Google Ads News
Policy update
Starting February 5, 2026, Google no longer allows personalized targeting for App campaigns promoting Rummy and Daily Fantasy Sports apps in India. Only non-personalized delivery is permitted for this vertical in that market.
Big Pmax Update
Matteo Braghetta discovered that Google is rolling out controlled A/B testing for creatives directly inside Performance Max!
New Banner
New banner about call-only ads being deprecated! Thanks for sharing Arpan Banerjee.
Merchant Center Change
Google Merchant Center is now surfacing recommendations specifically aimed at improving your product description field in the feed.
The idea is to push advertisers to use richer, more descriptive and query-aligned product text so Google can better understand, match, and rank products across Shopping and Performance Max placements.
For advertisers, this means feed optimisation is becoming more content-driven: weak or generic descriptions are now a measurable quality gap and should be treated as a performance lever, not just a compliance field.
Found by Petter Norlén.
Alphabet reaches 400 billion revenue (GOOGLE IS DEAD 🤣 )
Alphabet delivered a very strong Q4 and closed 2025 with several structurally important signals for the ads and AI ecosystem.
Annual revenue passed $400B for the first time, with FY revenue up 15% YoY and Q4 revenue up 18% YoY. Operating income also continued to scale, reaching $129.0B for FY 2025 (+15% YoY) while keeping operating margins broadly stable around 32%.
From a growth engine perspective:
Search still grows at scale (+17% YoY), confirming that core query-based monetisation is not being displaced yet.
YouTube generated more than $60B from ads and subscriptions in 2025, reinforcing its position as a full-funnel media channel, not just a branding platform.
Google Cloud is now the fastest-growing major segment: Q4 revenue grew +48% YoY to a $70B+ annualised run-rate, and more importantly operating margin jumped to 30.1%, up from 17.5% a year ago.
On the AI side, scale is already massive:The Gemini app has 750M+ monthly active users and Google processes 10B+ tokens per minute across its first-party models, including direct API usage.
The strategic signal for marketers and platforms is also in the investment numbers:Capex nearly doubled YoY in Q4 (+95%), reaching $27.9B, clearly pointing to sustained infrastructure and AI model investment rather than short-term cost optimisation.
Short version: Google is simultaneously scaling its core ads business, rapidly improving cloud profitability, and massively increasing AI infrastructure spend without sacrificing operating discipline.
Malicious Google Ads
More Malicious Google Ads are targeting Mac users by posing as legitimate tools (for example “Mac cleaner”) and then redirecting them to fake Apple-style support pages hosted on trusted Google domains.
These pages instruct users to run hidden Terminal commands, which can compromise the system. The campaigns appear to use hijacked, previously legitimate advertiser accounts, making the ads look trustworthy at first glance.
Thanks for sharing Hana Kobzová
Multi approval
Google Ads now has a “Multi-Party Approval” security feature: sensitive admin changes (like adding/removing users or changing roles) will require a second administrator’s approval before they go through.
If another admin doesn’t approve or deny the request within ~20 days, the change is blocked. This helps prevent account hijacking by making it harder for a single compromised admin to lock others out or grant themselves access.
Thanks for sharing Hana Kobzová.
Pmax update
Emil Emanuel Ankjær Nordahl discovered that Mixed campaign type experiments are now available in an early beta.
You can test different campaign types against each other (for example Search vs. Performance Max, Demand Gen vs. video, or feed-only PMax vs. Standard Shopping).
The main limitation is that both campaigns must already exist, so you can’t yet test small setting changes within a single campaign.
For now, the workaround is to duplicate a campaign and experiment with different structures or bidding. Despite the limits, this is one of the most promising experiment updates so far.
New diagnostics
Georgi Zayakov discovered that Google Ads has quietly added a new data source diagnostics view in Data Manager that shows clear connection health statuses and actionable error messages, so you can spot broken or degrading data connections before they affect reporting or bidding.
This is especially useful if you rely on offline conversions, CRM imports or complex tagging setups, for example integrations with Salesforce.
It’s a small update, but a meaningful step towards more reliable measurement in Google Ads.
Ads GPT
Early signs that ads are coming to ChatGPT: Glenn Gabe & Barry Schwartz have spotted references to “ads shown to the user” in the source code of ChatGPT responses, even though live ads aren’t widely visible yet.
This reinforces OpenAI’s recently announced plan to begin testing ads in the free and lower-cost Go tier, with ads clearly separated from answers and not influencing model outputs!