Ad auctions in court, ChatGPT hits $1bn, Google hides click data
Three separate ad auction stories landed in the same week, and each one changes how you should read your ad data going forward.
Google keeps AdX, but the auction rules change
On 2 September, Judge Leonie Brinkema declined to order Google to divest its AdX exchange or its DFP publisher ad server, sixteen months after finding the company had illegally monopolised both markets. Her written opinion was sealed for fourteen days, so the industry debated a ruling nobody had actually read.
The remedies she did order are structural, not symbolic. Real-time AdX bid data must be shared with rival ad servers. Unified pricing rules are out, and publishers in Ad Manager will be able to set different price floors for individual bidders. First look and last look are prohibited on open-web display inventory.
Her reasoning: no obvious buyer exists, a divestiture would take three to five years and face appeals that delay any relief further, and small publishers using DFP for free could be harmed by a forced sale. Brussels is still on a separate track after a €2.95 billion fine, with structural remedies still possible there.
What to do: Ask your ad ops team or SSP contact when per-bidder price floors land in Ad Manager. Ownership did not change. The clearing price is where you will see whether this ruling moved anything.
The FTC says Amazon charged you for a bidder that did not exist
The FTC and 22 state attorneys general filed a 181-page complaint on 31 August alleging Amazon ran an undisclosed soft reserve price on top of its second-price ad auction for more than seven years. The complaint puts the total surcharge across 1.2 million US advertisers at roughly $20 billion. Over 500,000 of those advertisers were small and medium businesses.
The complaint tracks how often winners paid their own bid rather than any runner-up: 4% of clicks in late 2020, rising to 30 to 40% through 2021, 70% by 2022, and 79.1% in 2024. For Sponsored Brands in 2024, winners paid their own maximum bid roughly half the time.
Amazon disputes the case. The company says inflation-adjusted Sponsored Products CPCs were flat between 2019 and 2024, that about 92% of selected ads in 2024 were not the highest bid (because relevance factors into ranking), and that advertisers saved more than $8 billion between 2021 and 2025 as a result of its system.
What to do: Pull your Sponsored Products data and calculate how often you paid your exact maximum bid. If that share has been climbing, your bid caps have been doing more work than your bidding strategy.
ChatGPT ads crossed $1 billion in under 200 days
Digiday reported on 31 August that OpenAI’s advertising business reached a $1 billion annualised run rate. The figure is based on roughly $83 million in current monthly revenue multiplied by twelve, so it is a snapshot of the current pace rather than $1 billion already banked across a full year.
On the same day, self-serve access through Ads Manager opened to eligible advertisers across 31 European markets, in approved categories and subject to policy checks. The existing agency and technology partner routes remain open alongside it.
Also on 31 August, the European Commission designated ChatGPT a Very Large Online Search Engine after OpenAI declared 159.1 million average monthly EU users. That designation requires per-ad disclosure of advertiser identity and targeting parameters, a public ad repository retained for one year after last display, and a ban on profiling-based ads to known minors. Compliance is due by the end of December 2026.
What to do: The self-serve door is open across Europe. The public ad repository arrives in December, which means you will shortly be able to see exactly what competitors are running there.
Google’s AI search report shows impressions, not clicks
Google finished rolling its generative AI performance report and AI feature opt-out control to every website worldwide on 31 August, closing a phased release that started in June. The report gives impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates for appearances inside AI Overviews and AI Mode. It gives no click data and no query data. AI impressions still sit inside overall performance totals rather than a separate silo.
Research cited alongside the rollout puts the organic click-through drop on AI Overview queries at 58 to 61%. The opt-out toggle exists because of a UK Competition and Markets Authority order, not because Google offered it voluntarily. It is domain-wide for now, with page-level exclusion not required until 3 March 2027. The order explicitly bars Google from cutting a site’s conventional rankings for using the opt-out.
What to do: Start logging AI impressions weekly against organic clicks from the same pages. Building your own picture of what an AI appearance is actually worth is the only option until someone provides the click data.
Quick hits
- The Trade Desk cut about 575 jobs, 15% of its global workforce, and exits the S&P 500 on 21 September.
- Agencies are metering media-buying AI agents with audit logs and daily token caps.
- Nielsen deployed seven changes to US TV currency as ad-supported viewing fell to 71.5%.
- Waze ads opened in 41 more countries, including all 27 EU member states.
- DV360 auto-archives every legacy mCPV and Video reach 1.0 line item on 26 October.
- A Zalando researcher found standard marketing mix models overstate paid search ROAS by roughly 2.5 times.
- FreeWheel found 48% of buyers assume viewers dislike AI creative; only 10% of viewers actually did.
- AdSense stops counting unrendered display impressions from 17 February 2027, so reported totals will fall.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
At BizStack, I aim to cut through the digital noise to provide clear, actionable advice.
And more than all else, I’m a father to a (always) little girl and a husband.
Contact me at [email protected] for assistance.
