The Platforms Took the Wheel in September. Did Anyone Ask You?

We spent a good chunk of September reading platform update emails that all said some version of the same thing: no action is required on your part. Which is exactly the sentence that should make you take action.

Here's what happened in roughly four weeks. Starting September 1, Google began automatically moving eligible Broad Match and older auto-created asset campaigns into AI Max, and it had already stopped letting advertisers build new ones back in August. Microsoft turned its own AI Max on by default for new campaigns. Meta started pulling placement exclusions out of ad sets and nudging buyers toward bid adjustments instead, backed by its own data saying automated placements run about 11.7% cheaper per action. And Amazon quietly enrolled existing Sponsored Products campaigns into ads that show up inside creator content, with the default set to more reach unless you go change it.

One agency summed it up as every platform deciding it knows better than you do, all in the same month. We'd put it a little softer, but honestly not by much.

To be fair, automation isn't the villain here. Some of these tools will perform better than a tired human babysitting bids at 11pm, and plenty of advertisers will see their costs drop. The problem is that "cheaper on average" is the platform's number, measured the platform's way, and it says nothing about whether your ad ended up somewhere your brand would never choose to be. A lower cost per action is great until you find out what the action was sitting next to.

So here's where we land. Let the machines do the math, but keep the judgment. Pull a baseline from before the switch so you actually know if anything got better. Move the exclusions you care about to the account level while that option still exists. Read your search term and placement reports like someone who has to explain them to a client, because eventually you will.

The brands that come out of this fine won't be the ones who fought every update. They'll be the ones who still know what they want when the platform stops asking.