Thursday, February 26

🌟 Today’s Highlights:

• Google is changing budget pacing for campaigns with ad scheduling

• Adobe’s Firefly AI can automatically create a first draft from footage

• Don't hijack your own success by running staged ads

• 📊 Stat of the Day: The share of Gen Z who say they’re more likely to rely on TikTok than Google fell from 8% in 2024 to 4% in 2026. (Source: Adobe Express)

• 💡 Today’s Insight: New Research: How Google Discover qualifies, ranks, and filters content

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⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

💰 Google is changing budget pacing for campaigns using ad scheduling. The new rollout could increase monthly spend for ad-scheduled campaigns by pushing budgets harder within allowed run times.

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🎬 Adobe's Firefly video editor can automatically create a first draft from footage. The new Quick Cut feature uses AI to edit footage and B-roll to create a first draft of the final video based on user instructions.

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💬 ChatGPT’s ad rollout will be iterative. According to OpenAI’s COO, the new ads will be gradual and privacy-focused to test monetization without compromising user trust.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

New Research: How Google Discover qualifies, ranks, and filters content

🗞 TL;DR - New SDK-level research was just published showing why some pages never reach ranking, how pCTR predicts clicks, and why images and recency drive Google Discover traffic. The research shows that Discover runs on a structured, multi-stage pipeline with hard publisher blocks, strict image requirements, freshness decay, and heavy experimentation.

💡 Insight - How Google Discover works, according to the new research:

• It’s a nine-stage process. Content is crawled, key tags are read, the page is classified (e.g., news vs evergreen), eligibility is checked, interest matching and a server-side predicted click-through rate (pCTR) model are applied, then the feed is built and delivered.

• Eligibility matters first. Before ranking, a publisher-level block or user dismissal will completely prevent your content from appearing — one “Don’t show from this site” action stops all your content.

• Freshness & images matter too. Recency heavily influences visibility (strongest in the first week) and high-quality large images (≥1200px) are critical for prominent placements; missing image tags can prevent cards from qualifying.

• Personalization and engagement signals layer. User interests, past behavior, follows/saves, and time-spent reading all help tailor the feed, and dismissals of a specific URL are persistently stored so that content won’t reappear.

• Experimentation is rampant. The Discover system runs many experiments concurrently, meaning visibility can vary widely across users and sessions.

So, how can you make the most of this knowledge? By understanding that eligibility, recency, engagement, and visuals drive success in Google Discover and prioritizing these tenets in addition to SEO basics.

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