The Click Brief- July 2026

Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates every month.

Top Takeaways

Biggest Platform Shift
Google is beginning to move Local Services Ads into Google Ads as specialized Performance Max campaigns. While bringing everything into one platform should make management easier, advertisers will lose some control, including manual bidding and service-level target CPA settings. Historical performance reports also won’t transfer, making it important to export data and establish benchmarks before migration.

Platform to Watch
OpenAI continues building ChatGPT Ads into a more complete performance advertising platform with conversion optimization, geographic exclusions, automatic budget pacing, advanced matching, bulk management through the Ads API, and updated product feed ads. Jeremy sees ChatGPT becoming a legitimate channel worth testing heading into Q4 for advertisers with the available budget.

AI Advertising Watch
Google is testing AI-generated summaries beneath paid search ads, with similar descriptions appearing on Shopping and product ads. The experiment raises questions about advertiser control when AI-generated copy can potentially appear alongside ads without being directly written or approved by the advertiser.

Competitive Landscape
One year after Amazon withdrew from U.S. Google Shopping auctions, the competitive landscape continues to shift. Some advertisers gained traffic and impression share, while competitors including Walmart, Temu, and SHEIN have moved in and out of the space, creating a different mix of competition.

AI Lab Watch
The Click Brief adds a new AI Lab Watch section covering developments beyond the advertising platforms themselves. July included new models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Grok, Meta, and China’s Moonshot AI, along with the growing conversation around open-weight models, AI capabilities, and claims that the industry is approaching the singularity.

Other Platform & AI Updates

• Local Services Ads will remain keywordless and continue using a pay-per-lead model after moving into Google Ads
• Existing LSA customer contacts, messages, and eligible call recordings will move into Google Ads Lead Manager
• ChatGPT Ads added conversion-optimized CPC campaigns and refreshed product feed ads with prices and star ratings
• OpenAI expanded advertiser controls with geographic exclusions, automatic daily pacing, advanced matching, and bulk management
• Google’s AI-generated ad summaries remain a limited experiment, but Granular is watching for expanded testing and advertiser controls
• Amazon remains absent from U.S. Google Shopping auctions despite returning to some international markets
• New AI models and the growing divide between closed and open-weight models continue reshaping the broader AI landscape

Final Take

July was a quieter month for major paid media announcements, but the updates point to two trends worth watching: advertising platforms continue consolidating management while giving more control to automation, and AI platforms are quickly developing more sophisticated advertising capabilities. For advertisers, the priority remains the same—understand what control is being gained or lost, preserve the data you need, and test emerging channels based on real business results rather than hype.

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: Hello, and welcome to the ClickBrief Podcast, your monthly download of what’s new and what matters in digital advertising and paid media. I’m Jeremy Packee, and my usual co-host, Emily Anderson, is out on maternity leave, so I’ll be flying solo this month. Congrats to Emily. I hope you enjoy your leave. She’s, a great mom, and congrats on your expanding family. July brought several, meaningful changes across paid media and AI. Google announced plans to move local services ads into Google Ads as a specialized PMAX campaign. OpenAI added conversion optimization and more advertiser controls to ChatGPT ads. And Google began testing some AI-generated summaries beneath paid search ads. You’ll also notice, if you check out the blog post edition, that we added a new kind of, like, AI LLM update section. I think this is good to just keep track of this sort of as, like, a separate, line item, because this is always changing.

Starting off with the high-impact updates. So, as mentioned, Google moved, local services ads into Google Ads, or at least is starting to, in August 2026, so those are going to be specialized PMAX campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. So, overall, these campaigns will remain keywordless, advertisers will continue paying for valid leads, and ads will still appear only on search and maps. So, this is just starting to begin, this migration. I’m not sure when it will complete, but it’s started right now for select U.S. home and storefront service advertisers. This move changes several parts of campaign management, so manual bidding and vertical level target CPA settings are going away. Advertisers using separate targets for different service categories will receive one calculated campaign-level target CPA. Historical performance reports will not transfer, but previous customer contact information, messages, and eligible call recordings will move into the Google Ads Lead Manager.

So, our take… I think putting this into Google Ads just makes the management easier. I think it’s good to just have it all in one place. It was kind of… I guess, annoying to, like, have to go into these separate platforms, so I think bringing it all into one specific place is actually pretty helpful. You know, advertisers do lose some of their historical reports, so that’s a bummer. Manual bidding going away is a bummer, so they’ll have to get used to, sort of, the PMAC-style targeting. That is a lot of control and context to give up, sort of for a cleaner interface, but hopefully, you know, maybe we’ll get some of that back. So, my recommendation is just export anything you need. Before this change happens, and just establish those benchmarks. Next update, ChatGPT adds conversion optimization, geo-exclusions, and bulk management. So, OpenAI… essentially added the conversion-optimized cost-per-click campaigns to the ChatGBT Ads Manager. So advertisers can now go in and select a conversion objective and optimize delivery towards clicks that are more likely to generate selected conversion events.

Billing remains based on valid clicks. So, after launching, product feed campaigns in June. OpenAI did add the geographic exclusions and automatic daily pacing, average daily budgets that are calculated over 7 days. They added some other integrations and some advanced matching, some advanced matching, and some bulk management through the ads API, and refreshed product feed ads with prices and star ratings. So, my overall take is… I feel like we say this every month, but ChatGPT is starting to look more like a real performance platform. Instead of just, like, an interesting place to test, we are running ads for this on multiple brands, with kind of results. They’re kind of mixed. But I do think it’s a legitimate player going into Q4. I think if you have the budget to start testing there, I think you should, and we can definitely help you with that.

Another update is, google has been spotting testing AI-generated summaries beneath paid search, ad descriptions. And then similar AI-generated descriptions were spotted on shopping and product ads. So this is a part of a small experiment, but overall this feels in line with some of the, sort of, like, AI mode style placements. the only bummer is, you know, you could be showing, I guess, in theory, ad copy that you didn’t add, or write, or possibly approve. So, hopefully there’s just more controls around this, and for the people that are in the test, I would hope that, they’re notified that their ads were being, shown like this. But just more to come. It seemed like a small test. But we have our eyes on it. This is another update I saw just kind of swirling around, and I think it’s really interesting because we reported on it. It was a big deal for a lot of our clients when it happened, but in case you didn’t know, Amazon withdrew from Google Shopping Auctions across multiple countries in July 2025.

It did return to some of those markets, but it has remained absent from U.S. shopping since. We still see them on search ads. I still see Microsoft Bing, like, shopping ads, so those are still there. But there’s never been really any public explanation as to why this happened. But yeah, it’s been… it’s been one year. It created a lot more room in the auction. But I didn’t leave that room empty. So, you know, Walmart, Timu, Sheehan, who have dabbled with, you know, different auctions in the last year, I feel like you see them pop up, and then chop off, and then pop up again. So they’ve kind of dabbled, and it seems like, you know, some advertisers, gained traffic and impression share, while others just found, like, a different group of competitors advertising against them. So yeah, I guess we’ll see if they come back. I think it overall, like, helped some of our accounts when they dropped out, especially accounts where we have products on our website, and then also, obviously, on Amazon. It was just nice to get more, like, you know, D2C sales directly on our website.

Some of the other medium impact updates, this was sort of, like, a quiet month, in my opinion. I did report on, like, some of the AI updates that, I thought were, like, genuinely interesting. So, in that new section, which I’m calling the AI Lab Watch. Which Emily was a fan of, so thanks, Emily. She gave some feedback on this as well. We talked about some of the updated models for OpenAI in Anthropic. They released some great models. I love the new OpenAI model, in general. I think it’s great. Also, Google released some Gemini models. I haven’t been the biggest fan of some of the latest Gemini models. I feel like, they’ve been fairly limited compared to some of the competitors. Grok released a new model. And I did give a breakdown on closed models versus open weight models, if you want to check out the blog. So, I think that’s important. And the reason that’s important is, like, one of the big storylines in July was,

China releasing this Moonshot, China’s Moonshot AI releasing the full weights for this Kimmy K3. So, I saw a lot of people talking about this, Kimmy K3. I haven’t used it, but it seems like a lot of people were excited about it, and you know. excited on the cost of it. I do think they kinda… at least temporarily, closed down getting some of the access to this, because a lot of people, were testing it out, and I found that… that interesting. Meta has also been releasing different AI models. I believe they just released one, in… in August as well that we’ll be reporting on. I also found the conversation between that Sam Altman and even Elon Musk earlier in the year, they both are claiming the singularity. So, you know, they’re basically saying, that the singularity is here. We have some doubts on that, although the models have been increasingly getting better. There was the whole, like, OpenAI model sort of, escaping its,

It’s Sandbox, which… Everybody’s been reporting on that, so if you haven’t heard about that, look into it. It is sort of scary, And I think this is just gonna be happening more and more, and we’re just gonna have to, stay up to date on all those things. But overall, you know, I don’t think that necessarily meant that the singularity is here. And I would say July. was sort of a quieter month, compared to, like, the Google Marketing Lives and, you know, everything that’s kind of been happening. So stay tuned, to August. We’ll have more to report on… on everything. Thanks. And that’s a Click Brief podcast for July 2026. This episode was edited by Aja Blue, and produced by Emily Anderson, and me, Jeremy Packee.