Two changes switch on today and both touch money you have already committed. Google Ads starts treating your cost per acquisition and return on ad spend targets as instructions rather than ceilings. ChatGPT Ads starts reading customer details out of your own website forms unless you turned it off. Nobody asked you to sign anything.
WordPress 7.1 lands on Wednesday with a change that breaks some editors, and a Google reporting switch on 24 August rewrites six weeks of history you have already reported on.
SEO and search
The bidding change goes live today and your target is now the lever
Google has been trailing this one for a fortnight and it lands today. Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin put out a five minute video over the weekend answering three questions, which tells you how much noise the industry made. The mechanic is simple. If a campaign is limited by budget and beating its target, Google will now spend up to that target instead of holding the better number. Campaigns with unconstrained budgets already behaved this way. Search, Shopping, Performance Max, Demand Gen and Travel are all in scope, and Google confirmed on 13 August that targets set at ad group level count too. Measurement firm Measured put it bluntly. A target you once set as a safety ceiling is now an instruction. Google has pushed notifications into accounts along with a tool listing the campaigns affected.
Why this matters for your business: open that tool today and look at the gap between the target you set and the result you actually get. If your target says R400 and the campaign has been delivering leads at R250, your cost per lead can climb by more than half while Google reports the campaign as working correctly. The dangerous targets are the ones nobody has touched in two years. Reset them to the number your business can genuinely afford per sale.
ChatGPT Ads started reading your form fields this morning
Automatic advanced matching became the default on existing ChatGPT Ads web pixels today. It was already on for new pixels. The feature lets the pixel read what a visitor types into your forms, hash it inside the browser, and send that with the conversion event so OpenAI can tie more conversions back to ad clicks. OpenAI emailed advertisers during the week of 3 August. If you missed the mail, the setting still sits under Tools, then Conversions, then Data Source, then Edit pixel, and you can switch it back on later.
Why this matters for your business: the hashing happens in the browser, so a raw email address never leaves the visitor’s machine. You are still sending a derived identifier to a third party off the back of a form your privacy notice describes in its own words. Under POPIA that belongs in the notice and in whatever consent you collect. Check whether the pixel sits on pages carrying enquiry or quote forms, then choose deliberately instead of by default.
Content and your website
WordPress 7.1 arrives Wednesday and live editing is out again
WordPress 7.1 ships on 19 August at WordCamp US, and the Field Guide published on 5 August settles two open questions. Real time collaborative editing is not in the release. It was pulled from 7.0 twelve days before that launch, and the guide says it was tested through the 7.1 cycle but is not enabled in the final build. That is two cycles gone. Notes, the editorial commenting system, did ship, and now takes inline formatting, at mentions and several conversations on a single block. The breaking change sits elsewhere. The post editor now always runs inside an iframe, on every theme. Classic themes and older blocks used to stay outside it. That exemption is gone, and staying on Block API version 2 no longer opts a block out. It just earns a console warning and the same breakage.
Why this matters for your business: if your site runs a page builder, a heavily customised theme, or any plugin that injects styling into the editor, test 7.1 on a staging copy before Wednesday rather than after. The failure mode is not a white screen you would notice immediately. It is an editor that loads fine and renders your content wrongly, which somebody discovers halfway through writing a post. On the upside, new Playlist, Table of Contents and Tabs blocks arrive, and responsive plus hover styling become editor controls instead of CSS you pay a developer to write.
Social
TikTok will now build a creator’s media kit inside the app
TikTok has added media kit generation in the app, so a creator can produce the stats one pager brands ask for without paying for a third party tool. It arrived alongside voice typing for photo posts on iOS and photo posts from desktop web. Threads separately took its first real brand refresh on 14 August, to mixed reaction.
Why this matters for your business: if you brief influencers, media kits will arrive faster and look far more uniform, which makes candidates easier to compare. Every number is still self reported from the same screen, so keep asking for a short screen recording of the analytics tab rather than trusting the tidy export. On Threads, check your saved templates and profile artwork.
Automotive
The 24 August Merchant Center change rewrites six weeks of your history
This is an update on our 12 August item, and the new fact is the backdating. Google aligns Merchant Center performance definitions with Google Ads and YouTube on 24 August, and splits YouTube affiliate clicks out of the Organic figure into a traffic type of their own. What only became clear last week is that the restatement reaches back to 1 July 2026. Six weeks of third quarter numbers you have already read and reported will not match the same report after the switch. There is no opt out.
Why this matters for your dealership: vehicle ads run off your Merchant Center feed, so this is your reporting rather than somebody else’s problem. Export your July and August performance data before 24 August and save it where you can find it in November. Without that snapshot you cannot tell a real drop in free listing traffic from a change in what Google counts, and the first month on month comparison after the switch will show a decline that never happened. If you report to a dealer principal or into an OEM programme, warn them this week rather than explaining it afterwards.
What to do this week
- Open the affected campaigns tool in Google Ads and close the gap between your targets and your actual results
- Decide deliberately whether ChatGPT Ads advanced matching stays on, then update your privacy notice to match
- Test WordPress 7.1 on staging before Wednesday, focusing on the editor rather than the front end
- Export July and August Merchant Center performance data before 24 August
- Refresh Threads profile artwork and any saved post templates
Four deadlines in one week is the sort of thing that slips when you are running a business. We watch this every day for the clients we look after. If you would like the same, get in touch.
Sources
- Search Engine Land, Google explains what advertisers should expect from Smart Bidding changes
- Search Engine Roundtable, Google Ads video Q and A on the August 17 bidding update
- PPC Land, Google puts ad group targets in scope for the August 17 bidding change
- PPC Land, ChatGPT advertisers face 10 days to opt out of automatic advanced matching
- Make WordPress Core, WordPress 7.1 Field Guide
- Make WordPress Core, Iframed editor changes in WordPress 7.1
- Google Merchant Center Help, Merchant Center performance reporting updates
- PPC Land, Google Merchant Center organic traffic drops in August 24 reporting change
- SocialBee, 2026 TikTok updates, news and features