This week’s news: in October 2026, OpenAI, Meta and Google changed three things that affect a small business owner’s money. ChatGPT ads are now open to Ukrainian companies, Meta decides on its own where most campaigns are shown, and Performance Max in Google Ads pulls images and videos from your website and social media by itself. For each item we give the date and the source. We checked the facts on October 26, 2026; where an official page would not open, we say where the content comes from.
1. ChatGPT: ads are now available in Ukraine (October 21)
On October 21, OpenAI announced that ChatGPT ads are available in 26 more countries, Ukraine among them. That makes 89 countries in total. OpenAI’s announcement would not open from our server, so we checked the content against three independent reports: Reuters, the industry outlet PPC Land and the Ukrainian blog Netpeak (all from October 21–22). They agree on the following:
- ads are shown to people on the free plan and the Go plan; there are no ads on Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise or Edu;
- you can launch ads yourself in ChatGPT Ads Manager (ads.openai.com) or through OpenAI’s technology partners;
- the ad sits apart from the answer and is labeled as an ad. According to OpenAI, ads do not influence ChatGPT’s answers, and user conversations are not shared with advertisers.
What is missing. OpenAI has not published a minimum budget, currency or payment method for Ukrainian companies, nor any prices or results for Ukraine. So if someone quotes you a “standard ChatGPT click price for Ukraine”, ask where the number comes from.
AI rewrites your ads by itself. Here OpenAI’s own sources disagree on the date. OpenAI’s help article on creative enhancements (automatic ad improvements) says that starting Thursday, October 29, 2026, the feature will be enabled automatically for new and existing campaigns. The email to advertisers, quoted by Search Engine Roundtable on October 20, says Friday, October 30, and refers to self-serve campaigns. The substance is the same: OpenAI’s AI can write new headlines and descriptions, translate them into other languages, resize images and change the page the ad leads to. Variations may be prepared in advance or created in real time during a user’s conversation with ChatGPT. You do not review or approve each version. You can opt out before the start date or change the setting at any time later in Ads Manager; a campaign’s own setting takes priority over the account default.
What it means for you. A new channel is usually more expensive and less predictable until many businesses start using it. If your customers ask ChatGPT “where to order” or “what to choose”, advertising there may make sense. But with no prices and no measurements of your own, it is an experiment, not “a channel that will definitely work”.
From descriptions of the ad account that practitioners published in 2026 after the US launch, three more things are worth knowing:
- tracking tags are not added automatically: there is no auto-tagging with UTM parameters (additions to a link that tell analytics where a visitor came from), so you have to add them to the ad’s URL by hand;
- the account sees leads only with a pixel or server-side data transfer connected; without it you get only impressions, clicks and spend;
- the account should be yours: the “business or individual” choice cannot be changed later, so it is better to create the account yourself and add your contractor to the team, not the other way round.
What to check: already running ads in ChatGPT, or a contractor suggesting it? Open the settings in ChatGPT Ads Manager, find Creative enhancements and decide whether to keep automatic rewriting. If your ad mentions a price, a warranty or promotion terms, check how the AI might rewrite them before October 29.
2. Meta: you can no longer choose “Instagram only” (October 12–13)
Meta updated its help page on placements in Ads Manager. The page itself has no date, and its text cannot be read from our server, so we take the content from two independent reports: Social Media Today (October 12, 2026) and Relevant Audience (October 13, 2026).
What changed. In campaigns with the Sales, Leads, Engagement and App promotion objectives, placements (the Facebook feed, Instagram, Stories, Reels, Audience Network and others) can no longer be chosen manually at the ad set level. Meta distributes the ads between them by itself. Awareness and Traffic keep manual placement choice for now, but the outlets expect it to go there too eventually. The rollout is gradual: your account may still have the old option.
What Meta offers instead:
- separate images and videos for different placements: up to 10 files in one ad, each with its own format, text and link;
- placement value rules: raise or lower bids for placements that bring you more or less money;
- account-level exclusions for some placements: according to Relevant Audience, these cover Audience Network (ads in third-party apps and websites), Facebook Marketplace and the Facebook right column. A Ukrainian marketing channel wrote the same on October 18: only a few placement types can be excluded.
Where the claims differ. Meta says automatic placements usually deliver a lower cost per result and cites its own experiment. The figures differ between reports: 10% in some, 11.7% in others. Meta gives no details of the experiment (which objectives, countries or how many campaigns), and there is no independent check. So we do not promise your cost per lead will drop: this is an average based on Meta’s own data.
What it means for you. If your ads used to run only on Instagram, because that is where your audience is or because a square image looks good there, part of the budget may now go to Facebook, Reels or Audience Network. Two typical traps from our experience:
- junk leads from Audience Network. These are ads on third-party websites and apps; lead campaigns often get bot-filled forms from there. Account-level exclusion is still available, and for lead generation it is worth setting;
- an image in the wrong format. A square feed image gets cropped or looks small in Stories and Reels. Add a vertical 9:16 version to the same ad, so each placement gets its own size.
What to check: in your Ads Manager report, turn on the breakdown by placement and see where the budget went and where the leads came from. Compare the cost per lead for the two weeks before the change and after it. Check whether your ads have vertical images and videos. If leads from some placement never turn into sales, an account-level exclusion (where available) or a lower bid via value rules are your tools.
We wrote about telling real leads from junk in our article spam leads from ads: how to filter them out.
3. Google Ads: Performance Max takes photos and videos from your website and social media
Performance Max is a Google Ads campaign type where Google itself decides what to show and where: in Search, on YouTube, on partner websites, in Maps and in Gmail. Now it also collects images and videos for your ads by itself.
Images from your website — from December 4. On October 21, 2026, Google published a post on the Google Ads Developer Blog about changes starting December 4, 2026. The body of the post cannot be read from our server, so the details come from PPC Land’s report the same day. In new Performance Max campaigns created from December 4, Google will by default take images from your pages (the ones your ads lead to), even if account-level dynamic images are turned off. This applies to the regular interface, Google Ads Editor and the API. Existing campaigns keep their current settings. Neither Google nor the outlets explain yet how to turn this off in a new campaign through the regular interface, and the post does not make clear what happens to a campaign created on December 4 itself.
There is an old contradiction here too. For years practitioners wrote different things: some said dynamic images can only be turned off for the whole account, others that it is a setting in each campaign. Now Google itself says that for new campaigns the account switch no longer decides anything, so you have to check every campaign.
Videos — already now. Google’s help article “About sourced videos in Performance Max campaigns” describes the feature: Google AI looks for videos in your sources (social media, your campaign’s landing page and your linked YouTube channel) and automatically adds up to 10 of them to an asset group. According to Search Engine Roundtable (October 23, 2026), the help article says sourced videos are enabled by default for all new campaigns and may have been activated automatically on some existing ones. Google will use a video only if its source is approved in your account; the list of sources is changed with the “Manage sources” button.
What it means for you. Your ads may end up with an old banner for a promotion that ended long ago, a stock photo, a video with a stranger’s face from your reviews page or an Instagram clip filmed “just for friends”. Automatic assets are not bad in themselves, but you should know exactly what is being shown in your name. Two things from our knowledge base:
- automation switches itself back on. In 2026, practitioners reported that manually disabled auto-videos and automatic image enhancements were found switched on again a month later, with no action from the account owner. So this is not a one-off check but a monthly one;
- your website becomes an ad source. Remove outdated banners, past promotions and random stock photos from the pages your ads lead to, and upload your key images to the campaign yourself.
What to check: Google Ads → Campaigns → the gear icon next to your Performance Max campaign → the Asset optimization dropdown: is the Sourced videos box checked? If you do not need it, clear it and select Apply. Then open the Assets list for that campaign and see which photos and videos Google added by itself: are there old promotions or strangers’ faces? If you are planning a new Performance Max campaign for December, agree with your contractor who will check its images after launch, and when.
How we work with these campaigns is described in our Performance Max section. Other settings Google turns on without your say-so are covered in what Google Ads turns on by itself.
What we left out and why
- “New customer value multipliers are out of beta”. Industry outlets wrote about it, but we found neither a Google page nor a second independent source with the same figures and date.
- The follow-up on Meta’s terms from October 30. One outlet says the clause about training AI on business websites was removed; another saw it still in place. We covered this topic in this week’s news for October 20, and we will not repeat it without Meta’s official text.
- ChatGPT removed UTM tags from links. There are reports, but no official confirmation from OpenAI.
Summary
What changed: since October 21, Ukrainian companies can advertise in ChatGPT too, and from October 29–30 OpenAI’s AI rewrites ads by default; Meta no longer lets you choose placements manually in campaigns for sales, leads, engagement and apps; Performance Max already adds videos from your sources, and from December 4 new campaigns will also take images from your website. All three stories have one thing in common: there is more automation, and you need to check more often what it does in your name.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request — we will look at your account, your Performance Max campaigns and their automatic assets, and tell you which of these changes affects you.