The Click Brief- February 2026

Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson break down February’s biggest digital advertising updates, from Meta embedding Manus AI directly into Ads Manager to Google’s major budget pacing change for ad scheduling. They also cover Google’s new target ROAS option for new customer acquisition, the launch of Pomelli Photoshoot and Nano Banana 2 for AI-assisted creative production, Microsoft’s new AI search reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools, and growing concerns around auto-applied Google changes and AI product tagging on Instagram. Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates every month.

Top Takeaways

Biggest Watchout
Google’s new ad scheduling pacing will attempt to spend the full monthly budget within active scheduled days, potentially causing overspend if advertisers rely heavily on ad scheduling.

New Feature to Test
Google Ads now allows advertisers to set a separate target ROAS for new customer acquisition.

Creative Shift
AI tools like Nano Banana 2 and Pomelli Photoshoot are making creative concepting and product photography faster and more accessible.

Other Platform Updates

• Google continues expanding conversational search and brand agents within the SERP
• ChatGPT now has hundreds of millions of users but still drives far less outbound traffic than Google
• Microsoft added AI search visibility reporting in Bing Webmaster Tools and Clarity
• Advertisers reported dormant broad match keywords being quietly re-enabled in some Google Ads accounts
• Microsoft Ads introduced multi-image shopping ads
• Google removed parked domains from the Search Partner Network
• Instagram is testing feed customization and AI product tagging
• X is testing AI content labeling and new aspect ratios
• Instagram rolled out teen safety alerts tied to self-harm-related searches

Visit The Click Brief blog for more in-depth analysis and updates from February.

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:  February came out swinging with massive updates across the board. Meta is officially embedding its Manus AI directly into Ads Manager. Google is fundamentally overhauling its budget pacing for ad schedules. And Google Labs just dropped the new Pomelli photoshoot tool to replace product photography. And that’s just the start.

Jeremy: So starting off with the high-impact updates following their acquisition of Manus late last year, Meta has officially started embedding the Manus AI assistant directly into the Ads Manager interface.

Emily:  Here it is. We knew, we knew it was coming.

Jeremy: It’s all over Meta too. Like anytime you finish a campaign, it pops up. Yeah, it’s really hard to exit out of it.

Emily:  And it’s usually like, for those who haven’t seen an ad account, it’s like an annoying pop-up that basically says the X. Yeah. Do you want to like, you know, refer to Manus to like, you know, double-check, you know, your work or get additional insights?

Jeremy: So have you tried it? I’ve tried it.

Emily:  I haven’t yet.

Jeremy: So this is what happened. So I connected it to my ads account, which is really easy. It’s like all, you know, direct connections, couple of clicks. And I wanted it to do a region breakout over time because I work with a company that does events and auctions and I thought it’d be really cool to see after an event how long it took Meta to start kind of focusing its like spend towards like where the next auction was. We do have campaigns that run nationwide and then we have like individual campaigns. And it was running for like 5 minutes, and at the end of it, it said I was out of credits. So it looked like it was about to be awesome.

Emily:  Yeah, you’re like, here it comes.

Jeremy: Yes, I was so excited for it. Um, and yeah, I ran out of credit. So it’s like credit-based. There’s like a free— like, I think you get like 300 credits or something that refreshes every day. So maybe over the course of like a couple weeks, I could get— yeah, you know, the data.

Emily:  I’m just like picturing you on a, like a claw machine where you finally got the toy in the claw and then you’re about ready to put it in the drop and it doesn’t hit the drop. It just falls off the claw and you’re just like, man.

Jeremy: I was really excited to see what it was going to do because that would be— I wanted to give it like sort of little direction to see how it would show that data because that would be kind of hard data to show over time. It’s including, you know, at least all 50 states. There’s a lot of cool features like that you’ve seen in like Gemini and, you know, ChatGPT where it’s like export into like a deck and visualize this. So I was really excited about it. You know, I didn’t really get to use it, but some of the features in Meta, like there’s a new like assistant tool where you can analyze campaign data and that’s pretty cool. That’s conversational. So you can go in there and be like, hey, you know how much or how is engagement doing in my account, or how are these campaigns doing? Um, and it does have sort of memories. So like, I taught it, uh, for that company I was talking about, talking about, I taught it the event schedule, and it said it was able to save that to the memory. So I could actually get recommendations, uh, based on that schedule.

Jeremy: Because otherwise what happens with these like LLMs, and if you have companies that, you know, run events or seasonal, it might just say something like, oh, your conversions, you know, decreased by 50%. It’s like, well, yeah, no duh.

Emily:  Like, right, right.

Jeremy: There’s events over, there’s nothing going on right now.

Emily:  So I think that is like a good segue. So like these tools, these AI tools, especially in platform, like I’m predicting they’re going to get better.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily:  Like, yeah, you had this really bad experience. It’s kind of funny, we laugh at now, but I do think like over time these tools are going to be a part of media buying. Yeah. And I think there are a lot of people out there asking themselves, well, then why would I keep my media buyer, ad agency, whether it’s in-house person or someone you’re hiring externally. And I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is one, Meta owns Manus. So they are keeping their business goals number one in mind. Yours is a secondary.

Jeremy: And they built into a lot of the recommendations are like, have you thought about making your budget unlimited?

Emily:  Totally. And sadly, there are probably some companies that are going to fall for that. And then number two is, when you have a strategic expert, strategic media buyer in the account, they’re thinking about your full funnel marketing plan, not just what’s happening in the platform.

Jeremy: What’s the wall garden?

Emily:  That is exactly so. Like to your point.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily:  Okay. The AI knows this because this is what’s happening, but it doesn’t have that additional context, right?

Jeremy: To piece it together. There are tools that help with that, you know, like a triple whale or something like that. But Totally agree. Like, you really need somebody that can help with the, uh, you know, the performance of the entire business. Because just looking at one platform, unless you only run one platform, then it’s a little bit easier. But most companies don’t, um, right?

Emily:  And even then, like, what if the Manus recommendation doesn’t work? Are you going to go try to contact Meta support? Good luck, right?

Jeremy: Right.

Emily:  Like, I don’t know. So I, I say test it out. Be skeptical. Yeah, be skeptical. Use it as an assistant, but like it’s not quite there yet.

Jeremy: I agree. I think it’s good for me for like, uh, and I don’t know if Meta is calling the, you know, the little like beta tool in Meta Manus at all. Like there’s that tool in there that will help you analyze specific campaigns and then there’s actually Manus like the AI.

Emily:  Yeah, I think they’re separate. I think it’ll be one thing though.

Jeremy: Yeah, I don’t know if they’re—

Emily:  because I think they introduced the other one earlier. Yeah.

Jeremy: But it is kind of neat to go in there and be like, hey, like, you know, how is, how’s my performance today? And granted, it might be wrong, but just to interact with data, I’m a huge fan of being able to interact with data.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: To where you don’t have to pull anything manually. Yeah, manually.

Emily:  Totally. Yeah, you had a great use case for it.

Jeremy: Yep. But it didn’t work.

Emily:  One day.

Jeremy: Buy those credits.

Emily:  One day.

Jeremy: Or pay the $400 a year, but I don’t know how much it is. I don’t know how many credits that you get.

Emily:  Next update.

Jeremy: Yeah, next update. So this is kind of a re, uh, retouch from last month. We did talk about some of these updates, but Google, uh, outlined its vision for digital advertising in 2026. I think this was actually done, um, in like a blog post or multiple blog posts in January. And we touched on things like direct offers last month and, uh, the like Agentic Commerce protocol that Google put out. But one thing I didn’t talk about is one, the, the new business agent. I don’t think we talked about this last.

Emily:  I don’t think we did.

Jeremy: But just, you know, this is just another way to interact with a brand. This isn’t necessarily an advertising play right now, but for a couple of brands, I think like Lowe’s was one of them, if I remember correctly. You’ll see like on the SERP, like it’ll say like, you know, chat with this brand or it says something along those lines and you can and you can talk with the agent about like products and, you know, things about the—

Emily:  in the SERP. Yeah, directly. Yeah.

Jeremy: So I put this in here just because I want to emphasize just like these AI-powered search experiences, like they’re just changing so rapidly. And I feel like if I look at the SERP this week versus, you know, 2 weeks ago, it could be like pretty different if you look at all the little pieces of it.

Emily:  And I think this emphasizes that conversational feature. I think that everyone who’s now starting like more LLMs like ChatGPT and such, like it flows in such like a conversational matter. Like it’s now taking that consumer buying and turning it into less of a search and more of a conversation. So I think that is an important update and something, you know, we’ll continue to see develop over time.

Jeremy: And just people using like those AI assistants or AI chatbots in general is just like soaring. I saw like a— I think I mentioned this later on, but I saw something actually this morning from a guy named Patrick Stocks at Ahrefs. I think that’s how you say it. It was like an SEO study that said AI assistants now equal 56% of global search engine volume. I thought that was pretty interesting. It takes into consideration like people using apps where some of these other comparisons were just comparing web traffic. So I found that to be, you know, pretty, I mean, pretty interesting that everybody is starting to use these. So next update, Google Ads introduced a new option allowing advertisers to set a separate target ROAS specifically for new customers within the new customer acquisition bidding strategies. This allows advertisers to use a different Efficiency target when optimizing for first-time buyers. I see this in the accounts. You know, before it was like you were having to basically add like almost fake revenue, you know, and fake. But, you know, a lot of the best—

Emily:  you’re talking— you’re referring to just like the new customer acquisition bid.

Jeremy: We would do it with like a lifetime value and you kind of figure out like how much you had to calculate that.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: So this is probably just a different way of looking at it. I like it so much more though, that you can get more straightforward.

Emily:  I think it’s less intimidating too.

Jeremy: Yes.

Emily:  Because Because if you’re like having to assign a value and kind of getting into it, now you should know that value when you’re setting a target ROAS. Like I’m saying that with, you know, emphasis here. Right.

Jeremy: Best guess your future revenue.

Emily:  Yes. Like I am saying that the number you pick here should be based on some mathematical equation with your lifetime value of customer. However, I digress. It is less intimidating to be setting a target ROAS percentage rather than assigning because it might be monetary value.

Jeremy: Absolutely. It might be very common to say, you know, for a new customer, I’m fine with like, you know, a 100% ROAS or 150% ROAS. But for an existing, you know, customer, I want a 400%.

Emily:  Totally.

Jeremy: What’s interesting, I haven’t used this feature yet, like the new one. You know, how that campaign optimizes would be interesting. Like, then does it just blend together like a 300%? Is it like, you know, kind of a guessing game? At what it ends up being, you know what I’m saying?

Emily:  Right. I mean, you’re allowing the algorithm, I mean, more flexibility if you’re saying, yeah, for new customers we’re going to take $100, but we’re just going to break even, $100 ROAS. But if I’m going to get a returning customer, then I need at least a $400 ROAS. Yeah, it, it would be really interesting.

Jeremy: I hope you can break it out too to see the results.

Emily:  Yeah, you would think. I’m sure in order to— yeah, I haven’t seen that. But yeah, I, I think that’s definitely a setting here I’m going to toggle around with, with some e-com clients. I’m going to run it by them, see if they would be interested in testing that out, especially for some of my clients who do have really long LTVs, like the customers are in for life. I think it would be, you know, okay, right, potentially to take a lower, lower cut there.

Jeremy: And I feel like some of these like features, they work with some brands and don’t work with others. Like I’ve had times where I’ve tried to break out, say, a shopping or a Performance Max campaign, you know, specifically for new customers, and it’s really kind of, you know, sort of tanked the results in both campaigns where I’ve had to bring it back. So maybe the fact that it’s in one campaign is a good thing. Now, I don’t know how much control you’re going to have over that, so you might lose control, but for some brands this might actually work better.

Emily:  Yeah, I’m thinking especially if you’re a brand that has like low conversion volume to begin with, right? So less segmented campaigns, probably the better. This is probably a really good fit for you. But exciting.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily:  Another toggle.

Jeremy: Another toggle is that we’re calling it.

Emily:  Love it. I don’t know. That’s what I—

Jeremy: another toggle. I like that to be like a feature of the show.

Emily:  Here we go.

Jeremy: Here’s another toggle.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: Cool. Next. So this, this is kind of a big deal. Not so much so for a lot of the brands I work with, but Google announced in mid-February that they’re making a major change to budget pacing for campaigns using ad scheduling. Which is now in effect because it went into effect on March 1st, but it essentially will proactively attempt to spend your full monthly budget limit, which is 30.4 times your average daily budget within your scheduled active days, regardless of the days your campaigns are paused. So that’s a lot to understand. I had to like really think about this. I don’t use scheduling that often. You know, over the years, like Google has gotten better at turning down budgets on the weekends, but if you’re a restaurant or you’re a brand where you’re like, hey, I don’t want to run during the week or I don’t want to run on the weekend at all and there’s a reason for that, you just have to be really aware that your budgets could go crazy.

Emily:  This is the number one reason I see clients overspend, especially if they’re coming to Granular and I’ll look back and be like, well, what happened on this week back then? They’ll be like, ugh, we made an ad scheduling and budget mistake. So like, yeah, I think this very important update because it’s, you know, you can potentially spend 30.4% more than what you intended essentially.

Jeremy: Yeah, I just wonder how it was, I mean, I guess we just, a lot of people thought it was already working like this, but apparently it wasn’t taking those schedules into consideration. So if you just turned on your budgets or turned off your ads, Google would then.

Emily:  They were taking those things in.

Jeremy: Yeah, they weren’t talking to each other, which is surprising. So it actually makes sense that it works like this, The fact that it hasn’t been working like this for so long, there’s probably some people that are gonna be finding out when this podcast releases.

Emily:  And probably the hard way. Yeah.

Jeremy: That they’re like, oh my God, I spent, you know, ah, yes. Where I normally would spend 10 grand, I spent 20 or 30, right? Or something.

Emily:  So definitely pay attention to that, especially if you’re ad scheduling.

Jeremy: 100%. Cool. Next update. Uh, on February 26th, Google introduced Nano Banana Pro. Or sorry, that’s okay. You can leave this in.

Emily:  That’s coming soon. Spoiler, Jeremy has a leak.

Jeremy: Nano Banana Pro Max 2. So on February 26th, Google introduced Nano Banana 2, merging the capabilities of its previous models into a single app with lightning fast speed. So I have been experimenting with this.

Emily:  Same. Not with Nano Banana 2.

Jeremy: Well, it’s built into Gemini. So if you’re using it, it’s just, using Nanobanana too.

Emily:  Yes.

Jeremy: And it is pretty good, I think. I don’t know.

Emily:  I don’t know.

Jeremy: For mocking stuff up, like, because I’m not a traditional sort of like creative designer, but I have an eye for things that I like. So I really like using that for is when I’m making creative suggestions or doing consulting, I’m like, hey, I’m looking for ads like this. And previously I would, you know, go through Meta Ads library or my personal library and be like, here’s, you know, here’s a brand from a jeweler, but apply it to cars where now I can just be like, hey, create an ad sort of like this, and I can send it over to the client to be like, this is sort of what I’m looking for. And it helps so much.

Emily:  So we are on the same page here. I was gonna say, for creative concepting and brainstorming design, getting a look at things, I agree, it’s a really powerful tool. It is not quite there where it is going to in my opinion, craft an ad that I can use.

Jeremy: Probably not. It also has the watermark on it, which you can easily remove. Yeah. And some of the ads I see in the wild though, I’m like, this would be better than what you’re running right now.

Emily:  Well, I mean, that’s true too. But like, yes, as far as like what you’re saying, like getting the concept in.

Jeremy: Like new concepts.

Emily:  Providing direction to a graphic designer. It is awesome.

Jeremy: Like I want an ad that looks like the Notes app. Or I can just be like, hey, make, this is like kind of what I’m looking for.

Emily:  Kind of what you’re looking for.

Jeremy: Yeah. I can get you 90, 90% of the way there and you just have to, like, I, you still need a designer to make it for your brand. But I comparing this to ChatGPT and I still like ChatGPT and you know, they use DALL·E and that’s pretty good. But I actually think, you know, Nanobanana 2 is way better, um, at getting me more of like the vibe that I want.

Emily:  Yep. I use it, um, actually a fair amount for slide deck presentations.

Jeremy: Oh yeah.

Emily:  A lot of times I will put together a slide deck on how I think it’s good. I don’t have as good a creative eye. It’s a skill I wish I had, but I really don’t. So what I do is I do it the best I can, screenshot it, will send it to Gemini and be like, hey, can you help me organize these and make it a little better? And it will like produce a slide that then I could like insert in. However, the thing you can’t edit them. That’s a big beef. That should change. But it does redesign it. And then it could be like a simple fix. Like I’ll be like, okay, that makes sense. Like let me add, a, you know, insert a square with some text here and like break it up a little bit. It really helps me in that sense. And I think my slides are looking better than ever because I have this tool to kind of rely on and give me like a little creative feedback that I just, I don’t have that skill. I wish I did.

Jeremy: And I feel like it’s, these aren’t my words, I stole these from somebody, but like, I think it was when the, when the Claude people came to Granular, or yeah, um, but DMC, you mean? Yeah, yeah. So the Anthropic, we had Anthropic people at DMC, but basically one of the, one of the guys there was like, you know, teach AI to do the thing that you don’t want to do.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: Um, and that’s kind of like the example you gave, like you don’t want to be looking through all the different settings necessarily on a slide deck. Like you, you have the information, you don’t want to spend the time, right? You know, you don’t want to spend hours making it look pretty, you want to spend hours on the messaging and the data.

Emily:  Yes, like the story I’m trying to tell. Yeah, my biggest pain has always been I want to show that story visually. I just don’t quite know how. And I’m sure a designer would, but yeah, they give me enough that I can go that way.

Jeremy: And even Manus, like we talked about Manus, like, yes, I haven’t, you know, I don’t have enough credits.

Emily:  Yeah, one day you’ll know.

Jeremy: But I would imagine if you wanted to make a Facebook-specific slide deck, that would be a good place to try that out, at least. So this leads right into our next update. On February 19th, Google Labs introduced Pomeli Photoshoot, a free marketing tool powered by the Nana Banana a model that transformed basic product photos into studio-quality marketing assets. I tried this and I’m blown away by how good this is. You know, it’s not gonna replace photography and maybe some people just use this for, you know, like concepting, like, you know, we just talked about Emily, but I just wanted to show you live on air sort of what this looked like.

Emily:  So, a live reaction. I love it.

Jeremy: Literally all you have to do is put in your website It’ll analyze your website and your business DNA, which you can edit. It takes a few minutes and then you can say, hey, do a photo shoot. None of these photos are real. This is unbelievable quality.

Emily:  That’s pretty good.

Jeremy: This brand specifically does jewelry and they would never use AI models. It’s like against their, was it brand ethos? Is that something?

Emily:  Sure.

Jeremy: So they would never use these, but they are good enough. Like look at this, it’s a bracelet and it added a little shine from like, you know, the sunset.

Emily:  If you did not have the resources to like outsource photography or get photography, that’s pretty close.

Jeremy: I would use this if I had a small e-com brand and I needed something for sale or needed models. Yeah, I don’t like AI taking away jobs from models or any of that. But if you have— if you don’t have the resources, some of those are just product photos.

Emily:  Yeah, some of them are not even like the ones you just show me, like, yeah, like half for models, but like just on like a piece of jewelry on someone’s wrist. That—

Jeremy: so I’ll show you what this looks like. So you basically say create a product photo shoot, you select an image. These images that’s pulling from your website, uh, yes, or I think you can connect your feed to it. Um, so I wouldn’t use— I wouldn’t really use lifestyle shots. I would actually just use like the product photos.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: And then you can use what are called Photoshop— or not Photoshop— the backgrounds, photo shoot templates, and you can adjust these. So there’s a flat lay, there’s a model try-on. Here’s Easter in use. And you can, you can adjust these. So beauty, I mean, I hate to say it, but these are usable photos.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: You could use right now in campaigns if you don’t have the capabilities to hire professional models, which, by the way, are always going to be better, but way more effort.

Emily:  Yeah, I will say, I think it’s— so the brand you’re showing me is very sophisticated. They have an amazing website, tons of resources. They’ve put a lot of time and effort.

Jeremy: They have a brand what they have. Guidelines, lookbook.

Emily:  They have, they have, and they’ve lived by that. So I do think I could see a brand, like to your point, maybe a smaller e-com brand, not as many past resources, not, you know, they don’t have that there. They could come to that tool and be underwhelmed by it because maybe there’s just not enough, right, to go off of, you know. So that’s something to keep in mind too. I think the more you’re feeding into, you know, your website and putting time and giving examples on like what your brand is, I think the better the output is going to be. So there is still that need of like, you know, keeping it updated, keeping it fresh into what you want it to be and not letting the AI kind of go crazy.

Jeremy: Sure.

Emily:  And who knows, maybe creating something that’s—

Jeremy: maybe if I did this, you know, 20 times with 20 different like jewelry brands, maybe it would look kind of the same. And then it’s kind of like, yeah, then, you know, kind of loses its spark a bit there. But I mean, as far as being like, you know, a paid media manager, other paid media managers, you have the capability to do creative that could be used in ads, right? And you didn’t have that before without having the technical abilities of, you know, Photoshop or, you know, Illustrator or whatever other programs, you know, people are using these days. Figma.

Emily:  And Pomelli, I think 10 out of 10 name. Yeah, I have to look on like where that name came from, but just fun to say. I think Manus Bard. I know they got rid of that, but like, Pameli, like, out of the gate.

Jeremy: Manus, like you were puking Manus.

Emily:  I guess like Manus is like, yeah, Manus, like praying mantis. Yeah, it’s like gonna pray on your account, get you to spend more Manus. But Pameli, okay.

Jeremy: I know, it’s—

Emily:  I like the name.

Jeremy: This is like the first time I’ve ever really saw a product that I’m like, out of the box you could do something with this.

Emily:  Yeah.

Jeremy: Without any other, you know, help. Uh, but there’s definitely workflows and stacks that work where you could make something for a brand and they could love it. Cool. Next update. Um, this is interesting. Uh, this is just on ChatGPT. So ChatGPT, uh, reaches 800 million. I think these were weekly users. Um, but there was a study that said it lags in outbound traffic, which It doesn’t really surprise me, but basically, um, I mentioned the study earlier, but it was a study from Patrick Stocks from Ahrefs. I think that’s how you say it. Again, I’m not sure. Um, it says that while ChatGPT handles about 12% of Google search volume, Google sends about 190 times more traffic to websites. You know, that’s not surprising. ChatGPT kind of keeps you on the site and there’s, we announced like some features where you know, these LLMs are trying to get it so you can check out on the site. So it’s all sort of seamless. And I mean, that makes the end experience for the users great. I mean, if I can find the exact product I want for this Florida trip I’m taking soon and I can get, you know, I don’t know, 3 kids’ luggage bags and I can just check out right in, you know, right in ChatGPT and it’s finding any active promo codes or sales, like that’s a great experience.

Emily:  So Totally cool.

Jeremy: Other updates, uh, there were some advertisers that noticed, uh, Google quietly re-enabling— or other updates, there was— I didn’t see this personally, but Google quietly re-enabled some dormant broad match keywords in people’s accounts. I don’t know if you saw this, Emily, but I did see people talking about it.

Emily:  I saw people here at Granular talking about it, right? That’s what made me look into it, like warnings of it, right? So yeah, hate, hate, hate. That’s why I’m—

Jeremy: that’s a wild move, like just turn on, uh, keywords.

Emily:  And broad match, right? This is why you have to, have to, have to work it into your schedule to do keyword check search query reporting. Yeah, so important. Um, weekly, biweekly, I guess, at the absolute—

Jeremy: and with AI Max, for sure, look at your search.

Emily:  I feel like I’m looking at them every day almost at this point because I have trust issues because of settings like this. So yes, please keep an eye on this in your account, and if you see like a random broad match get added Good way to check on why that happened is usually the change history and then it’ll say this was auto-applied and then revisit your auto-recommendations. That’s where I would start. I’m not quite sure if this specific re-enabling dormant—

Jeremy: This seemed like a mistake to me.

Emily:  Yeah, because I’m like, I’ve not seen that. I’ve not seen that in auto-recs. I’ve seen add new keywords, obviously. Yeah. But re-enable, I don’t know. So just check it out.

Jeremy: When it says re-enable, I’m like, did they pause it at some point? Now they’re turning them back on or?

Emily:  Yeah, like if you had it in there, it paused due to low activity, which— when have I ever seen a broad match keyword, right, to low activity? Right, never. Um, and then they turned it back on. I don’t know.

Jeremy: And there’s still like— there’s still accounts where I run, uh, for specific things, I’ll still run exact match campaigns.

Emily:  Totally.

Jeremy: Like there’s still— oh, I don’t feel the pressure that you have to do broad. I think it is amazing for scaling and to get, you know, additional search terms in there and stuff. So like absolutely broad is like amazing. It gets, you know, more— like technically, if, you know, we read what Google is, or if we believe what Google’s saying, you know, gets more signal, can see the user’s browser history and, you know, all the sort of things to make it more relevant.

Emily:  Um, but don’t be afraid to run exact match campaigns, especially for clients who might not be e-commerce too. And maybe they’re a lead gen client, and maybe for whatever reason— I have a client who has this, they have issues with their CRM, they can’t connect it to Google, so we don’t necessarily know the level of quality of lead coming through Google. So the most we have to go off of is honestly the search terms or the keywords they convert on. So in that case, I am extremely hesitant to choose broad match keywords because one, we’re already kind of a smaller fish in a really large pond as far as budget-wise, but two, I’ve just kind of seen broad match go off the rails and then I have really no idea. If that’s lead qualified. Now, if you have the CRM hooked up so you can tell the data, if you’re an e-com that you can see, like, you don’t care, okay, purchases are coming through.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily:  Then I think that’s a different use case. But yeah, to your point, there has been a lot of push on broad and you and I will push it when it makes sense.

Jeremy: I mean, I love broad.

Emily:  I do too. But there are use cases still where it does not make sense.

Jeremy: Like the long path to conversion to— yeah, I have some clients that might be 90 days and obviously You know, the stock attribution’s like, you know, 30-day, uh, clicks. So totally. I look as well, I’ll look at the search terms and I’m like, if these search terms are exactly what we want, yeah. Then we have, like, there’s not better search terms, right? Like we have to feel good about the traffic coming to your site.

Emily:  Yeah. And then if you’re getting the purchases or you’re getting the leads, you’re like, okay, like this is what I have and my business is scaling and we’re growing. Like, okay, but Anyway, get off my—

Jeremy: All right, cool. Next update. This is probably more towards you. You’ve been in this a little bit more than me, but Microsoft added AI search reporting to Bing Webmaster Tools, giving site owners visibility into how their content appears in AI-generated answers.

Emily:  Yeah, currently working on a blog using the Granular site as the test kitchen, per se. But yeah, in Microsoft Clarity, you can now— it has a toggle for AI visibility where you can see what LLMs and the percentage of traffic are coming from those. So what the blog I’m writing is on, it, one, first blog part one shows you.

Jeremy: Oh, there’s parts.

Emily:  Oh, there’s parts.

Jeremy: Okay.

Emily:  How many parts can we expect? Well, only two right now, but you know, every good movie series has a three-part trilogy. So we’ll see what happens.

Jeremy: I like that.

Emily:  But part one is just how to enable the Microsoft Clarity tool. So getting that on your site. That’s been on the granular site now for about 3 weeks, maybe I’m at a month. And then I’m going to go back, see what our traffic looks like, and then compare it to what SEMrush and GA4 are reporting. And then just see the difference, like if there’s anomalies, if it’s similar.

Jeremy: Does it give you simple just like percent of AI traffic? Like is it easy to understand in there?

Emily:  It’s very easy to understand. Like I don’t consider myself super proficient in websites or anything like that.

Jeremy: Like the webmaster tools and search console and that sort of thing.

Emily:  Exactly, but this is pretty straightforward to me even.

Jeremy: And Google’s not doing that right now. Like, we can’t— I don’t think that’s in Search Console.

Emily:  It’s not in Search. Well, I have to check Search Console. I have not checked that. So in GA4, I had to create a custom report based off like source medium, like where traffic was coming from. It seemed really low when I ran it 2 weeks ago. So I don’t know what— I could have done the report wrong. I got to do some research.

Jeremy: But also, if you’re in GA4, they have to visit the site.

Emily:  Yes. Yes. Exactly. That’s true. That’s a very good point. Yeah, yeah, Emily, make mental note. That’s a really good point. So yeah, there is a little bit more research I need to do with it, and I’m going to try around, but stay tuned. Okay, that’s going to come out eventually here, but it’s, it’s been fun to see. So that is a good update, um, and it, it doesn’t really hurt to have on your website.

Jeremy: No, not at all.

Emily:  I would just do it. Clarity seems to play around with it.

Jeremy: It’s a good—

Emily:  yeah, Clarity is a cool tool altogether. So cool tool, cool. Hashtag cool too.

Jeremy: So Instagram is rolling out a new design update that features customizable feed options and a new Your Feed center to give users another way to access Reels content. In other news, creators are expressing frustration over an Instagram AI shopping experiment that displays products influencers do not endorse alongside tags that can— that could compete with their preexisting brand deals. So I just found this interesting. This is more just like people kind of talking online. I just saw saw literally, uh, random people sort of talking about this. So obviously when you’re in Meta and creating these ads now, it’ll like automatically like link products. So I think this was just— it was just like linking the wrong products or something.

Emily:  Yeah, maybe they’re only getting paid to promote a certain product, right?

Jeremy: And then there’s products being tagged in their videos. So it seems like there’s some frustration with that going on. We also saw recently that there was like in a non-shopping ad, we saw like the wrong product was tagged and we weren’t using any of like the standard enhancements. There was no feed attached to it. So I was actually wondering if it was related to this. We ended up pausing the ad and it fixed the issue, obviously, ’cause we paused it.

Emily:  You didn’t have a feed attached and it was tagging a random product?

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, so I don’t know if it was just like through like a standard enhancement or something.

Emily:  Your ad account’s haunted.

Jeremy: But yeah, it didn’t seem to be like that big of an issue. So I think, uh, obviously we want the right products, uh, tagged at like a minimum, I think, if you’re going to do it. Cool. Uh, next, uh, Google talked about this thing called the Gemini Advantage coming to the Google Marketing Platform, uh, on March 23rd. So they just said it’s a shift toward a more unified AI-powered platform that helps advertisers see more of the consumer journey, reduce fragmentation and activate data in real time. There’s— they literally just announced this. I don’t have anything else to say about it. I don’t even really know what it is.

Emily:  I’m on the edge of my seat, but I—

Jeremy: they talked about it.

Emily:  Yeah. Okay. Well, that might be in our March update then. We’ll stay tuned to March 23rd.

Jeremy: So other like kind of quick updates that I don’t necessarily want to talk about too much. Microsoft Ads, uh, introduced multi-image shopping ads, allowing advertisers to include multiple product images through Microsoft Merchant Center. Google’s been doing this for a while. I don’t always see it in, in, in the wild, but I love when I see like the shopping ads. This is like, this is in the more traditional search experience. I’m not sure if it’s in AI mode in any way, but you know, you’ll see like the carousels sort of like go through. I wish it was like that for every single product. Maybe Google doesn’t do that because they, maybe people don’t click on as many. I’m not, I’m not sure, but I, I love seeing, you know, the multiple image format.

Emily:  Good ad, good ad.

Jeremy: Twitter, another update. Twitter added new aspect ratios and tests AI labeling. I mean, that’s good, uh, AI labeling, great. Uh, yeah, like anything AI should really be—

Emily:  Twitter’s labeled in a way right now with AI junk, with grunts.

Jeremy: It’s the ultimate slop platform.

Emily:  But it is.

Jeremy: So that’s why, like, I will say I’m still addicted to going on it for like news and stuff. It is.

Emily:  Oh, I hate it too.

Jeremy: X, I know we’re still saying Twitter, but I call it Twitter. Twitter X?

Emily:  I love Twitter. So do I. Twitter was like, and it kind of still is, I think it’s like my personal diary where I just put random thoughts. And you’re right, I like it for news. I actually learn a lot of PPC tips and tricks.

Jeremy: Sure, there’s still good content.

Emily:  There are still really good PPC tiers on Twitter. So that’s what I use it for. But I don’t have any ads, any clients running ads on Twitter, and I haven’t for like 5 years.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s been probably like 2-ish for me. Um, so there’s probably opportunity there, but yeah, I haven’t been— I don’t know.

Emily:  I don’t know. They— I had, I had written a blog back when Elon bought Twitter on how they could fix their ad platform because hopefully he’s listening. No, he’s not. Um, I have other things to say if he’s listening. No. Um, but it’s just, I don’t know.

Jeremy: I think you mentioned it’s definitely not one— gambling ads and then—

Emily:  yeah, gambling, porn ads, and then David protein bars. That’s like all I see. I’m like, what is that? Like, oh my gosh. So yeah, I don’t have any, um, clients running on there now. I feel like there are other channels to scale on, but I’m glad there’s going to be AI labeling. Can’t wait to see what that looks like.

Jeremy: That is good. Uh, it’ll be interesting to see like what is labeled AI. Like we were just talking about Pomelli, like in that instance, like should— this is like more of a whole debate, but like should that be labeled AI? I almost feel like that shouldn’t be, but maybe it should be. But if it’s like straight up AI slop, but then it’s a good question.

Emily:  I— we actually had a mentee ask that question the other day to me. She asked me if we had to label ads that were AI generated, like if a company had to label ads that were AI generated.

Jeremy: I think if you’re a company that would have a problem with that or traditionally has not done that, maybe consider it, but then it could turn into—

Emily:  but the platform’s not requiring it right now, right? Because I’m like, well, the platforms are pushing this AI-generated kind, but it will be interesting to see, especially because if it was believable, especially my brain, I would not want to. Yes. And these platforms are now more and more are saying like they have to be labeled. Like I actually think X is behind here because like TikTok, you have to label it AI.

Jeremy: For ads though?

Emily:  Not for ads, but for organic.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily:  So like.

Jeremy: Yeah, there’s like the little tags.

Emily:  Right. So I’m curious.

Jeremy: But do you have to? Like I don’t think, like you’re not going to get caught by not doing it, are you?

Emily:  Or do you put your then does your stuff potentially get taken down? I don’t know.

Jeremy: True, like you’re shadow banned or something. Like you just won’t have any reach.

Emily:  I would try it on TikTok or something. Like I won’t tag it as AI and we’ll see what happens.

Jeremy: Okay.

Emily:  It’ll be just a fun video. It won’t be anything bad.

Jeremy: No, I like it. Well, I assumed it wouldn’t be bad.

Emily:  Yeah, I mean, it’ll just be like a cat.

Jeremy: Now I’m like questioning, what are you gonna post?

Emily:  No, I’m gonna post like a cat talking or something.

Jeremy: I like it. Big fan of cats talking. Yeah. This is longer than I expected this update, but we had so many updates today.

Emily:  There’s so many things.

Jeremy: So another one, we’ll kind of cruise. You’ll cruise through some of these. Google removes parked domains from Search Partner Network. Yeah, duh, do it finally. Yep. Uh, that’s crazy that it wasn’t there. And then I think one I might have like accidentally skipped past was, uh, Instagram adds teen safety alerts for parents. I, I feel like this is still like sort of developing, but I read that Instagram is rolling out a new safety feature in the US, Canada, and UK and Australia that, uh, surfaces support resources and encourages teens to reach out to trusted adults when they search for self-harm-related content. I don’t know who’s searching that much, I guess, on Facebook, but maybe on Meta— or sorry, maybe on Instagram you could search.

Emily:  Um, or maybe there’s like trigger words that—

Jeremy: true— or the types of content you’re interacting with or something. I’m surprised there’s any of that content really on there, but you know, everybody’s algorithm is so different. What you see is so much different than, you know, what your neighbor sees.

Emily:  Totally. I— yeah, I think this is probably a needed, um, addition. I do feel like Meta’s lawyers made them do this.

Jeremy: I think they should.

Emily:  But they should. I do think they have a social responsibility to, especially for teenagers.

Jeremy: Yeah, I like running ads, but there’s no doubt that there’s a negative effect of social media on kids.

Emily:  Absolutely. I don’t think anyone would deny that. There’s been so many documentaries that I’m like, oh wow, this is crazy.

Jeremy: Pretty, pretty eye-opening.

Emily:  But yeah, so I’m glad this feature is here. I’m, yeah, like you, I don’t quite know how it works, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

Jeremy: Anytime it’s safety for kids and we’re both parents, so we’re biased a little bit here.

Emily:  But like, yeah, I like think about like one day I’m going to have to decide as my kid. Yeah. I’m like, no.

Jeremy: Don’t be using your hooks on my kid.

Emily:  Right. He won’t fall for that. He hates ads. If we’re watching like Miss Rachel on YouTube and the ad comes on, he’s like, he looks at me like immediately to like, and he’s only 16 months and ad comes on. He immediately looks and points at the remote like skip, skip, skip. I’m like, Oh, he hates what I do.

Jeremy: And that’s the ClickBrief Podcast for February 2026. This episode was edited by Aja Blue and produced by Emily Anderson and me, Jeremy Packee.