the study.In audio, an agent bought a campaign from another agent. PPC Land reported that Triton Digital’s new Seller Agent let an AI agent buying for the fashion brand Otrium, through the agency Draft Digital, find, negotiate and book inventory from the Dutch publisher Talpa Media with no manual step between brief and booking. Humans set terms, price guardrails and data standards in advance. “Speed only matters to us if the guardrails hold, and this transaction showed both,” said Philip Sonneveldt of Otrium. Triton disclosed no budget, price or results.The same tools serve fraudsters. PPC Land reported that ADEX, the anti-fraud business of AdTech Holding, says AI played a significant role in 52% of the fraud schemes it identified from January to September, based on data from eight unnamed platforms covering 1.2 million campaigns and 4.9 million creatives. Bots posing as humans appeared in 64% of those schemes and cloned brands or fake endorsements in 53%. “What AI changed is the finish,” said Sergey Martianov, its chief product officer. ADEX forecasts prompt injection aimed at AI shopping agents in 2027, labelled explicitly as a forecast.What those systems buy is not always worth buying. PPC Land reported that the Video Advertising Bureau circulated a 25-page supplement, “More Illusions of the Internet”, whose only original calculation puts American programmatic spending on AI slop at $530.1 million to $978.7 million, by multiplying an ANA estimate of 1.3% to 2.4% of spend by eMarketer’s $40.78 billion programmatic total. The rest is borrowed: Thales puts bad bots at 40% of 2025 web traffic, against 47% for humans. “The internet continues to face a crisis of reality which is only getting worse,” VAB wrote. PPC Land found that one of its own figures, $4.6 billion wasted on fake influencer followers, works out at about $8.9 billion using VAB’s stated method, and that no slide measures made-for-advertising sites.The people who train these systems are also being watched. PPC Land reported that noyb filed five GDPR complaints on October 27 against Scale AI, the company behind the Outlier training platform, in which Meta bought a 49% stake in June 2025. The complaints, lodged with regulators in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria, allege that freelancers were tracked with TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook pixels while working, subjected to repeated biometric checks and denied answers to access requests. A DiPLab report counted 16 trackers and average monthly worker income of 1,214 euros. “Such constant and extensive tracking while working really goes against all reasonable expectations,” said Lisa Steinfeld Leiser of noyb. Scale AI called the claims unfounded.The 2026 midterms are the most expensive election on record, and the money is flowing through television. Adweek’s Mark Mwachiro reported that Comcast Advertising is sharing insights from record midterm political spending, citing AdImpact data showing spending has passed the 2022 midterm record of $8.9 billion and edged ahead of the 2024 presidential cycle’s $11.2 billion. Sarah Fuller of Comcast Advertising named Michigan, Texas, Georgia, New Hampshire and California as hot spots on both linear and streaming, and described frequency caps meant to stop viewers drowning. “It’s extremely important that we’re not ruining that experience by having it be more ads than actual content,” she said.Campaigns are also buying people. Digiday’s Kimeko McCoy reported that the 2026 midterms could mark a turning point for influencers in political campaigns. The Republican National Committee invited more than 100 influencers to its convention in September, and the Democratic National Committee’s creator programme has more than 550 members. Cameron Trimble, a former White House director of digital engagement, said his firm HUED Collective is running at least $600,000 to $700,000 in political creator payments this year. “The moment an audience sees a creator as a campaign mouthpiece, the value starts to disappear,” warned Alex Dahan of Open Influence. California and Texas require creators to disclose paid political posts.Comcast is also widening the routes into its self-serve television product. PPC Land reported that Universal Ads opened a campaign management category in its partner programme on October 27, letting 12 software companies, among them Kochava, Koddi, SearchKings, Topsort and WorkMagic, build TV buying into their tools so advertisers can add television to search, social and retail campaigns without a separate account. “TV has been the white whale for a lot of marketers who know it can perform, it’s just difficult to prove,” said Frank Yang of WorkMagic. Universal Ads promised no markups or commitments but did not say what partners charge.Streaming publishers gained targeting without identifiers. PPC Land reported that Comscore’s Proximic audience segments are now available inside Magnite’s SpringServe ad server, which Comscore calls the first real-time contextual integration there, with the FAST publisher Future Today among the first sellers. Pause ads are eligible; pricing and markets were not disclosed. And for the moments when audiences spike, IAB Tech Lab opened its Live Event Ad Playbook implementation guide for comment until November 23. A worked example follows a fictional championship Game 7 in which overtime draws 2.4 million streams, 26% above the expected peak, and a halftime pod generates 14.8 million bid requests against an 11.4 million ceiling, about 23% of them duplicates. The guide is explicit that stream counts are not biddable impressions.Identity on television increasingly means an IP address. PPC Land reported that Digital Envoy made its NetAcuity data available on The Trade Desk on October 28, letting advertisers build segments by the internet provider, mobile carrier or organisation behind a connection, across the open web and connected TV. “One of the most valuable moments in telecom is when consumers are making a change,” said Jerome Eymery of The Trade Desk. No pricing, match rates or accuracy figures were disclosed, and PPC Land noted that carrier-grade NAT puts many subscribers behind a single address, while one study found just 6.4% agreement between providers on IP-to-household links.Podcasting’s centre of gravity has crossed the Atlantic. PPC Land reported that Acast posted record third-quarter net sales of 802.3 million Swedish kronor, up 25%, with North America growing 54% to 384 million kronor and overtaking Europe, which grew 5%. Organic growth slowed to 18% from 41% a year earlier, and the shares fell 5.86%. “While podcast revenue is still overwhelmingly audio, monetization always follows attention and consumption,” said Greg Glenday, the chief executive.Smaller streamers are building their own pipes. AdExchanger’s Alyssa Boyle interviewed Alia J. Daniels, co-founder of Revry, a free streaming service for LGBTQ+ stories that also runs PrismRiot, a programmatic exchange for multicultural and diverse-owned publishers. She pitches it as an alternative to audience extension deals that deliver eyeballs rather than relevant reach. “The reach needs to be relevant,” she said.The seasonal and physical screens had their own announcements. SiriusXM expanded its holiday lineup to 25 channels from 23, starting November 2, and PPC Land noted that, unlike its 2023 to 2025 announcements, the release no longer calls the channels “ad-free”, which matters now that an ad-supported plan exists. Samsung said unique users of casual and party games on its TVs grew more than 90% in North America and more than 200% globally, without starting counts or a period, alongside an Ipsos survey of 1,803 adults whose questions never mention games or TVs. And Clear Channel Outdoor won a three-year renewal to sell advertising at Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport, which served a record 1.9 million passengers in 2025, with new double-sided digital displays along the concourse.For publishers, the midterms are a subscription test. Digiday’s Media Briefing reported that publishers are selling more subscriptions to smaller audiences. Greg Piechota of INMA said the typical publisher reaches a fifth fewer people a month than in 2019 yet sells 50% to 85% more subscriptions a quarter, and that North American publishers in INMA’s sample of 3,018 brands sold 43% more than in 2019. But the typical North American subscriber base has fallen 16% from its early 2024 peak, as election-driven sign-ups lapsed. “Growth depends on attracting and converting casual readers, and that is getting harder,” Piechota said. Reuters saw new subscriptions rise 50% in a day on election coverage, and The New York Times made midterm coverage free in its app until results are clear.The Times of London is trying something narrower. Digiday’s Seb Joseph reported that the paper is preparing to test “macro payments”, selling specific products such as its rich list and best places guides to non-subscribers at the moment they want them, within the next couple of months. The Times has about 680,000 digital subscribers and a hard paywall. Abs Ahmed, director of subscriptions, said more than half of web traffic is now bots and crawlers, and that the paper does not expect social and search referrals to recover. He likened metered reading to letting people in to read with “a taxi meter going on.” AI decisioning in email delivered “multiple increases in conversion”, he said, and the performance tool Smartly cut cost per acquisition by more than 55%.The pressure on magazine advertising is showing up in internal numbers. Adweek’s Mark Stenberg reported that Conde Nast’s fourth-quarter US ad business is forecast to fall short by more than $35 million, with bookings of about $130 million against its internal goal, after a third quarter about $6 million short. The company called the figures “materially inaccurate” and said first-half US ad revenue beat targets. “Everyone who is a leader is gone,” one person familiar with the strategy told Adweek, as interim chief executive Mike Perlis runs the company.Publishers are also looking for distribution that does not run through Google. PPC Land reported that Taboola will put its DeeperDive AI answer engine on the lockscreens of select Motorola moto g phones, rolling out across 2026 and 2027 in the UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico and Argentina. Taboola gave no device counts, said nothing about advertising or default settings and did not quote Motorola. Its second-quarter revenue of $476.8 million came in $15.2 million below the bottom of its guidance after a Google policy change ended its Explore More product.The holiday advertising market is cheaper than expected for some and dearer for others. PPC Land reported that AdRoll’s third-quarter report found display prospecting CPMs down 45% year on year for July 1 to September 8, across more than 20,000 businesses, and retargeting CPMs down 29.1%. The DTC agency Pennock saw the opposite on Meta for July and August, with CPMs up 35.1% and new-customer acquisition costs up 77.2%. “Demand did not disappear. It moved,” wrote Nikki Lindgren, Pennock’s founder. In 2025, Meta CPMs rose 76% in peak week against October.Shoppers themselves are anxious. PPC Land reported that Walmart’s 2026 holiday trend report, based on its own panel of verified shoppers, found 43.8% named affording the holidays as their top stressor and 70.2% want lower prices, though it gave no sample size or margin of error. Walmart promoted a $35 holiday meal basket that serves 10 the same day. A separate survey of 2,001 consumers for SheerID, also reported by PPC Land, found 43% would abandon a discount verification that asked for a Social Security or national ID number, against 12% who would quit over too many steps. “Overreach, not friction, kills conversions,” the report concluded.Advertisers on ChatGPT can now follow people elsewhere. PPC Land reported that StackAdapt announced on October 27 that advertisers buying ChatGPT ads through its platform can retarget people who merely viewed those ads across its connected TV and display inventory. The release named no markets, prices or match rates and did not explain how a ChatGPT view is matched to a person on another screen, while OpenAI says advertisers receive only aggregate data. In mobile, AppsFlyer’s 2026 Performance Index, built on 27.2 billion installs from nearly 25,000 apps, found ad spend rising at nine of the top 10 media sources, with Apple Ads and AppLovin leading iOS and Google Ads leading Android. And Admiral Media’s audit of 1,000 top free US iPhone apps found only 12.2% had a preview video and only 13.5% used all ten screenshot slots.Apple, meanwhile, kept raising prices or holding them at their raised level. PPC Land reported that the 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 starts at $1,999, the price the M5 model reached in June after launching at $1,599 in October 2025, and that the M6 iMac starts at $1,499, $200 more than the 2024 entry model, with features that came on the old $1,499 model now requiring the $1,699 configuration. Both ship on November 6. Apple also put a beta AI assistant for Keynote, Pages and Numbers behind its $12.99-a-month Creator Studio plan, built on Apple models and OpenAI, with external agents able to edit documents through the Model Context Protocol on macOS 27. “This is our most exciting update since the launch of Apple Creator Studio,” said Brent Chiu-Watson of Apple.Amazon’s devices are reaching further into the home. PPC Land reported that preorders opened on October 28 for the Echo Show 16, a $499.99 smart display with Fire TV built in and a 13-megapixel camera whose Visual ID can now recognise household members from up to 17 feet, against 8 before. “We’ve more than doubled the range of Visual ID, from eight to up to 17 feet,” Amazon said. The announcement said nothing about advertising, though Echo Show ad formats exist. Amazon also announced Alexa Home Map, a 3D model of a home built from room scans, which can rewind 24 hours of activity across Ring and Blink cameras. Amazon did not say where scans are stored, for how long, or whether the data informs advertising.The plumbing of payment and AI commerce drew its own surveys. A Censuswide poll of 750 software vendors for the payments company Payroc, reported by PPC Land, found 97% said slow payment integrations had cost them revenue, while 97% also said their current provider meets their needs well. “Most software companies aren’t unhappy with their payment provider,” said Paul Vienneau, Payroc’s chief technology officer. And a Stripe Economics essay by Marisa Rama, also covered by PPC Land, found American AI application companies 2.2 times as likely as European ones to reach $1 million in revenue within a year, while the gap in consumer adoption is much narrower than at the model layer. “This is not exactly cause for celebration but it is much better than the gulf at the model layer,” Rama wrote.Inside companies, AI adoption has become something to measure, and the measures are being questioned. PPC Land reported that Amazon published a memo on October 27 by Terk Terkowitz, a distinguished engineer, alongside a revised role guideline for software engineers. “We are all aware of how deeply flawed these metrics are, primarily because they are disconnected from what matters,” the memo said of token usage, tool adoption and code counts, while still endorsing them for careful use. It warned that treating them as targets leads to “tokenmaxxing”. The memo also said managers must use AI tools themselves, and asked leaders to look at teams at the 10th and 90th percentiles of adoption.LinkedIn offered the other side of the ledger. PPC Land reported that LinkedIn, launching LinkedIn Pulse as the new name for its Economic Graph research site, says members listing AI literacy skills are 78% more likely to be hired, while only 1.2% list an AI skill. It estimated about 2 million jobs created by AI but gave no period, geography or method, and conceded that “the data does not prove that AI caused startup teams to become smaller.”Retailers are starting to tie pay to the same goals. Digiday, republishing a Modern Retail piece, reported that retailers are still figuring out how to tie AI goals to executive compensation. Ralph Lauren added “AI metrics” as a factor that can adjust annual incentive payouts, disclosed in a 131-page filing, and Reuters found about 12% of S&P 500 companies disclosed AI goals in executive incentives this year, up from 5% in 2024. “Cost cutting can be helpful for a business, but I think everyone’s goal is revenue growth,” said Anish Shah of the recruiter Ruckus.At the top of marketing departments, behaviour is under scrutiny of a less quantitative kind. In an Adweek column, François Bazini, a former chief marketing officer at Suntory, described how to spot a toxic CMO, listing ten archetypes from the Personal Brand Manager who overhauls a sixty-year-old brand within six weeks to the Lucky Genius who credits campaigns for gains that came from market growth. “Most toxic CMOs do not look toxic; that would be too easy,” he wrote. Executives moved, too. Adweek reported that ShopMy hired Jed Dederick, who spent nearly 14 years at The Trade Desk, as chief revenue officer to bring programmatic-style scale to creator commerce. “Through the evolution of programmatic, we uncovered the value of liquidity and automation,” he said. AdExchanger reported that Marketbridge is acquiring Channel99, a B2B advertising and attribution company founded in 2022 by Demandbase’s founder Chris Golec, for undisclosed terms, to measure how companies rank in chatbot answers.Healthcare marketing showed the gap between investment and experience. Adweek’s Andrea Michelson reported on three mistakes healthcare brands make when marketing to women, citing a Langrand survey of 1,000 US women aged 18 to 44 in which 73% said they had felt dismissed in healthcare settings because of their gender, despite nearly $60 billion invested in women’s health between 2020 and 2025. In England, a poll of 400 pharmacy owners for the agency Brand Champions found 87% believe fewer than half of patients know their full range of services. “But trust isn’t the same as being top of mind,” said Fiona Wylie, its founder.Data centres promise local benefits, and the evidence is commissioned. PPC Land reported that an AWS-commissioned GfK survey in Aragon, Spain, found 59% of AWS suppliers added staff against 41% of other local firms, though the comparison groups differed by sector, the supplier list came from AWS and the data was self-reported.Regulation moved unevenly. New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, signed a law barring “unsafe AI companion features” for minors on October 28. From January 1, 2027, operators may not give under-18s 12 listed features, including human-like outputs and outputs that “engage in flattery or sycophancy with the user”, unless users are established as adults through age assurance, with penalties of up to $25,000 per violation enforced by the attorney general. The Senate passed it 60 to 0 in June. PPC Land reported that a Chilean Senate committee approved delaying the country’s personal data protection law to October 15, 2027, earlier than the government’s proposed December 1, 2027, but the original December 1, 2026 start still applies unless both chambers pass the bill in time. The regulator has no board after the Senate rejected a slate of nominees in May. Product safety enforcement is tightening at Europe’s borders. PPC Land reported that LegitScript counted 2,993 dangerous product alerts in the EU and UK from January to September, and that UK authorities rejected 266 products at the border. China was the recorded origin for 64% of EU-flagged and 72% of UK-flagged products.The internet itself was switched off for school. PPC Land reported that Cloudflare counted 49 internet disruptions in the third quarter, 18 of them Iraqi shutdowns for school exams, making Iraq the largest single source. A September 10 interconnection failure cut Honduras’s national traffic by 63% for about three hours. “Access to the Internet is often access to information, coordination, safety, and help,” Cloudflare wrote.And the brands kept marketing. Adweek reported that 7-Eleven will launch “A Convenient Love”, a seven-episode Instagram K-drama miniseries for its Flavors of Korea menu, from November 2, and that LA28 unveiled “Stars Align” as the slogan for the 2028 Los Angeles Games, with a 60-second film set to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. “They’re a symbol of hope and inspiration, of awe and optimism, and that’s exactly what the Games represent,” said Alex Merchan, LA28’s chief marketing officer. Google, too, sells hope and optimism; on Wednesday its investors wanted to see more of it in the advertising line.1.95%Share of new Google Maps reviews deleted within a week across 9,048 profiles.PPC Land27.2 billionInstalls behind AppsFlyer’s 2026 Performance Index, from nearly 25,000 apps.PPC Land12.2%Share of 1,000 top free US iPhone apps with an App Store preview video.PPC Land45%Year-on-year fall in AdRoll display prospecting CPMs from July 1 to September 8.PPC LandEvery morning, get a curated digest of the last 24 hours in programmatic advertisingsource