What’s Afoot is our monthly look at what changed across marketing, organized the way our full-service team is: production, digital, web, and everything else. For each update, you’ll get what happened, a link to the source, and what we’d actually do about it.
Starting August 24, YouTube counts a public view the moment a video starts playing. That applies to long-form videos, Shorts, and live streams, according to Social Media Today. Monetization still runs on “engaged views,” which keep the old definition.
So if your channel’s numbers jumped in late August, congratulations on the new math. It doesn’t necessarily mean new fans.
Mark August 24 as a break in your data and switch any month-over-month or year-over-year reporting to engaged views. If you pay creators, ask for engaged views and average view duration in their reports, not just the big public number. The first few seconds now decide whether a play becomes an engaged view, and that’s most of what we cover in creating engaging video content for social media.
In August, TikTok upgraded the AI video generator inside its Symphony ad suite. It can now produce AI video ads up to 30 seconds long from as many as 50 reference images, clips, and audio files, per TikTok for Business. The same month, Snapchat said wholly AI-generated videos are no longer eligible for recommendation on Spotlight, its public video feed.
That’s not a contradiction. Platforms want AI speeding up the work behind the scenes. They’re much less keen on feeds full of content nobody actually made.
Use AI where it saves time, like rough cuts, versioning, resizing, and captions. Keep real people, real places, and your real product in front of the camera, because the human element is exactly what these platforms are starting to reward. Generic creative was a problem long before AI made it free, which is the whole point of cookie-cutter creative marketing. If you’re planning a fall campaign, our video production team can build one shoot that feeds your ads, your site, and your AI tools for months.
Instagram is testing its Bonuses program on photo and carousel posts, not just Reels. For now it’s limited-time and invite-only. That follows Instagram’s spring change to stop recommending photos and carousels from aggregator accounts that mostly repost other people’s work, as TechCrunch reported. And on the video side, Instagram’s new First Draft feature assembles a rough cut of a Reel from the clips you’ve picked.
If your content calendar treats photos as filler between Reels, rebalance it. Original, well-shot stills are now rewarded by the recommendation system, and for invited creators, by actual payouts. If your library is thin, start with how many photos you should get from a shoot. Then talk to us about commercial photography that’s planned to work across your website, ads, and social.
![Fall Campaign Tourism NOTL [Giant Shoe]](https://giantshoecreative.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/1781-FR-Thumb-1280x640-1-1024x512.jpg)
From September 1 to 30, Google is automatically migrating Search campaigns that use campaign-level broad match or automatically created assets to AI Max, reports Search Engine Land. Campaigns with automatically created assets get search term matching and text customization turned on by default. In plain terms, Google can widen which searches trigger your ads and write new versions of your copy. Dynamic Search Ads follow in February 2027, per Google.
Find out which of your campaigns are affected before Google decides for you. Tighten your negative keywords, confirm brand exclusions, and read the search terms report weekly for the first month. Make sure the pages those ads land on actually match the searches you want, since the budget is rarely the real problem. This is the housekeeping our Google Ads management team does every week.
Starting in late September, Google is removing the campaign-level language setting from Search and AI Max for Search campaigns, according to Search Engine Land. Google will decide which ad to show based on the language your ad is written in and what it knows about the person searching. The Search portion of Performance Max changes too.
For Canadian businesses running English and French campaigns, this is the one to watch.
Make sure every ad group and its landing page are clearly one language. No mixed-language headlines, no English sitelinks hiding in your French campaign. Language was always a strategic choice, not just a dropdown, which is why we wrote about how language impacts your ad copywriting.
ChatGPT ads have been rolling out to Canadian users since the spring. In August, OpenAI added conversion-optimized bidding, a multi-product carousel test, and new measurement integrations, as Search Engine Roundtable reported. It also switched on “automatic advanced matching” for existing pixels starting August 17, unless advertisers opted out. That feature uses hashed information from your website forms to connect conversions to ads.
If you’re curious, run ChatGPT Ads as a small, time-boxed test with one clear conversion goal. Fund it from the experimental slice of your budget, not your proven channels, a split we get into in making the most of your 2026 marketing budget. And if you’ve installed OpenAI’s pixel, check whether advanced matching is on and whether your privacy policy explains it. That’s a conversation for you and your lawyer, not a setting to guess at.
LinkedIn added a “Seems like AI slop” option to posts on July 30. More than a million members had used it by August 20, and LinkedIn says members now see about 40% fewer views on content it classifies as slop, according to Engadget. One caveat: LinkedIn launched new detection classifiers the same day, so that drop reflects both. Authors may also see a note in Post Analytics when enough readers flag a post.
Keep using AI to outline, research, and tighten. Don’t let it write your opinions. The posts that perform on LinkedIn sound like a specific person with a specific point of view, which is why employee voices tend to outperform brand pages. If your company page reads like a press release, our social media team can help you find your voice again.
As of August 31, Google’s generative AI performance reports in Search Console are available to all websites worldwide, per Google Search Central. They show impressions from AI Overviews, AI Mode, and AI features in Discover, broken down by page, country, device, and date. They don’t show clicks. Google also rolled out a toggle that lets site owners opt out of those AI features entirely.
Open the report and compare the pages Google uses in AI answers against the pages that actually bring you leads. Don’t flip the opt-out switch without a very good reason. For most businesses, being cited beats being invisible. If your key pages aren’t showing up, why your business isn’t showing up in AI Overviews is the place to start. This is squarely what our SEO team works on.
Google’s August 2026 spam update ran from August 18 to 21, globally and in all languages. It was the third spam update of the year, according to Search Engine Journal. Google didn’t say what it targeted, and as of early September there’s no September core update.
If your traffic dipped in that window, check whether it bounced back before changing anything. If it didn’t, review Google’s spam policies with an honest eye, especially around pages produced at scale. And resist reacting to every blip, because SEO takes time to work in both directions.
When OpenAI moved free users to GPT-5.6 in early August, Peec AI data shared by SEO consultant Lily Ray showed listicles and comparison pages making up a much smaller share of ChatGPT’s citations, with listicle citations roughly cut in half. A lot of “AI visibility” playbooks are built on exactly those formats. But an independent re-run on hotel searches found the opposite, with listicle citations going up.
When two datasets disagree, make the move that works either way: pages on your own site that answer one real question clearly, with first-hand expertise. We covered the bigger picture in how AI chatbots are changing SEO. If you’ve been paying for a pile of “Top 10” pages built only to win AI citations, now’s a good time to ask what else they’re doing for you.
On August 6, Google brought Ask Maps, its Gemini-powered conversational search inside Google Maps, to Canada. Instead of typing “restaurants near me,” people can ask for a quiet patio dinner before a show and get a short list of recommendations. Ask Maps draws on your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your website to decide who makes that list.
Treat your Google Business Profile like a landing page. Fill in every attribute, keep hours and services current, add real photos, and reply to reviews in a way that describes what you actually offer. For Niagara restaurants and bars especially, the details in your profile are now the details Google repeats back to hungry customers. The same goes for hotels and hospitality, where details like “quiet,” “dog-friendly,” and “walkable” are now things people can ask for directly.
Everything in this section is opinion and/or news, not legal advice. If anything legal applies to your business, talk to your lawyer – and we know some of the best lawyers in Niagara if you’re looking for corporate counsel.
Bill C-36 would replace PIPEDA, Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law, with a new Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act. It would also move enforcement to a new Digital Safety and Data Protection Commission, as the IAPP summarizes. The bill was tabled June 15 and Parliament is scheduled to return September 21. You can follow its progress on LEGISinfo.
Nothing changes yet. But marketing runs on personal data, from email lists to pixels to CRM records. If it’s been a while since you looked at how your forms, cookies, and tracking tools handle consent, this is a good year to do it. Our guide to email capture and automation is a useful place to start thinking about what you collect and why.
Looking to donate or raise money this Fall? These two excellent fundraisers are fast approaching, with Walk A Mile In HER Shoes scheduled for October 17, 2026 at the Niagara Pen Centre in St. Catharines and Hope In Every Step scheduled for November 2nd in Burlington.
Of course, the team at Giant Shoe Creative Agency loves everything shoe-related, and we love supporting community initiatives – so hopefully we’ll see you at one of these events this upcoming season!
Ontario businesses and non-profits with 20 or more employees need to file an accessibility compliance report by December 31, 2026, according to the Government of Ontario. Your website is part of the picture, and larger organizations need their sites to meet the WCAG 2.0 Level AA standard.
Don’t wait until December. Run an accessibility audit on your site now, so there’s time to fix what it finds. If the audit turns up a long list, it may be worth asking whether your website needs a full redesign instead of patching it. Our Niagara website design team builds accessibility in from the start.
Looking for help doing an accessibility or SEO audit? This Fall, we’re offering free SEO consultations (including a quick audit and a one-on-one call with an expert). Reach out to us and let’s get your website seen!
Since August 2, the EU AI Act’s transparency rules require AI use to be disclosed in certain situations, including deepfakes and some AI-generated text on matters of public interest, per the European Commission. AI tools that were already on the market have until December 2026 to add machine-readable marking to what they generate.
This only applies directly if you market to people in the EU. If you’re a Niagara winery shipping to Europe or a tourism operator courting European visitors, it’s worth knowing. For everyone else, it’s why you’ll keep seeing more “AI-generated” labels across the platforms you use.
Keep a simple record of where AI touches your published content, especially images and video. It’s good practice in any market, and it makes labelling decisions easy when a platform, a client, or a regulator asks.
On August 13, Instagram changed its wordmark for the first time in a decade, as TechCrunch reported. Within hours, people were reading the stylized “r” as a “z” and joking about “Instagzam” in the comments.
Take the lesson for free. Before you launch a new logo, show it to people outside your company at real sizes, like a phone screen, a lawn sign, and a browser tab, and ask them to read it back to you. If you’re wondering whether it’s time for a refresh of your own, 7 signs your brand needs a facelift is a good gut check.
