In this week’s digital news, Google Ads seems to be bringing the ability to do campaign level audience exclusions to Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. Apple is reportedly preparing to launch advertisements within its native Maps application as early as next year.
Google’s BlockRank performed competitively with other state-of-the-art ranking models that were tested in research. OpenAI has officially launched the ChatGPT Atlas web browser.
Anthropic and Google officially announced their cloud partnership. Shutterstock’s Creative Impact Report finds that volume-based strategies don’t deliver results for marketers.
Google Ads is testing a new Data Exclusions feature that allows advertisers to apply campaign-level audience exclusions in Performance Max (PMax) campaigns. First spotted by Satoshi Ando and shared by Dario Zannoni, the feature lets users exclude remarketing lists, such as existing customers or recent converters. It appears under campaign settings and may currently be enabled only by contacting a Google Ads representative.
Meta’s new AI-driven ad engine, Andromeda, powered by NVIDIA’s Grace Hopper Superchips and Meta’s MTIA processors, has transformed ad delivery across Facebook and Instagram, prioritising automation and personalisation. However, advertisers report rising costs, campaign volatility, and reduced transparency, as manual targeting and optimisation become obsolete. Smaller brands struggle with data demands that favour high spenders. Agencies face workflow disruption, shifting focus to creative diversity, data integration, and adaptation. While Meta claims efficiency gains, many see Andromeda as trading control and clarity for automation and dependency.
A new report has revealed details of an alleged internal Google system known as Blockrank. This system is speculated to be an evolution of classic ranking principles, moving beyond a single authority score for an entire webpage (like PageRank) to evaluate the quality and authority of individual blocks of content or sections within a page.
This fundamentally reinforces the importance of content architecture and granularity. SEOs can no longer rely solely on the overall domain authority. To succeed, content must be structured into clear, authoritative blocks (e.g., using strong headings, clear HTML structure, and supporting data) to give Google’s systems the best chance of scoring and citing high-quality sections. It emphasises that every section of your page must stand on its own merits.
In a move that marks a major structural change in the search ecosystem, OpenAI has officially launched the ChatGPT Atlas web browser. The new browser integrates native, conversational AI search features directly into the user experience, reportedly leveraging Google Search data in the background.
This is a direct challenge to Google’s traditional SERP dominance, creating a new, AI-first layer of content consumption. For SEO, the goal is rapidly shifting from ranking on Google to succeeding at Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO). Websites must now optimise not just for traditional organic ranking, but for being the cited source within the AI summaries generated by Atlas and similar AI-powered tools.
While traffic to websites from AI tools is still comparatively low, failure to adapt means missing out on potential referral traffic from the growing audience using these new, AI-integrated browsing platforms.
Anthropic now has access to up to a million of Google’s custom-designed Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) thanks to a new deal worth tens of billions of dollars. The deal is expected to bring well over a gigawatt of AI compute capacity online in 2026. Anthropic spreads its workloads across vendors, letting it fine-tune for price, performance, and power constraints. Google’s TPUs offer Anthropic strong price-performance and efficiency.
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Ad budgets are rising faster than results. Shutterstock’s 2025 Creative Impact Report shows a 33% jump in marketing spend but only a 17% lift in purchase intent since 2023. The widening 20% impact gap signals a broken model, especially for brands leaning on high-volume output. Today’s environment demands carefully curated and culturally aware creatives.
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