Ad Tech Briefing: Google’s ad tech remedies arrive just as the platform battle moves to AI

In short, Google keeps the machinery, but must make it more interoperable. While this is an important win, the context is arguably the bigger point. While the court is attempting to open infrastructure built during the desktop web era, AI platforms are building increasingly integrated advertising systems of their own. In fact, in these last seven days alone, a raft of mergers and acquisitions — i.e., Taboola’s decision to buy Dinanomi and Infillion’s decision to purchase Foursquare shows how even the independent sector is moving in that direction.

Opening the old platform

However, that’s not to say the remedies are without virtue, as they clearly do attempt to go beyond prohibiting a repeat of Google’s past conduct. These requirements are geared toward inhibiting Google’s accumulated advantage during its rise, when publishers had strong incentives to use its publisher ad server to secure access to its advertiser demand.

However, change will be gradual, and multiple Digiday sources claimed they believed this ship has already sailed.

Google has 12 months to open AdX to competing publisher ad servers, while the required Prebid integrations take longer to implement. The judgment itself runs for six years, with a monitor and technical committee overseeing compliance.

There is a more fundamental limitation. The remedies primarily concern open-web display advertising, a market whose relative importance has diminished since the conduct at issue began. As Digiday reported this week, the proportion of AdWords impressions flowing into traditional display fell from more than 40% in 2019 to 11% in 2025.

Google therefore keeps the infrastructure. The government gets rules governing how it interacts with competitors. Meanwhile, the industry’s center of gravity is shifting.

The new platforms are closing the loop

ChatGPT provides the clearest example. For example, on Sept. 10, Amazon opened ChatGPT inventory through Amazon’s demand-side platform to select U.S. advertisers, combining OpenAI’s emerging advertising inventory with Amazon’s buying technology, advertiser relationships and commerce data.

Days later came another potentially consequential development: a ChatGPT ad format that doesn’t necessarily send users anywhere. Instead, clicking an ad can open a conversation with a brand agent inside ChatGPT, letting users keep researching a product and potentially move closer to a transaction without returning to the open web.

Such developments threaten to upend the traditional advertising bargain. Search monetized intent while sending at least some users onward. Social platforms have become progressively more closed but remain heavily reliant on external landing pages.

Meanwhile, conversational AI could combine discovery, recommendation, advertising, and commercial interaction within the same interface.

And governance questions are already emerging. For example, last week OpenAI stopped approving ChatGPT ads for standalone image- and voice-generation products competing with its own offerings. Adobe, an early participant in ChatGPT’s advertising pilot, was among those affected after previously promoting its Firefly image generator there. The reported restriction does not currently extend to video-generation products.

That doesn’t make OpenAI the next Google ad tech antitrust case. ChatGPT advertising remains nascent, competition is evolving quickly, and self-preferencing is not inherently illegal.

But the timing is notable.

Lawmakers in Washington, D.C., and the EU have spent years litigating Google’s control of advertising infrastructure and conduct toward competitors. As a court now imposes interoperability requirements intended to constrain those advantages, AI companies are building environments that control the consumer interface, recommendations, advertising inventory, and commercial interactions — as well as the rules governing which advertisers can participate.

Regulation looks backward as advertising moves forward

The tension extends beyond OpenAI.

Google itself expanded its agentic commerce efforts this week across Search, YouTube and Gmail, including additional Merchant Center data intended for conversational product discovery and further work around its Universal Commerce Protocol.

Publishers are confronting the other side of that transition. At Digiday’s Publishing Summit last week, executives described declining search referrals and the prospect of a “Google Zero” environment in which AI interfaces increasingly intermediate publishers’ relationships with audiences.

The economic effects are reaching ad tech too. Taboola announced plans to acquire Dianomi for £19 million ($25.4 million), potentially rising to £27 million ($36 million). Dianomi has cited declining publisher traffic and changing content-consumption patterns, including AI summaries and zero-click search, among the factors affecting its business.

Green shoots of hope

All of which leaves Brinkema’s judgment important, but also historically bounded.

Making AdX compete more openly through Prebid could materially benefit publishers and independent ad tech companies. But the next platform battle may be less about access to an ad exchange than control of the interface where consumers discover, evaluate, and ultimately, buy things.

The advertising industry spent two decades discovering what happens when those questions are addressed only after a platform becomes indispensable. AI may test whether it learned the lesson.

OpenAI is testing an AI-native format that turns an ad click into a branded conversation within ChatGPT rather than an outbound website visit.

What we’ve heard

“It’s hard to be a $7 billion company, right?”

— Josh Wepman, managing director of technology investment banking at Houlihan Lokey, discussing why publicly traded ad tech companies can struggle to attract the large institutional investors that drive public-market valuations at ExchangeWire’s ATS London conference.

Numbers to know

The final Google ad tech remedies trial and underlying market data provide this week’s numbers:

6 years: The duration of Google’s behavioral remedies and associated compliance oversight.

12 months: The period Google has to enable AdX to submit bids to competing publisher ad servers.

15 months: The outer deadline for implementing the required AdX/DFP integrations with Prebid.

40%+: The share of AdWords impressions that went to traditional display advertising in 2019.

11%: The equivalent share in 2025, illustrating how much the market targeted by the remedies has contracted in relative importance.

What we’ve covered

⁠Google’s ad tech remedies decoded: what changes, what doesn’t, and what will take years

⁠OpenAI’s next ChatGPT ad format: click to chat, not to site

What we’re reading

OpenAI is testing exclusion targeting for ChatGPT ads

Adweek reports that OpenAI is testing additional negative-targeting controls after buyers raised concerns about limited control over where ChatGPT ads appear.

⁠Horizon is bringing Roku’s TV data in-House. Here’s what that means for advertisers

AdExchanger examines Horizon Media’s direct integration of Roku viewing data into its blu. intelligence platform, another example of agencies trying to shorten the distance between media signals and campaign decisions.

Saving time, adding pressure: AI’s double-edged impact on agency staff

VideoWeek examines the less glamorous side of agency automation: AI can compress workflows while simultaneously increasing expectations around the amount and speed of work employees produce.

Google fined €403 million over location data processing

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Google €403 million ($463 million) on Sept. 21 over its processing of users’ location data. The regulator found GDPR infringements involving Google’s Web & App Activity, Location History and Location Accuracy features, including failures relating to lawfulness, fairness, transparency and data retention. Google was also ordered to bring the processing into compliance within six months. The inquiry covered practices between May 2018 and February 2020.