Chrome just killed uBlock Origin ad blocking

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🚫 Chrome just killed uBlock Origin ad blocking

🤖 Your next customer is an AI agent, says Mastercard

🛒 Amazon's Alexa now pings shoppers before your rivals

⚡ Site speed now beats your keywords in AI search

📊 AdSense will stop counting ads your visitors never saw

Plus: 💡 5 strategies & tactics, 🎁 7 other news you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

🚫 Chrome just killed uBlock Origin ad blocking LINK

Google removed every Manifest V2 extension from the Chrome Web Store yesterday, wiping uBlock Origin from search and install pages, cutting off downloads and updates for the tens of millions of Chrome users who ran it.

Manifest V3 swaps the webRequest API for declarativeNetRequest, capping extensions near 30,000 static rules, while EasyList alone tops 75,000, leaving gaps that let more ads and trackers slip through on Chrome.

Brave hosts uBlock Origin, AdGuard, uMatrix, and NoScript on its own servers, Firefox keeps full Manifest V2 support, and Microsoft plans to drop Manifest V2 in Edge by year's end.

🤖 Your next customer is an AI agent, says Mastercard LINK

Mastercard says AI agents are set to become a key buyer that brands must reach, with agent-assisted consumer spending forecast to hit $3-5 trillion by 2030 and business-to-business spending possibly reaching three times that amount.

The company's report found 85% of consumers are open to working with AI agents to find the best product, and 74% will hand over specific commerce tasks, but only one in ten will let an agent complete a purchase fully autonomously.

Mastercard proposes a trust layer that verifies who is acting and what the user authorised, plus agentic tokens giving specific permissions like spending limits, rather than granting agents unlimited access to payment credentials.

🛒 Amazon's Alexa now pings shoppers before your rivals LINK

Amazon rolled out a new feature within its Alexa for Shopping AI assistant called "Update Me When," which sends personalized notifications the moment something happens that could push a consumer toward a purchase.

People can set alerts for events like a favorite brand launching a product line, a new season of a TV show dropping, an artist announcing a concert tour, or an author releasing a book.

The tool marks a shift in Amazon's AI strategy, since Alexa once mainly answered direct product questions but now aims to anticipate a buying moment before the shopper even thinks to ask.

⚡ Site speed now beats your keywords in AI search LINK

How fast a website loads has become the main factor deciding how well it shows up in AI-powered search, moving past the old focus on keywords and backlinks used in traditional SEO.

AI search tools from Google, Perplexity, and OpenAI favor pages that load in two seconds or less, using Core Web Vitals scores such as Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint to judge which sources are worth processing.

Slow pages get filtered out during retrieval even when relevant, pushing e-commerce sites with heavy JavaScript and news outlets with autoplay videos below the performance thresholds AI systems set for inclusion in generated answers.

📊 AdSense will stop counting ads your visitors never saw LINK

Google AdSense told publishers that display advertisements which load but never start painting on screen will stop counting as impressions from February 17, 2027, a change the company applies automatically to banner display inventory.

The new begin-to-render method registers an impression only after an advertisement has loaded and started to render, so publishers may see a decrease in total display impressions because counting happens later in the ad serving process.

The shift follows the IAB Tech Lab and Media Rating Council guidelines from October 2017, and it eliminates the buffer publishers built to deliver count-on-download campaigns against begin-to-render terms across web, mobile web and connected television.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> How to prove paid social drives paid search demand: Prove paid social's hidden value by tracking branded search spikes, measuring delayed conversions, and comparing matched regions where social spend differs.

> I Built an AEO Content Workflow That Finds LinkedIn Gaps and Fills Buffer With Writer-Ready Briefs: Explains how to boost how often AI engines name a brand by finding unanswered questions and turning them into writer-ready LinkedIn briefs.

> What high-citation brands do differently in AI search: The 2026 AEO playbook: High-citation brands earn AI-answer mentions by structuring content for easy extraction, matching each format to the engine that favors it, and continuously refreshing pages.

> How to Find and Pitch Real Case Studies for Digital PR with Becca Peel: Provide journalists with real, verified human case studies tied to your data, because AI can gather statistics but can't find the person a story applies to.

> How to prepare your site for AI agents: Structure each page section as a self-contained answer with clean HTML and consistent business details, because AI answer engines cite only content they can easily extract and verify.

Other news you might like

• Reddit launches 15-second video views ad goalLINK

• LinkedIn increases push against inauthentic activityLINK

• Why brands are turning to older creators for authenticity AI can’t fakeLINK

• Inside Away’s new ‘programming’ strategy for social mediaLINK

• How E.l.f. Beauty is building AI into its community managementLINK

• Google Analytics showing zero traffic on September 1stLINK

• Google’s answer to Canva is an AI tool where you prompt instead of designLINK

🧰 Trending tools

ChatCut: edits videos through plain-language commands that handle cutting, motion graphics, scripts, and music without touching a manual timeline.LINK

PlugThis: builds complete Manifest v3 Chrome extensions from plain-English prompts, generating permissions, popup UI, background workers, and Supabase backend in about two minutes.LINK

Adomate: creates ads at scale from Meta account data, ad libraries, and Trustpilot and Amazon reviews, with fully traceable, non-blackbox creative workflows.LINK

AI Search Console: monitors how ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI engines mention your brand, tracking prompts, citations, competitors, and visibility trends in one dashboard.LINK

Migma AI: automatically builds on-brand email campaigns from your brand, audience, and calendar, then lets you review, approve, and send.LINK

CartAI: automates checkout across merchant sites through one API, handling payments, shipping, and order tracking without building per-site integrations.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!