The Click Brief- April 2026

Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson break down April’s biggest digital advertising updates, including Google officially replacing Dynamic Search Ads with AI Max and expanding AI Max into Standard Shopping campaigns. They also cover Microsoft launching its own version of AI Max for Search, Google introducing AI-powered qualified call lead tracking, and OpenAI rolling out self-serve ChatGPT ads with CPC bidding. The episode dives into how conversational search, visual search behavior, and AI-generated creative are reshaping paid media strategy, along with Meta’s new AI connectors for campaign management and analysis. As automation accelerates across every major platform, Jeremy and Emily explore where advertisers should embrace these tools and where they should proceed with caution. Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates every month.

Top Takeaways

Biggest Shift
Google officially replacing Dynamic Search Ads with AI Max marks another major step toward keywordless and AI-driven campaign management across Search and Shopping.

Biggest Platform Signal
OpenAI launching self-serve ChatGPT ads with CPC bidding signals that conversational AI platforms are rapidly becoming legitimate advertising channels.

New Feature to Test
Google’s AI-powered qualified call lead tracking could provide advertisers with more meaningful phone call conversion data without relying entirely on third-party tools.

Control Upgrade
Google’s new AI Brief controls for AI Max campaigns give advertisers more influence over messaging, audience direction, and search matching through natural language prompts.

Creative Reality Check
AI-generated ad copy and creative tools continue improving quickly, but Jeremy and Emily caution that brands still risk losing differentiation if everyone relies too heavily on the same automation systems.

Other Platform Updates

• Microsoft launched AI Max for Search campaigns
• Google introduced real-time policy reviews for Responsive Search Ads
• Reddit expanded Reminder Ads globally for all advertisers
• TikTok added more Smart+ campaign controls and expanded Symphony AI creative tools
• Demand Gen added view-through conversion optimization and Commerce Media Suite support
• OpenAI released GPT-5.5 and ChatGPT Images 2.0
• Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Design
• Meta expanded its AI business assistant and introduced Ads AI connectors in open beta
• Google updated Ads data controls and added new experiment auto-apply settings
• Microsoft added landing page reporting for Performance Max campaigns
• eMarketer projects Meta could surpass Google in digital ad revenue by the end of 2026

Final Take

AI is no longer just assisting campaign management, it’s actively reshaping how advertising platforms operate. But as automation expands across search, creative, targeting, and reporting, the competitive advantage still comes from strategy, testing, and knowing when human judgment matters most.

Episode Transcript

Jeremy:  Hello and welcome to the ClickBrief Podcast.

Emily:  Your monthly download of what’s new and what matters in digital advertising and paid media.

Jeremy:  I’m Jeremy Packee here with Emily Anderson.

Emily:  April was another really busy month and we’re a little behind, so I need to come on here and take accountability because I got Jeremy and I off of our recording schedule because I was on vacation last week. And then this week, this week, of course, my family all comes down with the flu or plague or something. So we have to record this virtually. So if our audio is a little rough this month, that’s why. But hopefully you can look past that because we have a ton of updates to talk about, including Google officially replacing BSA ads with AI Max. AI Max also expanding into standard shopping campaigns. OpenAI rolled out self-serve buying and CPC bidding for ChatGPT ads. Technically that’s happening in May, but we’re going to talk about it a little bit here. And Meta introduced Meta Ads AI connectors in open beta. So a lot going on. Let’s jump into it.

Jeremy:  So starting off with the high impact updates. So on April 30th, uh, Google or Ginny Marvin, uh, her LinkedIn, uh, announced several new AI Max updates ahead of Google Marketing Live. So AI Max is coming to standard shopping campaigns using Merchant Center data to help serve more relevant ads for complex conversational queries. A new AI Brief feature will also let advertisers guide AI Max text customization, search term matching, and audience direction using plain language instructions. Google also announced text disclaimers for search ads, which are fully compatible with AI Max. Uh, those are designed to help regulated advertisers include their required language in all the ads. So Emily and I have talked about this a lot, but we feel like, you know, this is the, the AI Max sort of push era. Like that’s what season we’re in right now. This is a huge expansion, you know, getting search into standard shopping kind of doesn’t make it standard shopping anymore. I don’t know if I put it in here, but I was jokingly calling these like PMIN campaigns instead of PMax campaigns. Like, I feel like, you know, AI Max is being pushed everywhere. Like, it’s, it’s probably going to be a huge part of Google Marketing Live.

Jeremy:  Yeah.

Emily:  We’re being pushed AI Max harder now than we’ve ever been pushed, like, alcohol or drugs as a kid. Like, they almost need a D.A.R.E. program for AI Max at this point because it is crazy how all over Google is. But you’re right. I think a lot of these updates that we’re talking about now are going to be reemphasized and probably expanded on during that Google Marketing Live. Live, uh, in a few, uh, weeks here. Um, but yeah, this is a heavy update, I guess. Jeremy, what would be your advice for an advertiser out there? Like, knowing that— I mean, DSA, they’re changing. Like, they have no choice on that if they want to continue on that.

Jeremy:  Yeah, and I didn’t even mention that. Yeah.

Emily:  Oh, I guess I skipped ahead.

Jeremy:  But no, I like that. We should combine it. We should combine it. So what Emily’s talking about is, uh, I guess you mentioned it in the intro, Dynamic search ads, which were like a campaign loved by a lot of different people in, you know, using Google Ads. We felt like those were going to go away and they are officially going away and they’re turning into AI Max. But, you know, my recommendations I would say are, you know, if you turn on traditional shopping or use traditional shopping, one of the main reasons we did that was to not have search ads. You know, we wanted to just, just Show on shopping.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy:  Yeah. So if you turn this on, like my biggest concern would be your campaign, you know, you can still use your negative keywords, but like your campaign now turns into a branded search campaign. So, you know, if you’re using automated bidding, um, where your conversion is going to be the easiest, you know, that’s going to be anything branded and, you know, you might be okay with your brand, you know, triggering shopping ads, but you might not want that in your search ads. And I think that—

Emily:  Are there brand exclusions that you can include in AI Max? I mean, you could obviously add it as a negative keyword, but do they have that brand exclusion setting?

Jeremy:  Yeah, I think there’s like inclusion and exclusion.

Emily:  So maybe start there too.

Jeremy:  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Because yeah, you definitely can add those in for AI Max. You used to be able to do that with like broad, with broad match keywords, but I think it’s exclusively in AI Max now. So I would just say like, if you want, one, you can’t even do this. I don’t have any accounts where this is even available yet for the standard shopping. Having AI Max, I would just say, I mean, personally, would I do it? Probably not. But, you know, you could certainly try it and it, maybe it’ll work. I don’t know. I just don’t want it to cause like a death spiral of like, You know, your account looks great, but your backend metrics look horrible because you’re not going for anything non-brand, which is warm traffic. Yeah. It’s going to be more expensive to go after people that like aren’t your customers. Right. Like that don’t know your brand. And, you know, a lot of times you want to focus the majority of your budget on these non-brand conversions. So just, just be aware. I do think I had a note here. It is somewhat neat. To, like, if you made this a truly non-brand campaign, it, the idea of having non-brand shopping and non-brand search together as one unit going after a common goal, like, that is kind of interesting to me because, you know, right now it’s not like, you know, shopping doesn’t really talk to standard shopping, doesn’t really talk to standard search, you know, and in PMax you have shopping combined with display combined with you know, sort of like demand gen discovery, YouTube, you know, it’s kind of combining everything.

Jeremy:  I do think these— and PMIN campaigns, I do think there’s going to be a place for them. And I bet a lot of people eventually do try it to just be like, all right, we’re going to do like non-brand here. But just be careful with it. Like, you know, shopping for e-com is like usually the best placement. So, you know, there might be situations where you don’t want to spend any money on non-brand search. So just, just make sure you know what you’re spending your money on.

Emily:  Yeah, absolutely. The other interesting part of this update that I want to highlight here is the— so a part of AI Max is that they’re writing, or they’re, as in like the Google algorithm, is writing your ad copy as well. So touching a little bit more about how they’ve included now the AI Max text customization, where, Jeremy, you explained it to me as you can exclude certain terms from being shown in ad copy, like don’t show free shipping, don’t show random sales, or, you know, clusters of terms, um, which is interesting. I still get so nervous when— I don’t know, you know, I think that’s going to be a thing of the future where algorithms are writing more and more ad copy, but it does make me nervous just because, like, I think you and I have both seen examples of like all of a sudden, like they’re creating random sales that you weren’t running.

Jeremy:  It’s like scraping your site or something.

Emily:  Yeah. And then it is like, you know, there is going to be like, and I think we’re already at the point of like AI exhaustion, especially as consumers.

Jeremy:  Yeah.

Emily:  So like if AI Max is writing ad copy for me and AI Max is writing ad copy for my competitor, It’s like, isn’t that like a conflict? It feels like a conflict of interest almost. Like, and then your competitive advantage is maybe that human element of copy. I don’t know. So I don’t know. It’s interesting. Like, like we said, they’re pushing it really hard. Um, almost—

Jeremy:  it does work. It does work for some advertisers.

Emily:  Yeah, it does. Yeah. I’m not saying not try it. Like, I think you try everything at least once and see what happens, right? You know, especially for e-com advertisers where there’s such a clear conversion goal.

Jeremy:  Lead gen, I would approach with a lot more caution, but It’s just interesting that it’s going from, you know, we’re very used to just like getting what we want. So, you know, we’ll add a negative keyword, we will add a keyword to the ad copy or, you know, just any little micro adjustments. We’re used to being able to make those like quickly. And with the AI brief, which is going to be talked about at Google Marketing Live, so we’ll probably have more information the next time we talk. They added, you know, the messaging guidelines, which In the accounts that I’ve looked at, I’ve only seen messaging restrictions and term exclusions. Options. Yeah, yeah. So like this new, these new options is you’re basically just saying things like what Google gives the example here, never mention prices in my ad copy. So it’s way more like, I guess that’s another sort of like negative message. I guess an opposite of that would be like, maybe you could do something like, hey, whenever always match, you know, always use prices in my ad copy, or, you know, always let them know that this is the main feature.

Jeremy:  This is our, you know, the differentiator for my product versus this other product. So that’s interesting. There’s also matching guidelines, so you can set boundaries for the searches you want to capture or avoid, you know, kind of like negative keywords, but also sort of like positive keywords, you know, like we were joking, like when we were writing this, like in like 10 years Google’s going to introduce keywords, right?

Emily:  Because they’re going to get, you know, so, so that’s just like funny, like the search term.

Jeremy:  I totally agree.

Emily:  Keyword.

Jeremy:  It’s like you’re basically going to be like, hey, I want to show up for Bluetooth headphones. And it’s like, that should just be a keyword. The audience guidelines are interesting. Again, this is part of like the newly announced AI brief. So you can reach your desired audience and serve them tailored messages. So that I sort of like do like, because I’m trying to think of how we would do that now. It would be through, you know, the actual keyword where, you know, Google’s going to know if I’m super health conscious or if I’m not, you know, or if I’m into fitness or I’m not. So you could be like, hey, if people appear to really be into fitness, maybe highlight this, you know, sort of feature, maybe highlight the fact that we’re low calorie or we’re high protein, high fiber. Like, that is interesting because I’m trying to think of how we would do that now. We would, it would have to be based on keywords, like obviously maybe audiences through other channels and, you know, that, that I like, that’s interesting.

Emily:  I feel like that was like a little taste of like keyword insertion, like almost in a way, like, hey, if someone searches this, put this, it’s not the exact like one-to-one obviously, but like it feels a little bit inspired from that, like next generation of that. But yeah, I mean, I think very interesting. We’ll see where this goes. Obviously, Jeremy and I will both be following Google Marketing Live to see what’s announced there and talking about that in our May update. But yeah, pretty much can guarantee, might even mark down and take an over-under at the agency how many times AI Max is said. I think we probably should.

Jeremy:  I’m trying to think of what to compare it to besides, you know, PMax. Maybe like responsive search ads. I don’t even know. Like, it’s just—

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy:  I still like keywords, you know, I think you should, everybody should still base their strategy around keywords, but you know, there are these sort of long conversational, you know, search queries and, you know, if this is how you get in front of those customers, then do it. I do think, you know, you get a similar sort of like reach into like AI mode and AI Max or sorry, AI Overviews with PMax, so everything, and if you have Max in the campaign name, like it’s getting everywhere on Google for the most part. Like, so don’t think you’re like completely missing out. Like people will make you believe that, but I mean, if you’re just, you know, try it if you’re interested. Or if you’re really struggling to scale, if you’re spending, you know, $500,000 a month and you’re like, we can’t find any more keyword, like any more search terms. It’s like, okay.

Emily:  Well, then expand to a new channel.

Jeremy:  Yeah, yeah, true, true, true, true.

Emily:  But yeah, I, I told— I think the moral of the story is like, obviously every business is different. You need to test these tools. Yeah, but obviously proceed with some caution, just like with anything.

Jeremy:  You know what? I think Broad would have covered this, but like one interesting thing that happened to me like this a while ago now, but it’s like back when we were pushing— not we, but, you know, Google is pushing broad match more is I think I was like looking for like cat food and I found the cat food I wanted. And then I literally, I was just curious. I just typed in Walmart and it actually showed the cat food available at Walmart just with that, you know, keyword where if you’re just looking at, you know, your search queries or search terms, you’d be like, I don’t want to just show up for Walmart. Well, Google does have, you know, all these millions of signals, you know, it can, you know, basically if you let Google go wide open, Google will know everything you’ve looked at, you know, all your search history. It’ll try to guess your intent. And one of the newer features is if you ever go into AI mode, especially if you have an Android, it’ll say like, you know, want more personalized ads and you can connect basically all your search terms or like, you know, all your searches to allow Google to see all your photos, all your emails, all your Google apps.

Emily:  Mark is crumbling somewhere right now at that, at the thought of that.

Jeremy:  But just think of how relevant relevant, like, in theory they could be, because if they looked at, like, you know, my photos, it’d be like, oh, he has, he has 3 kids, or, oh, he has, he has twins. So if I search for kids t-shirt, maybe it gives me something that is, like, matching for twins, or, you know what I mean? Like, totally. Like, it’s so niche and it’s scary, and I don’t have that feature on, but it, it is interesting, like, Yeah. And just because I don’t wanna talk about AI Max too much, I’m just gonna say this is like later on in the update, but on, so I’m going into the next one, but we’re kind of talking about the same thing. So on April 21st, Microsoft Advertising announced, what do you think they announced, Emily?

Emily:  Was this Microsoft Advertising what they announced for the first time?

Jeremy:  I’m making you guess. What were we just talking about?

Emily:  Oh my gosh. Well, AI Max?

Jeremy:  Yeah, AI Max.

Emily:  Well, oh my gosh. I feel like they are ahead of the game. They wouldn’t announce— I was trying to think of something that happened on Google like 3 years ago.

Jeremy:  Oh yeah, yeah, no.

Emily:  So, yes.

Jeremy:  So Microsoft announced AI Max for search campaigns. It’s available in OpenPilot in May, along with offer highlights in Copilot and expanded Microsoft Clarity AI visibility insights, which I think we may have touched on that recently. And Emily, I know you have some experience with that, but, you know, essentially what I want to get across is You know, Microsoft is doing AI Max too. So everybody’s trying to do these keywordless sort of like matching. And there is a reason for it. Like, I don’t know if you do this, Emily, but like my kids, she has a, my daughter has a squirt gun and it’s also like a bubble blaster too. And there’s like, you can like switch between bubbles and water and that broke. And I’m like, I don’t want to search for this thing. I just used Google Lens and I just, you know, take the picture. And then sometimes I’ll put for sale or whatever. And actually, it’s funny, I talk about Walmart, people are going to think I love Walmart, but like it, it was for sale for like $15 at Walmart. And, you know, I’m thinking I don’t see a ton of ads whenever I use Lens.

Jeremy:  I’m sure they’re out there or coming, but, you know, that is, you know, I should have been served an ad when I did that search, you know what I mean? So that would— I would never like how you can’t do a— you can’t match a keyword to a picture. You know what I’m saying?

Emily:  So like, and I do, I have done that specifically actually also for a child’s toy.

Jeremy:  Yeah.

Emily:  I saw a truck at a park I wanted, so I took a picture and looked it up and I found it.

Jeremy:  But that’s an instance where, you know, you’re right.

Emily:  I don’t think I’ve seen an ad. Now I’m going to have to go see if I can find one.

Jeremy:  I tried to get one to trigger today and I couldn’t, but you know, that’s the thing.

Emily:  Now retargeting ads I would probably get, like if I go actually click and—

Jeremy:  Very true.

Emily:  Or it’s interesting. I wonder if you look up the picture. Then later go back on Google and do a search for like bubble gun. Yeah, I don’t know, but that is a good point, Jeremy. Like, that is a really good point. The more and more—

Jeremy:  because I search like that all, like, all the time, especially if I’m like, like you said, at somebody’s house, or I see something at a thrift shop, or I’m like, I don’t know, like, what is the value of this at a rummage sale? Can I buy it new? Or there’s just— there’s a lot of instances where you could use that, and I, I that, you know, Google’s gonna try to match my intent. ‘Cause if I’m searching for a specific squirt gun that’s like, and Google knows it’s for sale at Walmart, like Google’s gonna eventually try to put an ad there, right? Like that would make sense. And honestly, if I was Walmart, I would want my ad there. So that can’t be done with keywords. So that’s why I’m always, I’m saying like I’m not an AI Max hater at all, but it just doesn’t work for every brand.

Emily:  Yeah, totally. Yeah, that was a great example.

Jeremy:  Cool. Thanks, Emily.

Emily:  I like, I mean, you got, I had not had thought about that honestly until we just chatted. So I know people on Android was like, oh wow, that’s, yeah.

Jeremy:  Well, people on Android too. I think, I don’t know if I can do it on, on Apple, but like you can kind of just like have it on like, uh, Noah on our team was talking about how he goes on Facebook Marketplace and you can like, I forget how you do it, but you can just like do something on your screen to like have it search with Lens.

Emily:  Oh yes.

Jeremy:  Or like if you’re on like an, if you’re on somebody’s Instagram or something, I don’t know if that’s available on Apple though. But I, when I, that feature came out for Android, I was like, dang, that is such a cool feature. And it came out a while ago. So cool. Uh, next update, uh, in April, Google Ads expanded AI qualified call lead measurement for eligible call conversions in the US and Canada. So instead of relying primarily on call duration, Google can now use AI to evaluate recorded calls and determine whether a call should be counted as a qualified lead. Call recording is enabled by default for most eligible accounts, but remains off for accounts that previously disabled it and for businesses Google identifies as healthcare or financial services. So this is neat. I actually— Emily, I don’t even think you saw this yet, but right before the podcast, I went and looked into trying to get more details on this. So I will say that like it, it has felt like Google has sort of like abandoned call tracking in some ways where it seemingly has at times not worked as well. And this is always something where we’ve recommended third-party platforms, uh, especially if you’re a bigger advertiser.

Jeremy:  So if this makes the Google product work better, it’s a good like stepping stone or even permanent solution. Possibly for some people because we always knew there was a gap, right? If you’re just saying like, oh, make it a conversion if it’s 1 minute, like that doesn’t do anything really. I mean, it’s— there’s some intent there, like, okay, if somebody answered the call and actually talked to somebody, but like, you don’t know what is said on that. And, you know, third-party platforms like CallRail, there’s just so many other features even better than these features, but you have to pay for them. But this is just, this is just a step in the right direction. And just so you know, because I didn’t know this, but I was wondering what Google would do for transparency. And it says you can review, you can review call recordings directly within your reports to see how the, or to see how AI classified each interaction. So you already can review your calls, I think, for up to 30 days if you’re recording them. But it says now your call details reports will feature a concise AI-generated summary of the call and specific hashtags.

Jeremy:  That’s interesting. The hashtags it gave examples of were high intent or consultation scheduled to help you understand customer needs at a glance. I hope that we can maybe determine some of these hashtags, you know, in other call platforms you can have like, like listen for these terms, listening triggers or something where it’s like, hey, if it says, you know, if I say, okay, we’ll schedule your appointment or something, it would then you know, be counted as a conversion. So I hope Google goes all in on this call tracking. Granted, it doesn’t really help you for like Meta or, you know, Microsoft or anything like CallRail is good because you can do everything. You could do it off a billboard if you want, you know?

Emily:  Right.

Jeremy:  But man, this is such a good stepping stone for clients that are like, I don’t know if we want to pay for a third-party platform. But there’s, if you have value on phone calls, you, you, you have to place a value there. Like, at least we have something versus like saying like, hey, we’re gonna make it qualified for this.

Emily:  Yeah, yeah, 100% here for this. Uh, would be interested to see how CallRail’s AI analysis that I know they’ve like been more heavily investing in compares to the Google AI analysis. I would love to see like almost a one-to-one report of a client who’s running CallRail and then what Google— like just to see like the, what the discrepancies were between the two, if there were any, or if it’s both are pretty accurate, but I don’t know, that sounds like a future blog that maybe we could write as that comes out. If we have a client that’s doing CallRail, I don’t know, I would be up kind of for that analysis, but I’m here for it. Hey, whenever we get more data, I don’t think either of us are like, no, we don’t want it. Like, we love more insight into things, so.

Jeremy:  And I will say like CallRail, unless you’re a really big advertiser, it’s not really like that expensive. It’s like somewhat affordable, but you know, my take would be like, if calls are important to you, like go in there and check it out. I actually haven’t even seen these reports yet. So maybe it’s not in all accounts, but yeah, big, big win here. Like Google, please continue to show value in call reporting. Even better, like, you know, let us use that tracking for Meta too, or Meta, do something like this, you know, I don’t want to send people to WhatsApp.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy:  So the other one, this was late breaking. So I know we got a late, you know, kind of, we recorded this podcast a little bit later than we normally would like, but the benefit of that is OpenAI added self-serve buying and CPC bidding for ChatGPT ads. So it’s out there. Like you can, as far as I know, you can try them. We’re working with some clients on CPC. Yeah, we’re gonna—

Emily:  what’s the average CPC?

Jeremy:  I don’t think it was like super high. I don’t wanna just like guess it, but I think you can do some searches and kind of find out. Yeah. It’s just, are these gonna lead to conversions? Like that’s what we don’t know. I think the measurement is still pretty basic.

Emily:  You know, I’ve seen a ton of ChatGPT ads.

Jeremy:  I haven’t really.

Emily:  I’ve seen a ton of ChatGPT ads.

Jeremy:  Yeah.

Emily:  I think they’re really on point.

Jeremy:  Really?

Emily:  I think they’re, they’re, I think they’re pretty good.

Jeremy:  So, but I think, okay, let me think about your ChatGPT ads. So you have, you have the $8 a month plan, don’t you? Do you still pay for that?

Emily:  Yeah, yeah, I have the $8 a month plan.

Jeremy:  I mainly use it for like my personal life, but yeah, so $8 a month on the pro, whatever the plans are, there’s like, there’s, yeah, there’s Go and then maybe Pro and then maybe Business or something. So like the top two, the top two don’t have ads, so I’m not seeing them. So what I would guess is that you’re You are the ideal customer to be seeing ads because what happens if you, because it knows stuff about you, right? So, but if you’re just somebody like, I bet I have to get stats on this, but if you’re the vast majority of people who don’t pay for ChatGPT, ChatGPT is not going to know anything about you, right? Because you’re not logged in. Are you still logged in?

Emily:  I mean, it’ll know. Well, even if it doesn’t, even if you’re, yes, you have to log in after a certain amount of searches, even on the free account. So, but it’s not, it says it doesn’t have as good of memory.

Jeremy:  Like, I would just be interested how many people actually log in.

Emily:  Limited number of searches. Yeah, I mean, that would be interesting data, but like, yeah, I do think it does remember a little bit of you if you aren’t logged in.

Jeremy:  Okay. But not, it doesn’t have all the other stuff like Google does, you know, Google, like if you just use Google.

Emily:  Right. But like, still you’re getting like, if you are searching like a certain topic, on it, like the ads are pretty relevant, I would say. Like they’re not out of nowhere.

Jeremy:  Got it.

Emily:  So yeah, I think the ChatGPT ads are interesting. Um, we’re gonna see this advanced more and more. Obviously these are just like the first stages of it rolling out, but to see them already support CPC bidding, um, in addition to CPM buying is pretty interesting because yeah, I think you’re paying per click, not even impression, which I— that’s I mean, that’s pretty awesome. So, yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy:  And I know there’s like been this like kind of shift where people, you know, a lot of people really like Claude or they like Gemini. I mean, we announce it later on, but like the new GPT, like the new OpenAI, like GPT-5.5 is like so good in my opinion. Maybe there’s, maybe that’s a hot take, but I was like, man, this is so much better than even 5.4, like I was working with it today and I was like very impressed. I did the same searches on, like basically I tried to get the same task done with Gemini versus ChatGPT and ChatGPT just did so much better. And it was pretty close previously. So yeah, cool. I think you should, I think you should try GPT ads and, or ChatGPT ads and see if they, if they work. I don’t think agencies can make accounts yet. I haven’t checked in the last few days, but I think if you’re interested, make an account, give whoever runs your ads access to that account and see if it works. I’m curious. And if you do run ads and they suck or they’re great, let me know because I want to know about that.

Emily:  And I would just say also continue to strengthen your SEO too, so you can appear organically in some of these searches, especially as people search, hey, what’s the best, you know, yada yada near me? Company, sell this gear me. I mean, that’s all pulling, uh, and based on the SEO on your website. So just, that is really where I would start, honestly, before I would start paying for ads on there.

Jeremy:  Cool. I like that. No, I like that. I’m cheap. No, that’s all good.

Emily:  In that sense.

Jeremy:  Uh, cool. Going on to some of the medium impact updates. So we’ll blaze through some of these. Um, but they’re, they’re definitely interesting. Definitely worth your time to look into. If you want more information on them, you know, reach out to me or Emily or You know, look on, look online somewhere. I’m sure there’s information on it. The ClickBrief is one place. So yeah, Google Ads introduced real-time policy reviews for responsive search ads in April. This basically provides instant feedback while ads are being created, including editable issues like capitalization, symbols, or destination problems. So that’s expected to roll out like across Google later on in the year. This is like an update where I was like, wow, they should have done this so much longer ago. Yeah, I love— Yeah, like this is awesome. It’s great. Like, otherwise you have to go, you have to wait.

Emily:  Nothing is worse than like publishing everything and then going back and then being like, oh, I got disapproved. Yeah.

Jeremy:  Right. So this is huge. Like, I mean, it’s just like such a little time saver. Like, duh. Cool. TikTok added, uh, more smart— the duh button. Dude, we gotta get a duh button. Uh, TikTok added more Smart+ controls and commerce updates. I won’t get into all of this, but basically TikTok is just giving you some more manual control within automated campaign types, which is kind of the trend. It’s like Google’s doing that. It’s like, here’s PMax. Oh, you want to actually, you know, make manual changes? Well, now you have negative keywords. So it’s kind of funny. It kind of goes like in the direction of being too automated advertisers and brands. Want more features, and then you kind of slowly get those features. Also, on April 13th, Reddit announced reminder ads globally for all advertisers. This format adds a remind me call to action. Yeah, like, I mean, Instagram has had these for a while. I use Instagram reminder ads all the time for events because you can’t run Facebook event ads on Instagram, which is kind of a bummer, but I think if you have a reason to use these, like, try them. You know, I was talking with a client today and, you know, we talked about, should we try these for— I don’t want to give all the secret sauce away, but it’s like, should we try these for Black Friday?

Jeremy:  Like, what if we run reminder ads for, you know, 2 to 3 weeks running up to Black Friday so that we don’t have to spend a ton of budget on Black Friday or like close to that, you know, week or weekend when it’s really expensive. I’m like, ooh, they would just get a free reminder. Like, hey, the sale’s happening, you know, you can set up the reminders. That’s, that’s, that’s a neat, neat strategy. It could, it could work well. Yeah.

Emily:  I like it. Yeah. You should try that.

Jeremy:  I know. I think we will. Other updates. We always like to talk about some of the, like, big, you know, AI sort of LLMs. A bunch of people were talking about Anthropic launching Claude Opus 4.7 and Claude Design. So these are just, you know, improvements in software engineering, vision, complex multi-step work. The Claude Design was a research preview product for creating visual work like prototypes, slides, one-pagers, and marketing collateral. I’ll probably try this in the next few weeks to see what it’s like because I’ve been just playing with the OpenAI updates. Like, I still like OpenAI as a, you know, LLM product that works. So they introduced GPT-5.5. And they described it as its most capable model yet for agentive coding, knowledge work, research, data analysis, document creation, and computer use workflows. I will say I agree. Like, to me, this was like such a big improvement over GPT-5.4, and I can’t believe we’re talking about these updates like it’s new iPhones. Like, it’s, it’s ridiculous. Like, these models—

Emily:  it’s so hard to keep— I know it’s so hard for me to keep track of like every model and and all that jazz. I, I don’t, I’m trying to even look if I have that on the Go plan.

Jeremy:  Like, I don’t think it’s on Go, like, necessarily, like, on our internal plan. Well, it is?

Emily:  No.

Jeremy:  Okay, I didn’t think it was. It’s, it’s very good though. I’m very impressed. Cool. Uh, also OpenAI introduced ChatGPT Images 2.0. Um, you know, I know we’re, we’re pretty hyped on some of the Xanobanana stuff, which that’s just a fun name to say, but I think these images are pretty good, honestly. I tried running these against some of the Gemini images and I had, this might not be for everybody, but I actually had better luck kind of getting something similar to what I want. You know, maybe sometimes I’m the annoying person that’s like, hey designer, I want something sort of like this, but it is such a good tool for that. Like if you’re working with design teams as like, somebody in performance, like media, paid media, just the fact that you can give somebody somewhat of a vision and be like, hey, good designer, like, do your thing, but this is kind of what we’re thinking. I love that workflow. I’m sure designers hate it, but like, it is so helpful.

Emily:  It’s probably more helpful than me when I just start writing on a piece, drawing on a piece of paper.

Jeremy:  That’s still helpful though.

Emily:  And then Sarah will look at me and be like, what is this shape? And I’ll be like, I think It’s supposed to be a car, but like, yeah, I mean, I think that’s very like a very valuable like use case for that.

Jeremy:  Yeah, it’s, it’s done wonders for getting what we call and other people call like performance media because, you know, performance media is sometimes different from like organic social or, you know, the stuff you put on your website or, you know, kind of standard brand branding.

Emily:  That’s a good, that’s a good distinction. That’s an important distinction. Yeah.

Jeremy:  I learned that word from Steve Kroll. I don’t know if he got it from somebody else, but yeah, performance media is— it’s kind of like how I describe it.

Emily:  I like it. I like that.

Jeremy:  That’s how I describe it. That is true. Yeah.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy:  So another update, on April 22nd, Meta expanded access to its AI business assistant across major global markets with language support, and this is essentially designed to help advertisers and agencies work with account support, performance guidance, and campaign recommendations inside Meta business tools. I think this is like somewhat helpful. Like I know Manus seems like it would be great if you wanted to pay a bunch of money for it. But this tool’s, you know, it’s kind of like Ads Advisor in Google Ads. It like, I actually used it today where I was like, hey, did any of the ads I launched in the last 2 weeks like stand out to you? And it actually gave me back lead gen information, which I’m like, this, we don’t run leads. So I was like, base, you know, base performance on conversion value or ROAS. So you, I had to guide it because granted my prompt wasn’t that good, but I just wanted to see what it would do. But it was like kind of helpful. It really was. It actually helped me find, it gave me the recommendation that some of my ad sets were a bit too fragmented, which I already knew because I, had some ad sets that literally only spent like, you know, $10 in the last like week where the other ones were spending thousands or hundreds.

Jeremy:  So I don’t know, it’s cool. Try it. I wouldn’t just straight up listen to it. Like it doesn’t know all your context, but it knows some of it, you know, it can see, it can see your change history and stuff. Not all like that. That’s hard to do with some of the other models, but as you mentioned, that’ll we can just lead right into Meta opening its AI or its Ads AI connectors. So essentially Meta is giving advertisers a way to connect Meta ad accounts to supported AI tools so they can create, manage, and analyze and optimize campaigns. I think that’s neat. I don’t— I believe OpenAI was like one of the partners. I think I thought Claude was in there. Don’t quote me on that. But I just don’t know if these connectors are gonna require to use like credits or not. So whenever you use, you, you’re forced to use like credits with these LLMs. It gets so expensive so fast. Like, you know, one of the updates in here that I didn’t even mention is like Triple Whale, their like AI tool, um, recently updated to like a better version, which can use Claude or OpenAI, probably even can use Gemini.

Jeremy:  But now it went from being like this thing that you could just like I’m going to try 100 different queries and see what it says to now it’s, it’s like token or credit based. And I’m like, ooh, this plan only has 6,000 credits a month. And that last prompt just cost me 1,000 credits. I’m like, this could be thousands more dollars, you know, a month once you have to start paying for this. So I think we think AI is expensive now, but we’re still in this like stage where, you know, you’re on your $20 a month plan and it’s like you can use it almost what feels like as much as you want. And it doesn’t cost you more. But the minute I think it starts costing people more is when they’re going to be like, oh, maybe AI isn’t great for everything, you know?

Emily:  So. Right, exactly. So yeah, it’ll be interesting to see where that goes. But yeah, interesting they opened it up.

Jeremy:  So other updates that if you want more information on, just please, you know, visit the blog or reach out to me or Emily. But Demand Gen added, uh, view-through conversion optimization and, uh, Commerce Media Suite support. So just some new features, you know, you can optimize for views. Uh, that’s kind of neat. And also the Commerce Media Suite lets advertisers use retailer first-party, uh, catalog and conversion data across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail. Uh, I don’t even know if I’m going to say this right, but TikTok added Dreamina, Dreamine, Dreamina, Dreamina.

Emily:  Dream, I’m sure it’s Dreamina. Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy:  So TikTok added Dreamina Seedance 2.0 to Symphony. So, you know, look into that. That sounds like a crazy sentence.

Emily:  Crazy.

Jeremy:  Yeah. But essentially this is TikTok’s tool to create video from text prompts. So interesting. Google. Ads data controls to move ads consent mode. So that seems like very cryptic, but essentially Google is making it so that data that alters Google Ads stays in Google Ads and things that affect, you know, GA4 kind of stay in GA4. So instead of like being able to kind of like make changes in GA4 that might affect Google Ads, just think anything in Google Ads should happen in Google Ads, anything GA4 should happen in GA4. Um, Google Ads also, uh, in their experiments, they added an auto-apply setting. So just be aware, um, that that’s, I believe it’s like almost default on. So just be aware. And it doesn’t look at all your metrics, right? So you can only pick 2 metrics. So just, just, just know that like those better be 2 pretty good metrics if you’re going to have it auto-apply. And then just some low impact updates. So Microsoft added Performance Max landing page reporting. Meta updates its Pixel and conversions API setup. There was a new Google Ads API version 24 was released. And this one’s kind of interesting.

Jeremy:  We won’t talk about it too much, but I saw this report that just caught my eye. Emarketer projects that Meta will overtake Google in digital ad revenue by the end of 2026. I mean, Meta is cooking. It’s king. I mean, Google is king too, but Man, Meta and Google, you can do a lot of damage. I mean that in a good way with just those two platforms. Like you, everything else is bonus to me. Meta and Google are where it’s at. So cool. And that’s the ClickBrief Podcast for April 2026. This episode was edited by Aja Blue and produced by Emily Anderson and me, Jeremy Packee.