The Click Brief- March 2026

Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson break down March’s biggest digital advertising updates, including OpenAI’s shutdown timeline for Sora, Meta expanding Manus AI across its ad and creator ecosystem, and Google rolling out a wave of Performance Max and Analytics updates. They also cover Meta’s major shift to click-only attribution, Microsoft finally adding negative keyword lists to PMax, and Apple entering the ads space with placements in Apple Maps. The episode dives into evolving AI tools for creative and campaign management, new cross-channel planning capabilities, and what these changes actually mean for advertisers trying to stay efficient in an increasingly automated landscape. Follow The Click Brief for fast, no-fluff performance marketing updates every month.

Top Takeaways

Biggest Shift
Meta’s move to click-only attribution removes engagement-based signals from conversion tracking, which could significantly impact reporting and perceived performance across accounts.

Biggest Platform Signal
OpenAI sunsetting Sora signals a broader shift away from consumer-facing AI experiments toward more scalable, revenue-driven products like ads and enterprise tools.

New Feature to Test
Google Analytics’ cross-channel budgeting and scenario planning tool could become a major step toward unified performance forecasting—if the data proves reliable.

Control Upgrade
Microsoft finally introduces negative keyword lists in PMax, bringing much-needed control to a previously limited campaign type.

Creative Reality Check
Google’s Veo video generation inside Asset Studio shows promise, but current outputs still lag behind tools like Canva and other creative platforms.

Other Platform Updates

• Meta is expanding Manus AI into Ads Manager and the Instagram Creator Marketplace
• Google added more visibility to Performance Max, including budget pacing and audience insights
• Apple is introducing ads in Apple Maps search and suggested locations
• OpenAI is testing an Ads Manager for ChatGPT with early reporting features
• Shopify is leaning into AI-powered product discovery within ChatGPT while maintaining native checkout
• WordPress now allows AI agents to create and manage site content (with approvals)
• Meta added new lifecycle targeting and expanded retargeting controls
• Pinterest is pushing Performance+ campaigns as the default
• Snapchat and TikTok continue expanding AI creative tools and premium placements
• Instagram is testing post-publish carousel reordering

Final Take

AI is becoming deeply embedded across every major platform—but it’s still not ready to replace human decision-making. The opportunity isn’t in handing over control—it’s in knowing where these tools can actually improve efficiency without sacrificing strategy.

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

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

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: Whew, when I opened this Google Doc from Jeremy with the ClickBrief this month, because he’s the one that puts all this together, bravo to him.

Jeremy: It’s not that brief this month.

Emily: This is a lot of work. It was not brief.

Jeremy: I know, that’s my bad.

Emily: It was multiple pages and I was like, okay, here we go.

Jeremy: I actually cut a lot too, so. But I think I’m like, all these are exciting. So I just keep digging in more and more.

Emily: And it’s hard because you’re like, all right, well, I found this one, now this one. Well, anyway, okay. So the official intro here. OpenAI set a shutdown timeline for Sora. Meta pushed Manus deeper into its ad and creator ecosystem and updated click-through attribution. Google rolled out a wave of changes across Analytics, Performance, Max, and Asset Studio. And Microsoft’s new PMax negative keyword list. Apple Maps also finally had an update. Wow, well overdue there. We’ll talk about that. And so much more to get into, ’cause again, this was a long one, but we’re gonna try to stick to our name and make it brief, call it the highlights, and you can see more in the blog that Jeremy writes.

Jeremy: The high-impact updates. Uh, on March 24th, the Sora team posted that it is saying goodbye to the Sora app. OpenAI’s help center said that the Sora web and app experiences will be discontinued on April 26th, uh, 2026, and the Sora API will be discontinued on September 24th, 2026. OpenAI also said it will share more details about timelines and preserving users’ work, which it may have already done, but I don’t think it they, you know, gave that timeline, uh, when I was writing this.

Emily: Yeah, I, I honestly, like, when I read the first update was about Sora, I was like, oh yeah, that’s still a thing. Because I feel like when it first came out, there was so much hype about it because it was like for like a day.

Jeremy: Oh my gosh, maybe even 3 days.

Emily: Well, yeah, 3 days. And then, you know, my people on Facebook found a hold of it and started making images.

Jeremy: Oh yeah, it was crazy. Yeah, those are, those are wild times. The first day of Sora I’ll never forget because I laughed all day at the most bizarre and definitely copyrighted and, you know, infringing on things like all day. Uh, so I’ll never forget the day Sora came out, and when it shut down, I wasn’t sad at all. Like, I just—

Emily: yeah, I don’t—

Jeremy: I’m like, it was kind of cool. It made me open up the app to see if it was still working. I was like, oh yeah, this was kind of funny, but it just lost its novelty, uh, really quickly, and You know, this is, uh, definitely showing a shift in strategic priorities. And I believe this was like something that was actually said in an OpenAI email or something that was leaked, but it was like sort of the end of these like side quests. Um, it was sort of super resource intensive, uh, and it was costing OpenAI almost $1 million per day. And I don’t think it generated any income at all. Maybe there was ways that somehow was profitable or not profitable, but made some money. I’m not aware of those. Uh, but it’s definitely getting away from, you know, that experiential, uh, consumer media, right? And just realigning into kind of more corporate deployments, maybe more of like the Anthropic sort of model with, you know, Kodak and stuff like that. They, I think they just want all those resources. It’s kind of a waste of their time.

Emily: They’re making major changes. I mean, even if you see the headline, I think it was either a week or two ago at, at this point when we’re recording that they laid off. I don’t know how many thousands of people, right? Like over an email. Wasn’t that like—

Jeremy: I’m sure that’s true. I don’t recall.

Emily: Okay, yeah, this is not— this could be fake news, but I swear I remember, uh, reading this. And so I just think that they’re kind of totally re-looking at their— like Jeremy mentioned, their prioritization— and this didn’t make the cut, which, uh, kind of—

Jeremy: and I’m not an OpenAI hater. I know a lot of people have—

Emily: oh, I’m definitely that way.

Jeremy: But like you know, they need to make money.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Like, and this is a way to, to try to do so, or at least not spend more money. Next update. So on March 18th, Meta announced new beta tests bringing Manus across its business and creator tools. And separately, uh, they introduced an early beta for Ads Manager, uh, in like the Manus AI actual separate platform. Uh, according to Manus, the connector can help analyze ad performance, surface insights, answer account questions in real time, help with reporting, and generate outputs like dashboard slides and infographics. So this is all in that like separate sort of Manus app, which is more of like how you, you know, use like Claude or like, you know, it’s very similar. Yeah, just feels familiar.

Emily: Yep.

Jeremy: They also expanded that into the Instagram creator marketplace where it can help evaluate creator and audience alignment for partnerships. So I, you know, our take, like I have some kind of mixed feelings on this. Like if you remember the last pod, I told you I like, you know, tried this and it essentially like I ran out of credits. I was trying to do some things and I’ve since like gotten some credits. Like I signed up for it just briefly to try it and it is pretty neat. Like its integration with Meta is like pretty impressive because it can read essentially all the data. Like, I don’t know if anything else really can just read everything. You’re not doing any exports, like, you know, and it can— you can upload like, this is my seasonality and you can try to teach it all these things. It still won’t pick up things like, like maybe if you changed attribution, like I might have to prompt it with that. But I was actually curious because we went from one attribution to another and it basically was like, oh, you’re doing so much better. And I’m like, that’s because attribution would change.

Jeremy: So it’s not perfect. I’m sort of excited about it. I wouldn’t just let it run and start doing anything for your, for your business. But I think it’s a, it’s another player. It definitely is another player in my opinion.

Emily: Yeah, I gave it a try. I just use their Manus Lite version, which is like 1.6 Lite or something. Yes. Manus Lite.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: And what I used it for, I ran a competitor analysis report. I used a prompt that they gave me though, and it was like defaulted to like beauty brands.

Jeremy: And you had enough credits? Because the thing I did costed 1,000 credits, and you get 8,000 a month for like $40.

Emily: I have no idea how many credits it took. I feel like we’re at like Chuck E. Cheese, and like you’re like paying for like tokens. Yeah, I have no idea. All I know is it did take like 10 minutes. Like, it felt like dial-up internet, right?

Jeremy: Um, mine took, uh, like 11 or 12 minutes. I gave it a very complex task.

Emily: Okay, I gave it the one it prompt— like the one it proposed me to prompt just because I wanted to see what it was going to pull for the competitive analysis.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: And it was interesting. I mean, you know, because they can go across all, like, they have, Manus has access to not only your account but also all of your competitors’ accounts, which then brings me into that. Like, again, these tools, like, they are cool. They’re gonna be a part of the future. Um, obviously here we’re still preaching that not giving it full control. They don’t understand your full business model.

Jeremy: It feels expensive as well.

Emily: 100%. Yeah, still feels expensive. And then the biggest thing for me, I honestly think they have access to your account, they have access to all your competitors’ accounts. Like, what’s your competitive advantage? It’s probably going to be that human media buyer, that human element, the human strategist. But it was a cool tool, and I could definitely see me using this in the future.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think I’ll use it. I, I always say I’m not gonna like pay for these platforms, and then I end up, you know, spending $50 on something to try it.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: So I, I’m optimistic for, for Manus. I think it’s kind of slept on right now.

Emily: So I totally think that, like, the— what’s dominating my LinkedIn feed right now is the Claude, right? People like integrating Claude with Meta and then getting their account shut down. Okay. Um, I’ve seen like a lot of that, but that is where I see a lot of people like more talking about like Claude than Manus, which is interesting.

Jeremy: Yeah, to me I feel like everybody is hot on Claude right now. I tried ClaudeBot and messed around that stuff. Very, very cool. Um, But yeah, I’m looking at, I’m looking at Manus right now. I’m like, what, what can I do with this that isn’t gonna cost me like $200 to get a report? You know, that’s the problem. I think it’s really good, but you’re paying for it. So next update, Meta Ads customer lifecycle strategy at the ad set level. So again, this is reported, I think I saw it from somebody on LinkedIn. I wish I could say their name. I, I can’t remember it off the top of my head, but I haven’t seen it, um, by our team yet. Uh, but essentially, uh, there’s this new setting and the setting includes reach new and existing customers or acquire new customers only. Um, there’s some other like different settings in there. So, you know, this just seem— this is just seemingly using like those audience settings, uh, most likely that, you know, we’ve had in there for a while. And this is nothing new. I think it’s just like kind of an easy button for people that didn’t even know, oh, you know, I can go after only new customers.

Jeremy: We’ve added negative lists. This is, this is nothing groundbreaking.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Um, the only thing that’s scary is the person that was talking about this said that it just added it to their existing campaign. So if you had a, a new customer only campaign that was done through audiences. It was actually going after all, you know, all existing and new customers. So that could be problematic. You know, we’re gonna keep an eye out on this. I think it’s a neat feature, but sometimes these features sort of like oversimplify things. Yeah. Um, so we’ll, we’ll see what, and like sometimes we’ll see what it does.

Emily: Give you like a fake sense of control.

Jeremy: Right. Next update, Google Analytics rolled out cross-channel budgeting, which is in beta with scenario planner and projection plans. These tools help advertisers model budget allocation across channels, explore, explore potential ROI at different spend levels, and monitor projected pacing against KPIs like spend, conversions, and revenue. Google also notes that this feature may not yet be available to all properties and that projections are based on modeled estimates rather than guarantees. So this, I was like super excited about this. I remember them talking about it, uh, at some point in the past, but I’ve actually seen this in the account. Or like in some of our accounts. I haven’t used it. You know, it is a Google product. I wonder if it’s going to, you know, kind of value Google more. But the fact that I could like add in my, you know, TikTok data and my metadata and then possibly use like a Google projection tool to actually see like what would happen at different spend levels, that would be amazing. We have to report back on this to see if it’s at all accurate, if it takes into consideration seasonality or anything, but how cool would that be if it’s actually using all the data in Meta, you know, all the data in, in Google, and then TikTok or Pinterest?

Jeremy: There’s a bunch of connectors in there, and it’s actually able to kind of model out some of that, that, that’s— and be free.

Emily: Yeah, I would assume this is like their response to like triple whales out there.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: And I know, Jeremy, you have a lot of experience, right, with triple whale. Would you say this is comparable to that, or do you think this could be better? I mean, it’ll be free, so that’s automatically better, or we think it’s going to be free, asterisk.

Jeremy: But, um, yeah, absolutely. People care about, you know, incrementality, and everybody’s trying to answer— or to answer the— but— or everybody’s trying to answer the question, like, if I spend more here, like, what happens to my total results? And, uh, yeah, Triple Whale is great. There’s a lot of other platforms that do some of this, but if it’s native in like a Google product that everybody’s familiar with and it just has like quick connectors, like it would have mass adoption if, if it’s useful.

Emily: Yeah, I’ll be curious. I’m not a huge performance plan, uh, performance planner tool fan in Google Ads. Yeah, I know some people are. To me it’s just really never accurate. Yeah, so that—

Jeremy: but this has— if it actually had all the data points and total revenue— the problem with like you know, like Facebook or Google is, it’s only seeing, you know, that in-platform revenue. So if it can make connections, like, you know, if we spend more on YouTube and it’s saying that, you know, it affects these other campaigns, I just, I wanna see what that looks like. Yeah. So we’ll report back on that one.

Emily: Yeah, we need to give that one a try.

Jeremy: Next update, uh, Microsoft Ads rolls out PMax negative keyword lists. I don’t have to give much of a summary on this.

Emily: That’s basically the summary because you’ve probably been doing it on Google for a year.

Jeremy: And for the few PMax campaigns I run on Microsoft, um, you just— I have to be very careful because I have to add them at the account level. So you’ve been able to add negative keywords at the account level, but I mean, if you add a negative keyword there, it’s excluded from all your campaigns.

Emily: Yeah. So that’s tough if you’re like wanting to just exclude brand, right? And you’re also running a brand, right?

Jeremy: So you can’t do that.

Emily: But so what do you do? Do you guys— what do you— do you stick to like general, like free, cheap or whatever and not do brand?

Jeremy: Never brand. But like, for instance, for this, these pants that we sell, the tactical pants, if it says something like parachute pants or, you know, like something that’s really obvious that nothing in my account would ever want to show up for. Well, yeah, then we just add it at the account level and honestly, it’s worked okay. Okay.

Emily: Well, so do you get then— I’m not like, just full disclosure, I’m not running a PMax campaign.

Jeremy: I don’t think anybody really is.

Emily: Okay, so I’m talking to the right guy.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: So then do you see like one? I think you can see search terms now. We went over that in an update.

Jeremy: It’s hidden in a report, so you can’t just do like the search terms report. I think they call it like You know, it’s one of those like search themes or something like that. And then you have to filter by like campaign name contains PMAX. So not obvious, not obvious, but totally doable to see.

Emily: So do you get a lot of brand terms then?

Jeremy: Yeah, but sometimes, you know, you can—

Emily: yeah, I mean, can you exclude— so on Google, for instance, you can exclude obviously brand exclusions at the settings level. And then I also double down and add brand as a negative keyword within PMAX. What is that? Can you exclude brand at the settings level on PMax on Microsoft?

Jeremy: Uh, I don’t think so, not that I’m aware of. Um, I’m just—

Emily: yeah, I’m just curious then, like, if— because I audit a lot of accounts, and almost all the accounts I audit— oh my gosh— always have, like, a PMax is basically a glorified brand campaign. Yeah. And if the brand is not excluded at the settings level or has negative keywords, then, like, the whole campaign is brand. Like all the search terms. So that’s why I’m curious about Microsoft, right?

Jeremy: Yeah, I, you know, I, I don’t believe you can do that. You have me like second guessing it, second guessing it. Like, did I do that? Like, uh, but yeah, okay, I was curious.

Emily: But yeah, about time.

Jeremy: Yes, I agree. Uh, next update, Google, uh, announced new Performance Max updates including first-party customer list exclusions, direct access to the budget report within PMax, expanded audience reporting, and network segmentation in placement reporting. The budget report shows the campaign’s monthly, the monthly spending limit using Google’s 30.4 times daily budget calculation along with cost to date forecast and daily spend details. This is cool, right? Like any time we get actual levers and things we can see in PMax, I think that’s always a win. I haven’t seen this like budget report. I looked for it. I’ve seen some of the expanded audience reporting and that’s, you know, kind of neat. So you can basically see like for those signals that you add, it’s actually like showing you like results for those. So that’ll be interesting to see, like, you know, can we make changes on this? Like, is this audience being used? You know, a lot of times those signals, in my opinion, are just better for starting off new campaigns because if Google has the ability to essentially target anything it wants, it’s kind of still going to do that.

Emily: Yeah, it’s more increased visibility, which we’re always a fan of. I have a comment in here and I don’t, this analogy isn’t 100% fleshed out, but I feel like there’s something here. So I was comparing PMax, I was comparing search, like just regular search, AI Max and PMax to like the movie, theater popcorn theory.

Jeremy: Okay.

Emily: Like how, like, have you, you know, you see the meme and they’re like, the medium popcorn isn’t meant to be purchased, but it’s there as like a psychological trigger to make you think the large isn’t as expensive. Because you’re like, oh, well, the large is only like $2 more. Always gets me. Always a large popcorn girl. Extra butter.

Jeremy: I get large as well.

Emily: Put the salt on. Anyway, I have this theory that Google is like using this and they’re like, I don’t know, it’s some sort of, like I said, the analogy is not perfect here, but like, Search is like the small, or AI Max. AI Max is base. PMax, they’re trying to make PMax more visible so you try AI Max. Or maybe the thought is we’re gonna do AI Max, which has not a lot of visibility right now into like search terms or anything, so you try PMax, and then we’re going to give you more visibility with PMax. I don’t know, like I said, The analogy is not totally fleshed out, but like I’m trying to think of like the psychological because like they, Google does seem to be releasing more and more visibility on PMax.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: Like where we are today, far from when it first got released. Right. And I think they got a lot of feedback and they took that to heart and I’ve seen a lot of improvements there.

Jeremy: It’s very usable now. Totally. It was like this scary black box, which it doesn’t, granted that you don’t see all your search terms and like all, you know, you don’t know. At one point you didn’t know what was video and where it was showing.

Emily: Totally.

Jeremy: Now you can actually work with it.

Emily: And now I feel this way about AI Max because a lot of the times AI Max, my search terms, I can’t even see them because they’re listed as other search terms. So it’s just like blind search terms. So I’m like, okay, so are they giving us more visibility with PMax but I have no visibility into AI Max? Like this is the movie theater popcorn. I don’t know, something’s there.

Jeremy: And AI Max, I do use, not to go off on a tangent, but like, You know, I do use AI Max on a few clients. We’re testing it and you can, you know, in your search terms, like basically put source and see some of those. But I don’t think you’re able to see all of them. Like you said, like a lot of the search terms are hidden.

Emily: It’s some other, yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: But you, you definitely can segment out and, and see the AI Max search terms. But I mean, I don’t know what percentage, but we’re not anywhere near 100%.

Emily: Yeah. We need to get more before I’m on board. Yeah. But Yeah, like I said, there’s some analogy there. I haven’t fully fleshed it out, but like some psychological game, I think.

Jeremy: Cool. Next update. Google says, uh, Veo is now available in Asset Studio within Google Ads where advertisers can upload up to 3 static images and generate videos up to 10 seconds long with natural motion. Google also says these videos can be packaged in ready-to-serve ads using customizable templates and that Veo can be paired with Nanobanana to create or adapt supporting image assets?

Emily: Yeah, I gave it a shot.

Jeremy: I was going to say I wrote a blog on it.

Emily: Yeah, I wrote a blog post on it. Not there yet.

Jeremy: Got it. The rather working Canva, the example, like I feel like the thing because I— Veo has been— I thought it was in Google Ads Asset Studio for a while, or at least, you know, some of the Nano Banana stuff where you can make images. But I did notice, like, you know, the example they used, it was like a pretty nice shot. I haven’t got a chance to try it and I’m trying to think of reasons um, to do so. So it’s neat, it’s a tool. Like, I— yeah, you know, there’s probably a reason, uh, to use it. Like, if you had to do something very—

Emily: if you’re very desperate and quick, or you’re like, hey, even if you’re desperate and quick, there’s other tools out there that right now are better than it. Yeah, like I said, I’d rather pay for a Canva premium subscription and work out of there. I know it’s not like completely generating it, like it’s a little different, but I honestly, I think you’d get closer ‘Cause it’s just, it’s very templated and there’s very limited that you can edit, even with the images. Like there, it’s just very limited right now.

Jeremy: Got it.

Emily: But I think they’re gonna get there.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: They are. Like that’s just, this is the way it’s going.

Jeremy: Cool, next update. In late March, Apple announced Apple Business, a new platform that includes mobile device management plus email, calendar, and directory services with custom domain support. Apple also said that starting this summer in the US and Canada, businesses will be able to place ads on Apple Maps, which is the part that we care about, with placements appearing in the map search results and in the new suggested places experience.

Emily: Woo!

Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, Apple Maps.

Emily: Yeah, well, yeah, I’m a Google Maps person, but I mean, well, and then I saw like some comparisons though of the new Apple Maps, and like before people would like roast Apple Maps.

Jeremy: Like, I was wondering, they were, yeah, they were like I like Apple too. I mean, but I’m like, I’m not gonna drive into this lake, you know?

Emily: Yeah, I like it to the extent of driving in the lake. But, um, I saw like some comparisons and like maybe they were fake, who knows. What you see on the internet you have to take with a grain of salt now. But it did look impressive, so I would give it another go.

Jeremy: But right now, if you’re a local business, you know, it’s very common to run like, you know, PMAX for store visits and yeah, it works well. So like if it’s another place that you can run ads that literally had— didn’t really have, you know, ads there before. Like, it’s going to be wide open.

Emily: And like, I don’t know about time. Like, I honestly, I feel like we don’t talk about Apple that much when we have— they don’t have like major updates that come across the—

Jeremy: no, there’s like the App Store.

Emily: This is like the first one, and what, we’re on episode like 10 of this? The first time we’ve mentioned Apple.

Jeremy: People are still talking about iOS 14, including me. Cool. Next update: on March 3rd, Meta announced an update to its advertising measurement framework for a social-first world. Going forward, only actual link clicks will count towards click-through attribution. Engagement actions like shares, likes, and saves will no longer trigger a click-through conversion.

Emily: Okay, this is like a legit pretty big change if you’re reporting.

Jeremy: Yeah, based off this, like you’re using click-only attribution totally in your account and all of a sudden you’re like, why is everything— yeah, so because it wasn’t click-only attribution really before, right?

Emily: It was like, I’m gonna click anywhere and it’s gonna count, right? I always like kind of looked off link clicks. Yeah, but can we talk about like— this is maybe a little off topic, but it’s a little suspicious that I saw today and actually the granular meta ad account.

Jeremy: Okay.

Emily: What was weird was, and this relates to click attribution, so I was looking at like our link clicks per month down to the ad level. Just, I was curious, like we had switched through some new creative and I was like, okay, where’s the, like, you know, the clicks to the website’s coming from?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: I kid you not, identical amount of clicks across all ads February to March.

Jeremy: That sounds like a glitch.

Emily: I checked it like 2 days ago and then again today. I’m suspicious.

Jeremy: The same amount of clicks?

Emily: The same amount of clicks. Like one ad will be like 4, it had 4 clicks in February and 4 clicks in March. And no lie, like down the line.

Jeremy: Weird.

Emily: So I don’t know if it’s like a glitch that was thrown by like this change. But like, I mean, we don’t optimize, like for reference, we don’t optimize based off clicks in this. Specific campaign, this is just an awareness, like going for impressions, it’s a retargeting campaign, yada yada.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, sketch. Interesting.

Emily: Yeah, I was suspicious.

Jeremy: You know, there’s been so many times where I’ve been suspicious like that, and then I refresh my screen like 40 times and then the data 100% changes, and I’m like, oh, that’s why, because it wasn’t—

Emily: this is why marketing’s a hard job. Like, it really— because like you talk yourself into thinking you’re crazy and then you’re like, the data is literally moving. Yeah, but Yeah, well, I mean, like, so far I pulled this data earlier this week and I’m like, that’s weird. And then I just pulled it again today and I was like, this is really weird. Like, what are the odds? Like, down to one of the ads had 1,500 clicks in February and 1,500 clicks in March. I’m like, there’s just no way.

Jeremy: Yeah, that’s so random.

Emily: So I don’t know, like I said, a little off topic, but going back to like your initial update, this is like a pretty big change if that’s how you’re doing reporting or optimizing.

Jeremy: Yeah, 100%. I remember seeing people on like, uh, X, uh, Twitter X, uh, you know, saying like, oh, my performance has like dropped off. And it’s like, are you using click-only attribution? It’s like, oh, it may not have actually done that, um, but it’s just reporting differently. That technically both are correct, it’s just like different. Yeah, now, so cool. Next we’re going to go into the medium impact updates. We’ll probably power through some of these. Uh, OpenAI, uh, according to reports in March, is testing an Ads Manager for ChatGPT. With a small group of partners, while Reuters reported self-service advertiser capabilities are expected in April. Uh, Adweek also reported that early testers are basically just re— uh, receiving weekly CSV reports with, uh, performance like impressions and clicks. And then this is separately, but I thought it was interesting. OpenAI hired a former Meta ads executive, David Dugan, um, to lead global advertising solutions. So my takeaway from this is just that, uh, you know, they’re committed to developing an actual ads ecosystem. You never know if they’ll like bail on this. Um, you know, they have gotten some pushback, OpenAI, for like being the one that has ads.

Jeremy: And, you know, I think Anthropic said they’ll never have ads. And, you know, Google is cautiously putting ads into like AI mode, um, from what I’ve seen. Um, but it’s not really— I haven’t seen too much like conversational style.

Emily: ChatGPT is— hit me.

Jeremy: You’re getting a lot of them?

Emily: Yeah. And they’re not really Um, I have the Plus plan.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think it’s because I have the Pro plan. Maybe there’s no ads in that one.

Emily: So the $8 a month folks are getting ads.

Jeremy: I’m only in the $20 plan.

Emily: I’m kind of glad I’m there because the ads are pretty good.

Jeremy: Really?

Emily: Pretty— I mean, they’re like, they’re, you know, relative.

Jeremy: And this is sort of related to that, is, uh, our next update here. So they essentially— OpenAI rolled out location sharing in ChatGPT. So just so the device kind of like always knows, you know, where you’re at. So that could be—

Emily: I assume every app has that on at this point.

Jeremy: Like, but I feel like, you know, that’s just giving you more hyper-local results, which, you know, I believe Google AI mode’s already doing that. So this is like a, I can’t believe it has taken this long type thing.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Cool. Another update related to AI and tokens.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Uh, so Anthropic just updated their, uh, Oh, let me just—

Emily: feels like fake currency. I know, like every— like the token thing. Okay, I’m sorry.

Jeremy: No, you’re good. But essentially on March 13th, Anthropic said the 1 million token, uh, context window became, uh, it became generally available for Claude, uh, Opus 4.6 and Claude Sonnet 4.6 at the standard pricing. So basically the, the context window is just like a lot longer. So, you know, you can keep, you can upload more stuff, you can keep conversations going longer. Um, so I think it’s just, I mean, I think that’s a good thing for these long tasks. Like I know I recently, I recently hit some of these windows, uh, in, in ChatGPT where like I’ve had conversations going for so long.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: That’s basically like stop talking to me. You just need to start a new one.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Um, so yeah, that’s cool that it can just, you know, run longer.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Uh, next update, uh, AI shopping and ChatGPT evolves as Walmart pulls back on native checkout and Shopify leans in. So Walmart found that purchases completed through ChatGPT’s original instant checkout experience converted at about one-third the rate of purchases that sent users, users to Walmart’s own website after testing roughly 200,000 products. OpenAI and Walmart are now moving away from that model in favor of a Walmart-controlled experience inside of ChatGPT tied to Walmart’s own checkout flow. And separately, Shopify announced that millions of its merchants can now be discovered and shopped in ChatGPT through Agentic Storefronts, which maybe that’s what you’re seeing, Emily, with purchases completed through the merchant’s own checkout experience.

Emily: Um, I don’t think I’m seeing this yet.

Jeremy: Got it. So like, I would say like our take on it is maybe that native chatbot, you know, checkout experience is sort of less effective, um, than these established merchant checkout flows. And Shopify’s approach suggests that a model where AI supports product discovery while merchants retain control over the checkout, branding, and customer data. Is probably a better experience.

Emily: That’s a good take.

Jeremy: Yeah. And you know, I looked, I read the blog post for this update and you know, it’s pretty, the fact that you can just like be on Shopify and like get into these programs is pretty amazing. Like you don’t have to like do anything that special. Mm-hmm. Um, I, I think it’s just the way it’s probably gonna happen.

Emily: Yeah. The ads I’ve been seeing have been more around lead generation, honestly. Gotcha. Maybe that’s just how I’m using it. Um, But no, I agree with your take here.

Jeremy: Uh, next update in March, SEO researchers reported that ChatGPT’s visible query fanouts were no longer showing by default for many logged out sessions, making some AI visibility tracking harder. And then separately, the one that I think is even more interesting is a third party found that more than 83% of ChatGPT carousel products closely matched, uh, Google Shopping results. So just interesting. Um, you know, it seems that like the Google, the Google shopping experience is like influential. Uh, I, I’m not saying that like OpenAI is basing the results on that, but it is very interesting that it sort of matches that either they’re both agreeing that these are the most important results independently, or, you know, OpenAI is learning from somebody, maybe you, maybe Google.

Emily: Yeah. I feel like, you know, Look at all of these LLMs. They all look the same, like UX experience. So, and even like ad, if like, if you look down to even ad platforms, they all function the same. So I do think there’s an element of like, we want people to use this tool. We don’t want to like, you know, we want to meet them where they’re at and what they’re used to.

Jeremy: Yep. Cool. Uh, next update, just a quick one. Uh, Meta expanded the Facebook feed placement to include the friends tab. Beginning in March 2026. So essentially, I believe that what that’s saying is like you’re going to be able to have ads in that. And yeah, I was unsure that I didn’t even really realize that there weren’t ads in that already. I’m kind of surprised that Meta even kept that friends only. I think it’s a cool feature on Facebook to be like, I actually want to see my friends’ content and not like, you know, MrBeast or something who makes great content, but still interesting.

Emily: Yeah, I actually didn’t even know this was a friends tab, was a thing that shows how much nobody really uses it. Yeah, now I kind of want to go to it because like if I go to my Facebook homepage right now, I don’t even know the people. It’s like influencers like buying houses. I’m like, or I’ll see like someone post like, oh, we bought a house. I’m like, oh, who’s this? Like, is this a friend? No, it’s like two people I’ve never met in my life, right?

Jeremy: Exactly.

Emily: So maybe I need a professional content creators, but yeah, I’m like not surprised. Like, I’m not surprised.

Jeremy: It is a cool, uh, Facebook feature if you’re— if you remember how Facebook was, you know, back in like 2010. Yeah, where it’s like just your friends. It kind of—

Emily: oh, take me—

Jeremy: makes me, you know, remember that more.

Emily: Take me back. Like when you’d post like a whole album from one—

Jeremy: yeah, they’re like all blurry photos and it’s like, you know, black and white version, a color version. Yeah, it’s like— yes, it’s like 14 of almost the same picture because you you know, dump your whole album on there.

Emily: Oh my gosh. Cringe.

Jeremy: There also Facebook added some new retargeting features which are neat. So there’s some options including minimum engagement frequency and more specific timeframe filters. So you just have more audiences. I like that. Yeah, we’ll use them all, but I like it.

Emily: Oh, I like it. Especially for like local businesses who have like really hyper local targeting or like a really specific niche need. Yeah, I think it makes sense.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Uh, this next one, I don’t really even think it’s that new, but, uh, Google launched Merchant Center for Agencies.

Emily: I think that’s like an older update, but yeah, I thought I was having déjà vu.

Jeremy: I’m like, didn’t the update here is just that it should be available to everybody. So like I kind of, I kind of just re-brought it up because we’ve had it for a while. So like it’s just, it should be everywhere in the US and Canada.

Emily: Like we’ve had it for months.

Jeremy: Yeah, it is an older update, but okay, they did, it’s fully like implemented now.

Emily: Okay, cool. So I mean, just side note on that, if you don’t have it, you’re left out.

Jeremy: Side note, if you’re an agency, like you probably have it and it’s sweet.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: Uh, next update, I did lean into some more sort of like AI updates just because it’s like kind of the, you know, the hot topic, but it all, it works.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: So WordPress introduced new write capabilities for connected AI agents on March 20th, letting them create and publish posts, manage comments, reorganize categories and tags, and update. media metadata, like alt text, captions, and titles. Uh, these apps, these actions appear in the site’s activity log, and these write actions do require user or user approval. So just kind of neat. I mean, it’s always scary if you’re just letting these agents like do things to your site. Uh, but it is a, a workflow update. Um, AI-assisted site management, and it requires approvals for, I believe, the most important tasks. I haven’t used this yet. But it’s kind of neat. Like if I was on WordPress, you know, I’d be at least thinking about trying it.

Emily: Um, you know, hopefully you’re not creating some weird AI slop, but you know, yeah, I’d want to get like, I kind of want to like ask the Momentic team like for their take on that.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: Anything related to this, Momentic is, they’d have a, they’d have, they probably have a hot take on this.

Jeremy: Yeah. Cool. Another one. Uh, Google PMax introduces seasonal asset group themes. So this was reported in late March. It’s seasonal theming for PMax asset groups. So essentially you can clone an existing asset group and apply a theme such as Mother’s Day, Easter, Black Friday, something like that. And it will generate themed image variations plus suggested headlines and descriptions while leaving the original asset group sort of unchanged. I’m still unsure of like exactly how this is going to work. I saw pictures of it with like, you know, sort of like an Easter theme. I don’t know, we might try this. I don’t know, like if it’s just like adding an Easter Bunny to like your products or something, it might be kind of—

Emily: so they’re adding the theme.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s like seasonal theming. So it’s like, you know, a visual element, but they also try to do like text related to it. Um, it looks like you can edit all these things, but you know, I haven’t, I haven’t used it yet, so I don’t want to give like a hot take on it. It could be cool.

Emily: Okay.

Jeremy: Um, it’s just like something to try out, um, if if it’s available in your accounts for the next like big holiday.

Emily: Yeah, maybe it’s for people who are like, we’re gonna run the same assets like almost all year. And yeah, Google’s gonna be like, okay, let’s like, we’re gonna offer something where it like feels more updated during certain times of the year.

Jeremy: Okay, so last but not least, the, uh, low impact updates. So I’m gonna power through some of these. Um, essentially Pinterest is making Performance Plus campaigns the default. So that’s just, think of that as like your sort of like automated PMAX style targeting. Nothing crazy there. I would try it. Like, you know, I think it’s worth testing these sort of automated targeting tools if you have the ability to do so.

Emily: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy: Google Shopping test first order discount labels. This is an older update too, but people were just seeing them more in the wild where it’s like, hey, if this, you know, basically this little label of first order, you get this discount. Okay, I think that’s cool. Just remember that that’s like an option for your like Merchant Center promotions.

Emily: Yep.

Jeremy: Meta, they added a location fee for European advertisers. So this is just going to be sort of like, I believe, baked. It’s a direct cost that’s passed through rather than a platform optimization. So if you’re in one of the markets like Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, or the UK, these fees are probably gonna be applied to you in your Meta account.

Emily: Gotta get that money.

Jeremy: Snapchat also added an AI image-to-video generation feature in Lens Studio. So it just, it’s pretty neat. You can create 5-second long videos. I don’t think it necessarily has an ad play in it yet, but just another example. You can see the theme here is like, hey, we’re gonna turn your images into videos. I feel like we’ve seen that for a while, which, what is that saying? Like, you should be running videos. Yeah. Like, you know, we just did— we just had Google Audit Granular and did like basically a big, you know, YouTube incrementality sort of like presentation. And video is massively important. It’s not used enough. And I would say that’s the takeaway from some of these is these ad platforms want your video. Like, give them your video and different— and different.

Emily: They know it works.

Jeremy: Yeah. And so do we.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: TikTok also expanded some ad placements. So there’s just the things you’ve never heard of. Yeah, there’s like logo, there’s logo takeover, primetime, top reach. Just an example of some of these, like takeover gives brands an exclusive co-branded placement when users open the app.

Emily: I feel like—

Jeremy: have you seen these? Like all these platforms are starting to do these now. You open the app, big, big ad.

Emily: Yeah. And I’m immediately like, get me out of here.

Jeremy: But like, pretty.

Emily: But yeah, everybody opens up the app, they’re going to see banner. Back then, but it is expensive. Did you— I don’t know the pricing. Okay. Somebody, I feel like, told me the pricing. Okay. I don’t know. But I know they’re— I mean, it’s obviously expensive to do that.

Jeremy: So if there’s a reason for you to be like, I need everybody to see my ad, you know, that’s an option.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: This one I just—

Emily: I love this one.

Jeremy: So I just thought was interesting.

Emily: This is my favorite update.

Jeremy: This is the most important one.

Emily: Hold the line.

Jeremy: So, so the English Wikipedia now has a content guideline stating that editors should not be using AI writing tools you know, such as the LLMs that everybody uses to generate or rewrite article content. The guideline allows two narrow exceptions: AI can suggest basic copyrights to an editor’s own writing if it introduces no new content, and it can assist with translation under separate translation guidance.

Emily: I love this.

Jeremy: So I don’t think they officially said you 100% cannot do it. They’re just like, you should not do this.

Emily: Yeah, they’re like kind of putting their foot down 100%. And I, I do like that for them because that is a platform that could get like way out of control with AI. But like, I love— I’m like, hold the line, Wikipedia. They have more of an AI policy than like some of these other publishers. I don’t know, like, I love it.

Jeremy: And you don’t really want people— like, what do you want, like a million people just, oh, this happened, quick, yeah, submit all, you know, kind of all totally the same LLM style writing?

Emily: Yeah, I love Wikipedia.

Jeremy: I, I do.

Emily: I just— it stood the test of time.

Jeremy: Yeah, I remember using it way back in the day, and I remember using it in school when they were like, you definitely can’t use—

Emily: like, use any other source besides Wikipedia. And now, like, I’m like, oh, Wikipedia is actually not that bad.

Jeremy: It’s not bad. And you can fact-check everything too if you want.

Emily: Totally. So I don’t know, I just like this update because, like, anytime I get to talk about Wikipedia in 2026, like, it’s a win for me.

Jeremy: So that’s true. Uh, last update. So I think this is cool. Uh, I, you know, this is more of like, uh, an actual user update, but Instagram is finally allowing you to reorder your carousels, allegedly. After publishing. I haven’t done this yet, but—

Emily: Oh, I saw their—

Jeremy: I feel like it’s kind of Instagram’s guy come on and talk about that. Oh, they did? Okay.

Emily: Yeah, because he always does like an ask me anything.

Jeremy: Yeah, I know exactly what you’re talking about.

Emily: Yeah, the guy with the glasses.

Jeremy: Yep. Cool. So that’s a quality of life update.

Emily: Uh, yeah, I like that. I do have an asterisk from earlier in this podcast when I said that, um, ChatGPT laid off a bunch of people.

Jeremy: Yes.

Emily: That’s not true. Okay. I got OpenAI and Oracle confused. Oracle on in March laid off a ton of people via a 6 AM email. That’s what I was— that was the headline. I got mixed up. So I just wanted to add that asterisk, and I didn’t want ChatGPT, um, employees to come at me. Um, but yeah, that’s that update. Also a horrible way to lay people off. Oh yeah, 6 AM email. But that’s not what this podcast is about. But I did want to add that as a note.

Jeremy: I know, I appreciate that. Look at that, live on the air.

Emily: Hey, live on there.

Jeremy: We’re willing to be wrong. You know, you let us know if we’re wrong. I’ll change my opinion based on any fact at any point if I agree.

Emily: Yeah. Or bring us to— if it’s a fact. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Jeremy: So like, you know, we’re out here, we’re always trying to stay the most up to date and things change every day. That’s why we do this. And yeah. And that’s the ClickBrief podcast for March 2026. This episode was edited by Aja Blue and produced by Emily Anderson and me, Jeremy Packee.