In September a setting quietly disappears from Google Ads. If you run search campaigns in more than one language, and in South Africa a great many businesses do, that removal changes who sees your ads and there is no opt out.
Google confirmed it on Friday. It leads a week that also pushed AI generated pictures into live search results, gave customers a button to report your replies to reviews, and produced numbers from Shopify that undercut most of what you have read this year about AI killing organic search.
SEO and search
Google removes the language setting from search campaigns in September
Google Ads will remove campaign level language targeting from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns in late September. Instead of you choosing, Google decides, reading the language of your ad text, the language of your landing page, and what it already knows about the languages a person understands. Performance Max keeps the setting for YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail, but loses it on the Search Network. Google says the change removes redundancy and setup errors, because its systems already match language automatically.
Why this matters for your business: in South Africa this setting was doing real work. An English campaign and an Afrikaans campaign for the same product could be split cleanly, with separate budgets and separate reporting. From late September that split has to live in your creative and your landing page instead. Go through every search campaign now and check two things. Does the ad copy read unambiguously as one language. Does the landing page match it, rather than mixing English headings with Afrikaans body copy. Fix the mixed pages first, because that is exactly where Google will guess and guess wrong.
AI generated pictures have arrived inside AI Overviews
Google said a month ago that it would put image generation into AI Overviews. This week the feature started appearing in live results. A searcher can now produce a custom picture from a prompt without leaving the results page, and AI Overviews have begun illustrating themselves with generated artwork rather than pulling a photograph from a site. Publishers have reacted badly. The generated images carry no source and no link, yet they sit beside cited websites, so a reader can easily assume one of those sites supplied the illustration.
Why this matters for your business: if you have been investing in original photography as a way to earn image search traffic, that route just narrowed. The answer is not to stop shooting. Photographs of your premises, your team and your actual stock still do the one job a generated picture cannot, which is prove you exist. Make sure yours carry descriptive alt text and sit on a page that names your business.
Customers can now report your reply to a review
Google Business Profile and Google Maps have gained a Report owner response option. Anyone can now flag your reply to a review as off topic, profane, harassing, discriminatory, hateful, or as containing personal information. Until now the reporting tools pointed at reviews. They now point at you.
Why this matters for your business: your review replies are moderated content with a public complaint button attached. The likeliest trap is a well meant reply that names the customer, quotes an order number, or repeats something they told you privately. All of that counts as personal information. Rewrite your reply template so it never carries a name, an invoice number or a job reference, and move the specifics into a direct message or a phone call.
Social and content
Shopify’s numbers say AI search is adding traffic, not taking it
Shopify published second quarter data showing AI referred sessions to merchant stores up 197% year on year. The second number matters more. Organic search to those same stores grew 12% over the same period, from a far larger base, and still sent more sessions than every tracked AI platform combined. Shopify also found AI referred shoppers converted at roughly twice the rate of organic visitors in specification heavy categories, and that the advantage doubled again when the AI read structured catalogue data instead of a scraped product feed.
Why this matters for your business: the pie got bigger. That is a very different story from the one most people are telling. Keep doing the organic work, because it remains the larger channel and it is still growing. The structured data finding is the actionable half. Clean, complete product markup is what turns an AI mention into a sale, and a scraped guess is what turns it into nothing.
Microsoft Clarity now shows which AI crawlers actually send you visitors
Clarity has added a Scrape to Referral report inside its bot analytics. It ranks AI operators by how heavily they crawl your site against how much traffic they send back, so you can see plainly which ones take content and return nobody. You can click from a referral straight into session recordings filtered to that source. Clarity is free.
Why this matters for your business: install it this week. This is the first free way to answer a question that has been pure guesswork all year, which is whether the AI crawlers hammering your hosting are worth the bandwidth. If one operator scrapes heavily and refers nobody, you have an evidence based case for blocking it at the edge instead of a hunch.
Automotive
Merchant Center for Agencies now documents a ceiling of 1,000 linked accounts
Google updated its Merchant Center help documentation to state that an agency account can link up to 1,000 client Merchant Center accounts. The limit existed before but was never published, so nobody could plan around it. There is no policy change, no effective date and no notification to account holders.
Why this matters for your dealership: vehicle ads run off Merchant Center feeds, and a dealer group usually runs one account per rooftop, sometimes one per franchise brand within a rooftop. Because the ceiling was undocumented, groups routinely spread feeds across several agency accounts as insurance against an invisible wall. That insurance is now unnecessary, and the split has become a cost, because it fragments reporting and hides broken feeds. Consolidate to one agency account. Then use the September language change as the reason to audit your vehicle detail pages at the same time, because a VDP that mixes English and Afrikaans is precisely the page Google will now be guessing about.
What to do this week
- Audit every Google Ads search campaign for its language setting and for mixed language landing pages, well before late September.
- Rewrite your Google review reply template so it never carries a customer name, an order number or a job reference.
- Install Microsoft Clarity and open the Scrape to Referral report to see which AI crawlers earn their bandwidth.
- Check that your product or vehicle structured data is complete rather than partial, because AI systems convert far better off clean data.
- Update to WordPress 7.1 when it lands on 19 August, on a staging copy first.
If you would like someone to run the language audit across your campaigns and landing pages before September, get in touch with us.
Sources
- Google Ads is removing language targeting from Search campaigns, Search Engine Land
- Google Ads language targeting update coming in September, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google AI Overviews with AI generated images in the wild, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google local report owner response, Search Engine Roundtable
- Shopify: AI referrals up 197%, but organic search still leads traffic, Search Engine Land
- Microsoft Clarity AI Scrape to Referral insights report, Search Engine Land
- Google Merchant Center for Agencies now supports up to 1,000 linked accounts, Search Engine Land