That is the part of Google’s AI ad labelling rollout that has not been written about properly. Most coverage framed it as a transparency feature. For anyone actually running accounts, it is closer to a metadata problem: your production chain now decides what your ads say about themselves.

What Google actually switched on

Google announced the change on 9 July 2026 and rolled the controls out through July across Google Ads, Display & Video 360, Campaign Manager 360, Merchant Center and Ads Editor. Ads across Search, YouTube and Discover now carry a “How this ad was made” section inside the My Ad Center panel, reachable from the three-dot menu or the info icon on the ad. If an asset is designated as AI created or edited, that panel says so.

The setting itself is simple enough. In the Asset library there is an “AI label” status column, and during campaign creation you get a “Review assets” prompt asking you to mark each asset as created or edited with AI, or not. Google’s documentation on AI content label settings spells out the steps.

What that documentation also says, in a note most people skim past, is that the setting is not always yours.

Three ways you get labelled without choosing

• Google’s automation made the asset. When you use its fully automated features to create and serve creatives, assets may be labelled on your behalf.
• Google is legally required to label in that region. Where local law puts the duty on Google, Google acts.
• A signal arrived from somewhere else. Google embeds SynthID watermarks and C2PA provenance markup into images and videos generated inside its own tools, and it reads comparable signals coming from other platforms.

In all three cases, Google’s guidance states plainly that the labels cannot be overwritten.

The third route is the one that catches agencies. An image generated in a third-party tool that writes C2PA metadata arrives carrying its own provenance record. You upload it, you answer “don’t label this asset”, and the label can still appear, because the file is talking about itself.

Where the label is visible, and where it is buried

This distinction decides how much anyone actually notices.

In most of the world the disclosure lives inside My Ad Center, behind the three-dot menu. Realistically, almost nobody opens that. For campaigns targeting the European Union, India and New York, ads with assets designated as AI created or edited also carry a visible overlay on the ad itself.

So the same creative can run quietly in one market and wear a badge in another. If you run pan-European campaigns out of a US account, that difference is not cosmetic. Search Engine Land’s report on the rollout includes the screenshot Google shared, which is worth looking at before you try to describe the panel to a client.

The workflow trap: your own label can get cropped

Google permits you to burn your own AI label into a creative, and confirms this will not violate its policies on text overlays and watermarks. Two practical warnings come attached.

First, keep the label away from corners and edges, because rendering across formats can trim it. Second, and this is the one that bites, Google’s own image enhancements can crop your label. If you want a hand-placed label to survive, you have to opt out of Asset Enhancements in Display and Performance Max campaigns, and Adaptive Layouts in Demand Gen.

That is a genuine trade-off. Those enhancements exist because they usually improve performance. A four-person ecommerce team running Performance Max now has to choose between automated creative optimisation and control over its own disclosure. There is no configuration where you get both.

What to check before your next campaign

Concrete and boring, which is the point:

• Add the “AI label” status column to your asset reporting. You cannot manage a status you cannot see.
• Audit assets you inherited. Stock libraries and freelancer deliveries from the past year may carry provenance metadata nobody logged at the time.
• Write down which markets each campaign reaches, because visible overlays apply only to some of them.
• Decide once, in writing, whether hand-placed labels are worth losing asset enhancements. Then stop relitigating it campaign by campaign.
• Tell clients before they find out from a screenshot. An agency explaining a label after the client spots it is having a much worse conversation.

What can go wrong, and when this barely matters

The failure mode here is not a policy violation. It is a surprise. A brand that has told its audience it does not use AI in creative, then ships a Performance Max campaign built on generated assets, has a credibility problem that no setting fixes. It is the same underlying gap as unapproved AI tools spreading through a marketing team: the org chart says one thing and the file metadata says another.

The opposite risk is over-correction. Google states directly that using its AI label setting does not guarantee compliance with any specific regulation. Treating the toggle as your compliance programme is a mistake, particularly if you serve the EU, where the disclosure duty sits on you rather than on Google.

This may not be worth much of your attention if you run text-only Search ads with no generated imagery, no automated creative features and no third-party AI anywhere in the pipeline. That describes fewer accounts every month, but it still describes some. If it describes yours, note the change and move on.

For everyone else, the shift worth making is this. Stop treating AI disclosure as a communications decision taken at campaign level. It is now a property of your asset pipeline, set upstream by whichever tools touched the file. Audit the pipeline, not the campaign.

Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy before making compliance decisions.

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Microsoft Advertising’s August product update added Topic Insights to the AI Visibility reporting inside Microsoft Clarity. Instead of listing individual citations, it groups them by subject: which topics AI systems associate with your brand, how often those topics come up, and where you are absent.

Three metrics worth understanding

Microsoft defined the vocabulary alongside the release:

• Grounding queries: the retrieval searches an AI system runs before it writes an answer
• Citation share: how often your domain shows up as a cited source
• Share of authority: how often your domain is cited compared with competing sources

Grounding queries are the interesting one. When somebody asks an assistant a messy conversational question, the system does not search for that string. It writes its own retrieval queries first. Those queries are the actual demand you need to be present for, and they are usually not what your keyword tool shows you.

Microsoft’s own recommendation, in the August Microsoft Advertising update, is to compare grounding queries against your existing search terms report, pull new keywords and negatives out of the difference, and adjust landing pages where competitors are cited instead of you.

What a small team should do with this

A concrete version. A software company selling scheduling tools to dental practices ranks for “dental appointment software” and buys that term. Topic Insights shows the brand cited on “practice management” and almost never on “patient no-show reduction”, where three competitors appear instead.

That is not a keyword gap in the traditional sense, because almost nobody types that phrase into a search box. It is a topic the retrieval layer generates on its way to answering “how do I stop patients missing appointments”. The action is a page that answers that question properly, not a keyword inserted into an existing one. It takes a day. The alternative is continuing to buy the term you already own.

The rest of the August update

Two Performance Max experiment types are now available: uplift experiments, which measure what PMax adds on top of existing campaigns, and upgrade experiments, which compare an existing Search or Shopping campaign against PMax after migration. Microsoft’s setup guidance is at least 30 conversions in the previous 30 days, identical bidding targets and settings between test and control, and four to twelve weeks before reading results.

That last number is the one people will ignore. A four week read on a low volume account is noise wearing a result’s clothing.

Ad Preview Hub now covers Performance Max as well, and adds Bing results page previews, so creative can be reviewed and signed off through a shareable link before spend starts rather than screenshotted afterwards. For an agency chasing legal or brand approval on assembled creative, that is a small workflow change that removes a recurring argument.

What can go wrong

The obvious limit: this is Microsoft’s view of AI citation behaviour, drawn from what Clarity can observe. It is not a complete census of every assistant. Treating share of authority as a precise market share figure will lead you somewhere silly.

Microsoft also continues to cite an average 8% increase in incremental conversions from Performance Max. That is a vendor figure about a vendor product. It is a reason to run the uplift experiment, not a substitute for running it.

And this may not be worth your week at all. If you are a local business with a small Bing footprint, the reporting is real but the audience it describes may be too small to build a process around. Check the volume before you commit anyone’s Tuesday to it.

The uncomfortable part

Every platform is now shipping its own AI visibility report, each measuring a slightly different thing, none of them agreeing with the others. Google shows AI impressions in Search Console. Microsoft shows citation share in Clarity. Neither tells you whether a person saw your name and remembered it.

The honest use of these tools right now is directional: find the topics where you are absent and competitors are present, fix the content, check again in a quarter. Anyone building a board-level KPI on these numbers this year should expect to rebuild it. We made a similar point about what Google’s AI impressions number does not mean.

Editor’s note: This area changes quickly, so check the latest platform policy before making compliance decisions.

Update, 11 August 2026: Clarity now splits branded from non-branded AI citations

Microsoft has added a distinction to the AI Visibility reporting described above: citations are now separated into branded and non-branded. Branded citations come from prompts that already contain your company name. Non-branded citations come from prompts that do not.

That split matters more than it sounds. A healthy-looking citation share made up almost entirely of branded prompts tells you that people who already know you can find you, which was never in doubt. The non-branded number is the one that tells you whether an assistant recommends you to somebody who has never heard of you, and on most accounts it is dramatically smaller. Microsoft is also explicit that the figure represents your share within what Clarity observes, not your share of the entire AI search market, which is worth repeating to anyone about to put it in a board deck.

The advice in the original post stands unchanged. Compare grounding queries against your search terms report, act on the topics where competitors appear and you do not. The only thing that changes is which number you report: filter to non-branded before you write anything down, and track that figure over time rather than the combined total.

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