Seven days from now Meta’s new commercial terms take effect, and a new section moves the blame for its AI’s mistakes onto you. Not the mistakes you asked for. The ones its tools make in your adverts without being switched on.
Paid media and AI
Meta hands you the blame for adverts its AI rewrites
On 30 October Meta’s revised commercial terms add a section on AI features that does not exist in the current version. It makes you solely responsible for anything Meta’s AI creates or changes in your adverts, including features Meta switches on itself. Meta’s own wording says its AI features “may make mistakes and may not always produce accurate, complete, or suitable results”, and that you carry “any and all risks”. The old wording covered only features you chose. That condition is gone.
There is nothing to sign. If your adverts are still running on 31 October, you have accepted it. Agencies told Adweek that Meta’s tools had already added sitelinks nobody requested, translated copy and generated AI images out of brand photos. Bookshop.org found an account update had opted it into a feature that dropped an illustration into its advert.
Why this matters for your business: Open Ads Manager before 30 October and walk through every Advantage+ setting on every active campaign. Several sit inside collapsed menus and stay on until you untick them one at a time. Screenshot what you switch off. Meta caps its own liability at $100 or what you spent with it over the past year, whichever is greater, and yours is not capped at all. If you advertise anything regulated, medical, financial or property, turn the lot off.
Search and SEO
Ahrefs says up to a fifth of the data your rank tracker buys is fake
This updates a story we ran on Tuesday. Nozzle reported that Google had swapped the results on 8 percent of the pages it collected. On Wednesday Ahrefs, a much larger data provider, said the same thing is happening to it and put the range higher. “Depending on the data provider, we’re seeing between 5% and 20% of search results affected in this way,” the company wrote. It now filters abnormal results and says it is cleaning up past ones that may have been affected.
Two independent providers describing the same behaviour is much harder to dismiss as one company’s measurement glitch. Be careful with the number, though. Ahrefs published no sample size and no method, so treat 5 to 20 percent as a vendor estimate rather than a measured finding. Google has said nothing.
Why this matters for your business: Stop treating one week of rank tracker movement as evidence of anything. When a report shows you dropping six places, check your Search Console impressions for that query first, because that data comes from Google directly instead of through a scraper. If you receive ranking reports, ask whoever sends them how they are handling this. If you send them, add a line explaining that third-party rank data now carries a known error rate.
Social media
Nearly half the Reels Instagram recommends are less than a day old
Meta published platform level numbers alongside its third quarter results this week. One is worth your attention. Almost 45 percent of recommended Reels on Instagram are now less than one day old, up more than 11 percentage points in a single quarter. Over on Threads, time spent per user grew more than 20 percent year on year, and the app now reports more than 500 million monthly users.
Why this matters for your business: Instagram is paying out for freshness and the window keeps tightening. A Reel you post has roughly a day to earn its reach. That argues for posting more often and polishing less, which is the opposite of how most small businesses run their social media. If you publish two carefully made Reels a month, four rougher ones a week will beat them. And if you wrote Threads off as a ghost town, those numbers say look again.
Content marketing
Google put marketing tools inside Gemini, then limited who can use them
Google has added a business section to the Gemini app with ten connected apps, among them Google Business Profile, Google Ads, Workspace, Canva, Shopify and Xero. You upload your website or brand kit once and Gemini keeps that visual style for the images it makes afterwards. Read the help pages before you get excited, though. Nine of the ten connections work only with personal Google accounts, and Google Business Profile is unavailable to anyone who can access more than one verified profile. That rules out every agency and every owner with two branches.
Why this matters for your business: If you run a single location on a personal Google account, the saved brand style is worth half an hour this week, because it fixes the “all our images look different” problem cheaply. If you have two or more locations, ignore the headlines and carry on. And note that the Business Profile link can change your trading hours and delete your posts, so treat it like a new staff member with shop keys.
Automotive
An AI phoned a dealer about a used BMW, and he nearly hung up
Ben Holdaway, who runs Abbey Park Cars in Hampshire, took a call that sounded like an ordinary customer asking about a used BMW X3 at just over £15,000. Partway through, the caller admitted it was an AI assistant doing research. When the magazine tried to ring the number back, the line was dead.
One call is one call, so read this as an early signal rather than a trend. The useful part is what Pete Hanlon, chief technology officer at Moneypenny, says comes next. These enquiries are already common in the United States and he expects them in Britain within two years. An AI agent can ring ten dealers at once and drop the rest once it has three or four good answers. It will not hold, leave a message or ring back.
Why this matters for your dealership: Your phone and your enquiry form are about to be judged by something that never waits. Fix two things. Make sure a competent person answers inside a few rings, and that after-hours calls reach something better than a voicemail beep. Then put the full specification on every vehicle page, including warranty terms, service history and finance detail. An agent that cannot find an answer on your site will phone, and an agent that cannot get an answer on the phone moves to the next dealer on its list.
What to do this week
- Audit every Advantage+ setting in Meta Ads Manager before 30 October and screenshot what you switch off
- Set product browsing the way you want it before 28 October
- Add a caveat about third-party rank data to any ranking report you send or receive
- Post Instagram Reels more often and judge each one on its first day
- Ring your own business after hours and fix what you hear
If you would rather someone else watched all this for you, that is what we do. Talk to us about your search and social.
Sources
- PPC Land on Meta’s revised commercial terms
- Adweek on advertisers pulling adverts Meta’s AI changed
- PPC Land on the Ahrefs poisoned results estimate
- Nozzle’s original research on swapped search results
- Social Media Today on Meta’s platform level numbers
- A breakdown of the Gemini small business tools and their limits
- Car Dealer Magazine on AI agents phoning dealerships