Search and display advertising rarely stands still – but occasionally the ground shifts beneath our feet. This August Google quietly announced that it will stop serving political ads in the European Union ahead of October’s Transparency & Targeting of Political Advertising regulation (TTPA). It also rolled out fresh API updates that require advertisers to declare when campaigns contain EU political content. If you manage Google Ads for European audiences, you need to pay attention.

Table of Contents

• Why is Google pulling EU political ads?
• What the API changes mean
• Action steps for advertisers
• FAQs

Why Google is pulling EU political ads

Politics and privacy rules don’t always play nicely with automation. In November 2024 Google said it would stop serving political advertising in the EU before a new regulation takes effect. The company has spent years adding transparency to election ads – advertisers must verify their identity, disclose who paid for the ad and label synthetic media. However the TTPA’s broad definition of “political advertising” and the lack of reliable data to identify local elections make compliance tricky. In short, Google decided it would rather pause these ads than risk breaching the rules.

This doesn’t just affect candidates. Brand advertisers dabbling in issue‑based messaging could find their campaigns swept up by the new rules. If you’re targeting voters in any of the 27 Member States with creative that touches on policy, you may soon be out of luck.

What the API changes mean

On 7 August the Google Ads developer team released version 21 of the Google Ads API. Hidden among the usual performance tweaks was a new contains_eu_political_advertising field for the Campaign object. You must set this field to declare whether your campaign includes EU political content. The options are:

• CONTAINS_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING – declare this and Google will automatically stop your ads serving in the EU from 22 September 2025.
• DOES_NOT_CONTAIN_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING – your campaign isn’t political and will continue to run as normal.
• UNSPECIFIED – leave it blank and you risk errors when modifying targeting or launching new campaigns.

From 3 September 2025 the API and Google Ads scripts will enforce the new field. Attempts to create a campaign without a declaration will fail, and you won’t be able to change location targeting on existing campaigns until they’re updated. Although the field exists in older API versions v19.2 and v20.1, upgrading to v21 is recommended for other reasons. The release also introduces AI Max for Search campaigns, which use machine learning to expand keyword targeting, generate ad creatives and route users to the most relevant landing page.

Action steps for advertisers

Here’s how to stay compliant and competitive:

• Audit your campaigns – Identify any ads that could be interpreted as political. If in doubt, assume a broad definition.
• Set the declaration – Update campaigns via the Google Ads UI or API to specify whether they contain EU political content. Future campaign creation should always include this field to avoid errors.
• Prepare for a blackout – Political campaigns will be automatically paused in EU territories from late September. Plan to shift budgets to issue‑neutral creative or other channels.
• Upgrade your tooling – Even if your ads aren’t political, upgrading to Google Ads API v21 gives you access to AI Max for Search and improved search term views.
• Monitor performance – Changes in ad visibility could affect reach and conversions. Keep a close eye on your metrics and be ready to adjust bids or creative.

FAQs

When will Google stop serving political ads in the EU?
Google has announced it will stop serving political advertising in the European Union ahead of the new transparency and targeting rules taking effect in October 2025. The Google Ads API documentation notes that campaigns flagged as containing EU political advertising will stop serving from 22 September 2025.

Does the new field apply to all campaigns?
Yes. If you create campaigns via the UI, API or scripts, you must declare whether they contain political content. Campaigns without a declaration may still serve, but you won’t be able to modify location targeting until the field is set.

Will my non‑political campaigns be affected?
No. Campaigns marked as non‑political or left unspecified will continue to serve in the EU. However it’s best practice to update all campaigns to avoid future enforcement issues.

What is AI Max for Search?
AI Max for Search is a new setting in Google Ads that uses machine learning to broaden keyword targeting, generate ad creatives and send users to the most relevant landing page. Enabling it could improve reach and conversions, especially as AI‑driven search evolves.

For more on how AI is reshaping search and SEO, read our guide on AI Search & SEO: How to Optimise Your Site for Generative Search.

Search is changing fast. Google’s AI Mode, ChatGPT and other large language models now answer questions directly, often without sending users to any website. This shift means marketers have to adapt their search strategies. In this article we explain how generative search differs from traditional SEO and what you can do to stay visible.

Understanding generative search

Generative search tools respond to queries with conversational answers. Research from Semrush shows that Google’s AI Mode share grew four‑fold in just a few months and now appears in more than one per cent of U.S. searches. These AI sessions are shorter, averaging only two or three queries, and more than 90 % of them end without the user clicking on a link. Traditional SEO tactics alone will not capture this traffic.

AEO versus SEO

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) is about making sure your brand is mentioned in AI‑generated answers. Unlike classic SEO, which focuses on ranking a page in the top ten results, AEO emphasises:

• Crafting clear, question‑based content so AI systems can extract useful passages.
• Building strong brand mentions across the web; AI assistants value a brand’s presence more than exact keyword matches.
• Recognising that AI traffic may be 4.4 times more valuable than conventional organic traffic.

Use llms.txt to guide AI crawlers

A proposed standard called llms.txt lets site owners declare which pages are important for AI to crawl. Adoption is still low — only around nine hundred and fifty domains had created files by mid‑2025 — so adding one could give you an early advantage. Place your llms.txt in your root directory and list the URLs you want AI models to learn from.

How to rank in AI Overviews

Generative search extracts concise snippets rather than scanning entire pages. To improve your chances of being cited:

1. Answer questions directly – Write a 50–60 word paragraph that clearly answers the query. Pages with succinct summaries stand a better chance of being quoted.
2. Use clear headings and bullet lists – Generative models use your heading hierarchy to navigate content, and nearly 80 % of AI Overviews include lists.
3. Add structured data – Implement schema markup to help AI and search engines understand your content.
4. Optimise for mobile and E‑E‑A‑T – Ensure your site loads quickly on phones and demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
5. Build topic clusters and refresh your posts – AI favours up‑to‑date information and will cite pages outside the top ten when they provide a better answer.

Tools to help you adapt

Optimising for AI search does not mean starting from scratch. Consider using:

• Yoast SEO – New AI features generate meta titles and descriptions that align with your keywords while preserving readability. Yoast also adds structured data automatically.
• llms.txt management – Yoast’s updated interface lets you choose which pages to include in your llms.txt file, giving you more control over how AI systems crawl your site.
• Long‑tail keywords – Longer phrases with specific intent are favoured by AI’s query fan‑out technique and face less competition. Using broad match with Smart Bidding can also deliver more conversions at a lower cost.

Final thoughts

Generative search is still evolving, but the principles are clear: answer questions succinctly, structure your content for machines as well as humans and build authority around your brand. By blending SEO best practices with AEO techniques, you can maintain visibility as search becomes more conversational.

Would you carry on employing a salesperson that was slow, ineffective and unkempt?

If a website were a salesperson

They would:

1. be accountable for their sales performance
2. care about their appearance
3. try to help if you asked them for something they didn’t know
4. call in sick if they were absent
5. suggest alternative solutions to try to find the quickest way to do something

They would not:

1. get away with taking 10+ seconds to respond when you interacted with them
2. say “404 – not found” and provide no further assistance
3. lose a new enquiry and have zero records of it every happening
4. bring the whole team down with a virus
5. continue working their hardest if you neglected their needs

Websites are lead generators, just like salespeople

Businesses that rely on their websites to help generate leads should care about their website’s wellbeing and performance – treat them like a member of the sales team; expect there to be a relative cost to keep them churning out solid results.

Help your website reach its potential and it will reward you with sexy results that contribute towards that all-important bottom line.

A website’s not just for Xmas, they need constant care and sometimes they need a website whisperer.

Be good to your website,
Merv – the website whisperer

Being a developer I’m often looking for little ways to improve website performance, such as how fast a website loads and the user’s browsing experience.

There’s a little known trick that helps with the latter, simply by not inheriting the overheads of pages you click through to. Oh, and rel="noopener" like rel="noreferrer" is also a useful measure against cross-site security issues! Note that the rel attribute supports multiple values, so rel="noopener noreferrer" is valid.

Performance issues you probably didn’t know about when opening links in a new tab

Here’s a typical example of how other websites can impact on your user’s experience (UX) on your site:

Your reading a blog post that has links to other pages. You click a link and it opens in a new tab.

This new tab shares processing resources with the page your reading!

Why’s this a problem?

Imagine you’re reading some engaging article that has in-text links to other resources – this is common and very useful (both for reader’s UX and SEO).

You’ve clicked one of the links and it opens a new tab – again, this is good, as you can continue what you’re doing then take a look at the other page afterwards – great for UX and SEO.

You’ve read the new article then switched back to the original tab.

Sound great, but here’s the kicker, it might impact on your site’s performance

That new tab has loaded a page that serves content from a massively ad-ridden news site – many of these sites have in excess of 100 JavaScript-driven trackers!!!

These make your laptop fan go mad, but just as annoyingly, they will potentially slow down your site, too, as they are using the same resources as your current page.

A typical example of this is laggy scrolling, where the page feels slow and heavy when you try to scroll through the content.

The Little Trick using ‘noopener’

To avoid the resource drains of the website in the new tab using the resource allocated to your site’s tab, detach it, by simply using rel=“noopener” on the link.

By detaching the new tab you (and you’re visitors) will continue enjoying the spoils of your blazingly fast site, without inheriting the shortcomings of others’.

Want to improve your website performance?

There are plenty of resources on the web to help you improve your website’s performance, including how you can implement noopener globally for external links,  or feel free to get in touch to discuss further.

Let me give a bit of context to this with a simple back story.

A speaker informing the audience of their Google position

…it’s position X on Google…

I was recently in the company of a speaker who was addressing a fair number of people, informing them of the great services they offer, when they said something that I couldn’t shake. It went something like this,

“Visit our site, it’s X position on Google…“.

I have no idea what they said beyond this point, as all I could think of was, “how could they know that if I, or the other listeners, were to do a Google search we’d see what they saw?”

The answer is simple: They don’t know!

Why can’t they tell me their Google position?

Because Google delivers results based on hundreds of factors, not just by entering a keyword and expecting the entire world to see the same results, in the same position. However, note that longtail keywords are, by design, more unique, thus it is technically possible to predict a partial outcome of search results when a much longer term is entered into the search engine, such as the first paragraph of this post:

“Google search engine’s not bad at delivering pretty darn relevant results. For this reason I strongly suggest you do NOT tell others what they’ll get when they carry out a Google search.”

But for most search results, including company names that are made up of two to three very common words* it really is a risky business expecting the same search results, when so many of the factors will be different – in all fairness, some people may see the same results, but it will likely mean that key indicators are very similar, ie. they are in the same physical location, they’ve used the exact same phrase and the company they are searching for has a unique name (the latter was not the case with the speaker in question). Two typical variables that impact on the results are the searcher’s location and browser settings.

In The Digital is a particularly good case in point, as the first two words are *stop words, meaning they all but overlooked and “Digital” could be referring to pretty much anything that’s related to the modern world.

Want help with SEO?

We invest a lot in understanding the technical and logical aspects of search engine optimisation, so if you’re looking for help with your website’s SEO please get in touch for a free consultation.

We all hate content blockers, like those pesky popups that require a sign up before accessing the rest of the page’s content. And it appears that Google is on the readers’ side.

In an update from Google they stated:

Starting today, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as high…

Why would Google do this? 

Simple. They want their search results to be relevant and useful. So blocking content will, in many cases, cause the visitor to click the back button (bounce) and go to the next result, essentially telling Google the first result was a waste of their time – something Google works extremely hard to rectify.

Why am I telling you this?

1. I came across a site the other day that has a great article (it was shared with me through social), but I couldn’t read it without signing up to the newsletter. This frustrated me, as I felt that the article should either be available or not – not let me load the page, but not be able to read the content!
2. If you are using a modal (popup) to force visitors to accept your cookies, you could be inadvertently compromising your SEO efforts.
3. I’m just a sharing kinda guy.

I’ll get to the bottom of this when I have a free block of time. But, but for now, a really simple way to keep the meta tag away, is to add a filter.

Here’s the basic code. Put this in your theme (or better still, in an admin plugin) and it will stop the meta tag from being added to the head:

/**
 * Prevent Yoast from adding a 'noindex' tag
 */
add_filter( 'wpseo_robots', '__return_false' );

Conditionally apply the Yoast filter

Better still, make it conditional by adding a meta field to each page to state whether the page is to be indexed. Then wrap the filter in a function and call it before the page is built. Here’s an ACF solution:

/**
 * Granular Page Index Control
 *
 * Yoast seems to like to throw up a 'noindex' meta tag. We probably don't want it!!!
 */
function maybe_encourage_search_engines() {
    if (function_exists('acf') and get_field('encourage_search_engines')) {
        add_filter( 'wpseo_robots', '__return_false' );
    }
}

I’m not a fan of adding filters, when there’s clearly a better solution, but this is robust and far better than the website’s pages actively being discouraged from valuable search engine indices.

Are you experiencing problems with search engine indexing?

If you’re experiencing a similar problem or just have a hunch that something like this could be negatively impacting on your website, please get in touch and we’ll gladly help. We’re seasoned developers with years of WordPress experience, developing custom themes and plugins, and helping clients with all manner of performance and search engine optimisations.

If you value your website’s search engine positioning then mobile-friendly websites are no longer a nice-to-have.

This site is delivered over https, using modern encryption methods. We advise you to do the same and get encrypted.

It’s no secret that your bits can be seen by Peeping Toms when you surf the web.

To be more precise, the bits are the streams of data between your device and the source of Internet access. And the Peeping Toms are eavesdroppers that intercept the data streams.

These issues arise because your data is travelling around the internet in a very public way. After all the internet is public. As an example, when you navigate to your favourite site the packets of data from your device jump onto the backbones of the Internet. These packets traverse from line to line, and often across oceans via submarine fibre cables, before finally reaching their destination. Whilst in transit from the server to your device these data can be intercepted and collected. If the page isn’t encrypted, they can be read by eavesdroppers.

Why does encryption matter?

Now, imagine a situation where you are submitting some login details. If the connection is not secure these credentials are exposed to all kinds of risks. But, if the data is encrypted, you are in much safer hands when exposing your confidential information to the very public Internet. It’s worth noting that encrypted data can still be read by eavesdroppers. But, with modern encryption methods, they will be extremely hard to decrypt, often taking billions of years!

This is just one of the many risks your data has to deal with when you are connected to the Internet. There are many others, including cross-site script injection.

But here’s the good news: Your website can be encrypted, too.

And your website should be. Data encryption should be in place as the standard, not as an additional line of defence.

In recent years Google has switched its search engine to https. This may be to hide the search results from competitors, who were allegedly acquiring Google’s search traffic by working with Internet service providers! And more recently Bing and Yahoo have also switched to https. In addition, Google has recommended everyone encrypt their data. They have even gone as far as saying websites using https will get better positions in search engine ranking pages (SERPS). As an aside, Google also says it gives mobile-friendly websites higher mobile SERPS.

If you’re not sure if your website’s encrypted, please feel free to get in touch and we’ll gladly discuss getting your website encrypted, and the options available.

If you liked this, you may find these external posts of interest?

Telegraph: David Cameron says spies should be able to monitor traffic

Forbes: Injecting tracking headers into unencrypted traffic to sell data