Ogilvy & Mather had a problem: sales of square Shredded Wheat cereal had gone flat. Nobody wanted to eat the same cereal a different way, and changing the recipe wasn’t really an option – it’s shredded wheat, there’s only so much you can do.
It Was About Display/Programmatic Advertising
The remedies outlined by the court are about the display/programmatic side of Google’s business, not Search. When someone searches on google.com.au and you’re bidding on keywords, that ad slot is decided in Google’s own closed auction – it never touches AdX. But when your Display, Discovery, or App campaigns show an ad on someone else’s website (a news site, a blog, whatever), that impression gets sold through the exact pipeline the ruling is about.
Google got sued for manipulating PPC prices (sort of)
In January 2023, the DOJ (the US Government’s Department of Justice) and a group of states sued Google over its control of the plumbing that sits between advertisers and publishers, ie, the ad server, the exchange, the auction. In April 2025, a US federal judge ruled Google had illegally monopolised key parts of that tech stack. On 2 September 2026, a week ago, the same judge ruled on remedies.
Can Google Actually “See” AI Content? Here’s What We Know
AI was never the target. The target is what happens when someone uses AI to publish 400 near-identical pages instead of one good one. Thin content, near-duplicate structure, pages that technically answer a query but say nothing that the ten pages linked to it didn’t already say, that’s what is going to get punished. The AI is just the tool that made doing this at scale so easy and quick.