Compiled retrospectively on July 16, 2026, from sources published on the date this page covers.
Confirmed
Google Expands Shopping Ads And Free Listings To 14 New Countries
Google's Merchant Center changelog confirms Shopping ads and free listings now cover 14 additional countries starting in July: Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Moldova, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Malta, and Serbia. Google frames this as new country eligibility for both ad formats, letting merchants target these markets for the first time and reach new audiences across the regions.
In plain termsFree listings are unpaid product results in Google Shopping, distinct from paid Shopping ads, and either way a merchant only shows up in these 14 new countries once their feed has prices, shipping costs, and tax rules filled in for each specific market.
Why it mattersMerchants selling into Southeastern Europe and the Baltics now have a legitimate new distribution channel to test before committing full catalog and feed investment there.
Our takeEligibility is not distribution. Actually reaching shoppers in these 14 markets depends on feed data carrying per-country shipping, tax, and language settings that eligibility alone doesn't supply, so expect uptake to lag the announcement by however long that regional feed work takes.
Confirmed
Google's Prediction Markets Ad Policy Now Excludes Four US States
Google's Prediction Markets advertising policy currently excludes Michigan, Nevada, New York, and Ohio from its approved locations list, meaning advertisers cannot run ads for exchange-listed event contracts and related products in those four states. Even in approved US locations, advertisers must hold certification as a CFTC-authorized Designated Contract Market or an NFA-authorized brokerage before Google will approve the ads.
In plain termsA CFTC-authorized Designated Contract Market is a federally licensed exchange for trading these event contracts, and an NFA-authorized brokerage is a similarly licensed broker, so the four-state block sits on top of a second, separate certification requirement that applies everywhere else in the US.
Why it mattersAdvertisers running prediction-market-adjacent campaigns in Michigan or New York need to pull or geo-fence those campaigns now, since Google will reject them regardless of federal registration status.
Our takeState-by-state ad carve-outs are becoming the default posture for prediction markets, not a temporary patch, since the underlying legal status of event contracts is still being litigated market by market. Advertisers running national campaigns should expect this exclusion list to grow before it shrinks, and should build state-level geo-fencing into the campaign structure now rather than patching it in after the next state gets added.
Observed
ChatGPT Ads Manager Gains Location And Audience Exclusion Controls
Search Engine Roundtable spotted two new controls in ChatGPT Ads Manager: a location-exclusion setting that stops a campaign from serving to users in specified places, and an audience-exclusion setting that filters out selected custom audiences. OpenAI's own Help Center separately documents the audience-exclusion mechanism, requiring each excluded list to include at least 25,000 matched users. OpenAI has not yet published help documentation specifically describing the location-exclusion control.
In plain termsA custom audience is a list of an advertiser's own customers uploaded so ChatGPT can target or exclude them, and OpenAI requires each list to match at least 25,000 people before it can be used that way.
Why it mattersBrands running ChatGPT Ads campaigns can now suppress delivery to existing customers or ineligible regions, a targeting precision paid search teams have had on Google and Meta for years.
Our takeThis is a campaign-side knob, not the actual bottleneck. The model still writes ad copy from the product feed those exclusions filter around, so feed quality is still the ceiling on what these ads can say.