Our Head of Paid Media, Dale, breaks down five Google changes – and exactly how urgently each one needs your attention.
Words by Dale Oloerenshaw, speaking to StrategiQ Head of SEO Nathan Height.
Google’s had a busy fortnight. But I’ve had a busier one figuring out what it actually means for your accounts, while juggling new parent duties on the side.
Three Google changes with direct impact on live campaigns dropped in the last fortnight. The AI headlines got the coverage. The ones that actually matter to your CPAs this week didn’t.
- 🔴 Act now – Limited Ad Serving (live, affects accounts today)
- 🟠Act within 90 days – Display migration, AI Max auto-flip
- 🟡 Watch and prepare – Ask Advisor / agentic commerce
- 🟢 Worth testing – Amazon × LinkedIn CTV
June 2026 was Google’s most consequential month for paid search practitioners in years. Most conversations across our industry have focused on the output of the Google Marketing Live (GML) conference. But the expansion of Limited Ad Serving to Search, the retirement of standalone Display campaigns and the September AI Max update all require action on your Google Ads accounts within the next 90 days. Alongside that, Google’s agentic commerce announcements and Amazon’s new LinkedIn CTV partnership are reshaping what paid media looks like beyond the next budget cycle.
Here are all five, ranked by how urgently you need to act:
Priority 1 – Act now: Google’s Limited Ad Serving policy is now live in Search
Google’s Limited Ad Serving policy was previously confined to Display. It now applies to Google Search.
The policy allows Google to throttle impressions from advertisers it deems ‘unqualified’ on queries it classifies as carrying a higher risk of negative user experiences. It operates at an account level, will roll out gradually until 2028 and user complaints now function as a direct algorithmic trigger.
Brands with generic ad copy, unclear advertiser identity or existing complaint histories are the most exposed. The throttle won’t appear as a policy disapproval – it’ll show up as a quiet, unexplained decline in Search Impression Share.
The StrategiQ take: this policy changes how we should think about ad copy quality beyond Quality Score. Any business running generic headlines without a pinned brand identifier is now at risk of invisible throttling, and the diagnostic signals are easy to miss if you’re not looking for them. The immediate fix is pinning a brand-identifying headline in position 1 on all Responsive Search Ads. The longer-term change is treating Limited Ad Serving compliance as a standing audit item – at StrategiQ, it’s now mandatory within both our onboarding and quarterly review processes across all managed accounts.
Priority 2 – Act within 90 days: Google Display campaigns are retiring
Google has confirmed all standalone Display (GDN) campaigns will migrate to Demand Gen, with voluntary migration available from June 2026 and a forced transition completing by 2027.
The in-account migration tool carries 42 days of performance history, reducing learning time to 1–2 days. Google’s own data shows advertisers adding GDN to Demand Gen see an average 9.5% ROI uplift – though that’s an industry-agnostic figure worth treating with a pinch of salt. Demand Gen unlocks Lookalike audiences, YouTube Shorts and Gmail inventory under a single campaign type – a much broader reach than standalone GDN, plus access to new AI-powered features announced at GML 2026.
The StrategiQ take: we should be migrating off standalone Display on our schedule, not Google’s forced timeline – especially where performance is in our favour. Moving proactively with the migration tool preserves performance history and gives us control over timing. Demand Gen is a better product for awareness and retargeting than the old Display campaign type, and the Lookalike audiences alone justify the move for most businesses. Treat the 9.5% ROI claim as directional rather than guaranteed, but the expanded inventory and audience capabilities are real. We’re running a Display campaign audit across all managed accounts this month to identify which to migrate first.
Priority 3 – Act within 90 days: The AI Max for Search auto-flip
Google delayed the full Dynamic Search Ads-to-AI Max migration from September 2026 to February 2027, citing advertiser feedback and Q4 disruption risk.
The reprieve is partial. Campaigns using Automatically Created Assets (ACA) or campaign-level broad match settings will still auto-migrate to AI Max in September 2026 as originally scheduled. Independent testing paints a more cautious picture than Google’s headline claims – 84% of advertisers report neutral or negative results from AI Max, versus Google’s stated 7% average conversion uplift. Advertisers running exact- and phrase-match-heavy campaigns see the most upside; those already using broad match see the least.
The StrategiQ take: the DSA delay is welcome, but the ACA and campaign-level broad match auto-flip means a significant number of accounts are going into AI Max in three months without opting in. An audit of these settings is essential – decide whether to migrate proactively on your own terms and get conversion tracking robust enough for AI Max, or let the switch happen automatically and fight an uphill battle with performance through Q4.
Priority 4 – Watch and prepare: Ask Advisor and agentic commerce
Google’s biggest announcement at GML 2026 was Ask Advisor, a Gemini-powered AI agent spanning Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center and Google Marketing Platform. It can take a natural language brief, pull product data from Merchant Center, and go from campaign concept to live setup in a few clicks – currently in English-language beta.
Alongside it, Google announced the foundations of agentic commerce: the Agent Payments Protocol (AP2), Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) and Universal Cart – infrastructure for AI agents to autonomously browse, select and complete purchases on consumers’ behalf. Google is also migrating ads into AI Search results, building next-generation ad formats that integrate with AI Overviews and conversational queries.
The StrategiQ take: Ask Advisor will accelerate how campaigns are set up, but agentic commerce is the story with the longer tail. Google is building the rails for AI agents to shop without human input – and products that aren’t structured with the right data attributes, UCP compatibility and Merchant Center hygiene won’t be visible in this emerging channel. For ecommerce and retail clients, feed quality and Merchant Center data completeness need to be treated as strategic infrastructure, not routine maintenance. The time to address this is now, not when AI-agent shopping goes mainstream – we’re already updating our retail media onboarding to reflect it.
Priority 5 – Worth testing: Amazon Ads and LinkedIn partner for B2B CTV advertising
Amazon Ads and LinkedIn have launched a formal partnership enabling LinkedIn’s audience targeting through Amazon DSP for connected TV (CTV) inventory. Marketers can now apply LinkedIn’s first-party data – job title, industry, seniority, company size – across its 1 billion+ members to streaming TV buys, combining professional audience precision with a high-attention video environment. Announced ahead of the 2026 upfront season, it marks the first time B2B audience data of this precision has been available for programmatic CTV buying at scale.
The StrategiQ take: for any B2B business, this is the most meaningful new media buying capability in CTV since the channel went mainstream. LinkedIn campaigns on desktop and mobile are effective, but operate in a low-attention, high-competition feed. Reaching the same decision-maker audience through streaming TV shifts the context entirely – less competitive, higher dwell time, better brand recall potential. CPMs will be high and scale is currently limited outside the US, so it isn’t a fit for every business. But for those with six-figure paid social budgets and complex, long sales cycles – professional services, SaaS, enterprise tech – it warrants a test in H2 2026.
Don’t let Google’s timeline dictate yours
If you’re managing an account with ACA enabled, campaign-level broad match, or standalone Display campaigns, the time to act is now.
If you’re feeling the strain of the latest changes, we can prioritise an account audit before the September window closes.
More about Dale
Dale Olorenshaw is Head of Paid Media at StrategiQ, with over 10 years’ experience working across industries from automotive to health, beauty, entertainment, sports and fitness.