Google has rewritten its Ads terms for the Ai era. The interesting bit isn’t what Google can automate, but who’s responsible when it does.
It’s not often we’d recommend spending time reading Google’s terms of service, but this update to the Google Ads terms is worth noting. Apparently it’s the first substantial rewrite for around eight years. In summary, as we’re now inviting Google Ads to look at our website and use Ai to help construct our advertising, the legal framework has finally caught up with what the technology is doing.
But there’s another part which may be more important.
Google reinforces the advertiser’s responsibility to ensure that we have the rights to whatever information we’re feeding into the system. More significantly, we’re still responsible for reviewing, approving or removing campaigns and advertising assets generated automatically by Google Ads. In other words, if Google creates an advert which makes an inaccurate claim about our product, that’s our problem. If it chooses a landing page which isn’t appropriate, that’s our problem. If some automatically generated wording causes a regulatory issue, that’s our problem too.
The more capable the automation becomes, the easier it is psychologically to transfer responsibility along with the work. “Google wrote it” starts to feel like an explanation. Contractually, it isn’t much of one.
This matters particularly for B2B advertisers. We should certainly use these tools. If Google’s Ai can save time, that’s valuable. But perhaps every increase in automation should come with a corresponding improvement in our checking procedures.