Google slipped a line into an announcement this week that sounds minor but isn't: ads in AI Mode are coming to the UK before the end of the year. If you sell online here, that's the story to pay attention to, because it changes where your products appear and how shoppers find them.
It's not the only news worth knowing about. A security incident should make every shop owner check the scripts running on their site, and Microsoft is giving website owners more say over how AI uses their content. Amazon has also shown that even the biggest ad platform in retail is still at the mercy of timing. Let's get into it.
Google Ads in AI Mode Are Coming to the UK
AI Mode is Google's chat-style search. You ask a question and get a written answer instead of ten blue links. Google is now expanding AI Mode ads to ten new countries, including Australia, Canada, India and Singapore. More importantly for UK businesses, Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom are planned for Q4 2026.
Two numbers stand out. AI Mode queries are about three times longer than traditional searches. And sponsored product listings in AI Mode already get click-through rates similar to the organic ones. Shoppers aren't skipping the ads.
So what does that mean for your shop? Think about how people search in AI Mode. They don't type "men's running shoes". They ask "what running shoes suit someone with flat feet who runs trails three times a week?" Google's AI has to work out which of your products answers that question, and it mostly relies on your product feed and your website.
Thin product titles, descriptions copied from the manufacturer and half-empty feed attributes give the AI very little to match. Detailed product data has always mattered for Shopping campaigns. In AI Mode, it's the difference between being recommended and being invisible.
Google is also launching "multiturn" ads in the US. These can appear in follow-up questions as the conversation goes on. So the direction is clear: ads will run all the way through a shopping conversation, not just at the start. This is something I'm paying close attention to as the UK rollout arrives in the middle of Christmas trading.
Microsoft Bing Lets You Choose How AI Uses Your Content
Microsoft announced new Bing controls with separate settings for training and grounding. Training decides whether your content can be used to teach AI models. Grounding decides whether it can be used to build AI answers, like the ones in Copilot. A "limited grounding" option allows Microsoft's own AI products to use your content but not its third-party services.
Microsoft says your normal Bing rankings won't be affected by what you choose. Bing starts honouring the new preferences from 1 February 2027. Sites still using the older directives have until 1 March 2027 to switch over.
For most retailers, I'd be cautious about blocking grounding. Grounding is what lets an AI assistant recommend a product from your store. Block it and you may disappear from those answers. If you're uneasy about AI companies using your content, a sensible middle ground is to block training but allow grounding. Talk to whoever manages your site before February.
A Security Scare Every Shop Owner Should Learn From
Attackers hijacked the DNS records of DebugBear, a website performance monitoring tool, through its domain registrar. They used that access to serve malicious JavaScript through DebugBear's monitoring script. On 29 October 2026 the company told customers to remove the script immediately. One affected platform confirmed that funds were moved from some users' wallets. The worrying part is that the script didn't need anyone's password, because it used the access of visitors who were already logged in.
Never heard of DebugBear? It still matters to you. Your site almost certainly runs plenty of third-party scripts: analytics, ad pixels, review widgets, chat tools. Each one lets someone else's code run on your site, and you're trusting that company to keep it secure.
- List every script in your tag manager and find out what any you don't recognise actually does.
- Remove old tracking pixels left over from trials you abandoned long ago.
- Be especially strict about what loads on checkout and account pages.
Good tracking matters for advertising. Tracking you don't need is just risk.
Amazon Ads Growth Slows, But Mostly Down to Timing
Amazon's ad revenue hit $19.6 billion in Q3, up 12% year on year. That's down from 26% growth the quarter before. Timing explains most of the drop. Prime Day moved from July to June, which pulled spend into the earlier quarter, and Prime Video's NBA coverage doesn't run in Q3. Amazon expects growth in the high teens for Q4.
More telling: Andy Jassy said outside AI shopping agents aren't meaningfully affecting Amazon Ads, and Amazon blocked Meta's shopping agent from its marketplace in September. The big platforms are clearly working to keep shoppers, and ad revenue, inside their own walls. That makes your own website, and how it appears in Google's and Bing's AI experiences, even more valuable as a channel you control.
Making the Case for AI Visibility Before the Numbers Catch Up
Kevin Indig has released a pitch deck to help marketing leaders make the budget case for AI search visibility before attribution catches up. It came from repeated requests on his autumn speaking circuit, from people trying to justify the spend while measurement is still shaky.
That's the honest position. Tracking sales that started with someone asking Copilot or AI Mode for a recommendation is genuinely difficult right now. But over twenty-five years in paid search, I've seen the businesses that moved early on Shopping campaigns, mobile and video generally do better than those who waited for perfect data.
For a smaller online shop, this doesn't mean a big new budget. It means getting the basics right: rich product data, helpful product pages, genuine reviews, and letting AI tools read your site. Most of that helps your Google Ads too.
What I'm Watching
The thread running through this week is clear. AI is changing where customers find products, and what happens behind the scenes of your site matters more than ever. That covers the data you feed these platforms as well as the scripts you allow to run on your pages.
Over the next couple of months, I'll be watching for the exact date AI Mode ads go live in the UK and how they sit alongside Shopping campaigns during peak trading. If your product feed hasn't had attention for a while, start there. It's not glamorous, but it's the work that counts.