☕️ Google ordered to be fairer and more transparent

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In today's MarketingShot:

🔍 Google ordered to be fairer and more transparent

📈 Bing now shows how AI cites your brand

⚖️ Amazon's $68B ad business faces an FTC threat

📊 X just made ad conversion tracking easier

📌 Pinterest is turning shopping into AI conversations

💡 + 4 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 6 other news & articles you might like

• The UK competition watchdog has ordered Google to make its search rankings fairer and more transparent, after businesses complained the current practices are neither fair nor clear and that changes arrive without enough notice.
• The Competition and Markets Authority told Google to rank organic search results using objective and non-discriminatory criteria, a move that follows its October decision to designate the firm with strategic market status over more than 90% of UK searches.
• A second requirement turns Google's voluntary UK Data Portability Application Programming Interface, which allows data sharing, into a legally binding process, while businesses are also promised effective routes to raise concerns when ranking changes affect them.

• Microsoft has started rolling out a preview of new tools in Bing Webmaster Tools that show publishers how AI cites their brand, adding four features called Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare.
• The Citation Share metric shows the percentage of citations a site receives out of all citations across all sites for the same grounding query, though it does not expose competitor domains, traffic share, or quality scores.
• Intents sorts grounding queries into categories like Informational, Commercial, and Research, while Topics groups related queries into thematic clusters, and Compare lets publishers overlay a past time period onto the current view.

• Amazon's $68 billion advertising business could face penalties from the FTC over claims it used hidden price floors that may have pushed advertisers to bid more than necessary for spots in search results.
• The probe centers on "reserve pricing" in Amazon's real-time auctions for sponsored listings, where advertisers allegedly raised bids to meet an undisclosed floor while believing they were competing against other bidders.
• The FTC action, joined by attorneys general in multiple states, may result in penalties totaling billions of dollars, and a new complaint has already been drafted, though Amazon and the FTC declined to comment.

• X has added three new tools to its Ads Manager that make conversion tracking simpler, including a Google Tag Manager integration, consolidated Conversion API developer tools, and a real-time conversion diagnostics dashboard, all rolling out this month.
• The Google Tag Manager integration lets advertisers set up the X Pixel and Conversion API through a guided, no-code workflow inside Ads Manager, cutting the need for developer support during the initial configuration that previously required engineering involvement.
• The live dashboard shows the health of both Pixel and CAPI events at once, letting advertisers spot signal drops as they happen and find whether a problem starts on the client side or the server side before campaign performance degrades.

• Pinterest launched an experimental app called "Ask Pinterest" that uses a conversational, chatbot-like interface where people ask questions in natural language to get personalized product recommendations and inspiration, available initially in limited access.
• The app draws on Pinterest's "Taste Graph," its internal data mapping people to their interests, and can pull from users' own saved Pins and Boards to personalize answers across sessions for complex, multi-step queries.
• Pinterest built Ask Pinterest as a standalone app to test the technology without disrupting its main app, and results from it will help the company build more AI-powered experiences for its flagship app later.

Strategies & Tactics

Other news & articles you might like

• Adobe brings GEO to CX Enterprise with Adobe Brand Visibility LINK

• OpenAI moves to automate ad creative LINK

• Amazon Launches Program for Independent Creators Navigating AI Search LINK

• Ad market reaches its highest share of GDP LINK

• Marketers face new loyalty risks as consumers delegate choices to AI LINK

• Inside Meta’s ads MCP server and what it could automate for media buyers LINK

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