Over the last few months, a clear pattern has emerged in the consulting work landing on our desk at Agent 6: businesses coming to us after rebuilding their website with an AI tool, only to watch their traffic and leads collapse in the weeks that followed.
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.
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.
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.