AI Is Starting to Rewrite Your Ad Copy for You — ChatGPT Ads Go "On by Default" This Week, Meta's Terms Slip to November 20, and 88% of Commercial Searches Show an AI Summary

In the last week of October, the "defaults" in your ad accounts change. OpenAI is turning on, by default for every campaign, a feature that lets AI automatically change the copy, images, and destination URL of ChatGPT Ads, while Meta prepared new terms placing responsibility for AI-altered ads on the advertiser and then pushed enforcement back to November 20. The same week, a Semrush study found that Google AI summaries appear for 88% of commercial search terms. We sort out what is confirmed fact in these three stories and which settings small advertisers should open up this week.

This article was written with AI (Claude) and reviewed by an editor. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, competes with OpenAI, Google, and Meta, all of which appear in this article, and our company uses Claude in its work, so we have an interest to disclose. Figures announced by a company are marked as "announced by the company," and figures from a research firm are marked as "announced by the research firm." This is not an investment opinion on any company, nor a recommendation to buy or not buy any particular ad product.

If you are a small team running your own ads, this week gives you a reason to open your ad account settings screen at least once. There are three pieces of news, and they share one thing in common: more things are "on even though you never turned them on." In ChatGPT Ads, a feature that lets AI change copy and destination URLs is being turned on by default for every campaign; Meta is preparing terms that place the results of AI-altered ads on the advertiser; and Google Search fills the first screen with an AI summary for most commercial search terms. Even teams that do not run ads are affected by two of the three (Meta's crawling clause and AI summaries).

1. ChatGPT Ads — the feature that lets AI change copy, images, and destination URLs becomes "on by default" (fact)

On October 20, OpenAI emailed advertisers to say it would automatically turn on "creative enhancements" for new and existing self-serve campaigns (reported by Search Engine Roundtable, which obtained the original email). According to OpenAI's help document, the feature uses the advertiser's existing ads and landing page content to (1) write new or revise headlines and description copy, (2) translate into other languages, (3) resize images to fit ad formats, and (4) change the destination URL to a "better-matching page" within the site. Variations are either generated in advance or created in real time to match the conversation where the ad appears, and there is no step in which the advertiser previews and approves each variation. The help document states that it "does not provide previews of every variation."

There is a way to turn it off. In Ads Manager settings, you can disable it at the account level or the campaign level; settings you have already disabled are preserved, and campaign settings take precedence over the account default. The help document also repeated the principle that ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers and are displayed separately from them.

The effective date differs slightly by source. The email said Friday, October 30, and the date shown in OpenAI's help document appears to have changed since then (PPC Land reported that it read the 29th on October 21, and when we opened it on October 25 it showed yet another date). So in this article we write "around October 30" and recommend checking before October 29. The email said "self-serve campaigns," but the help document does not carry that qualifier, and OpenAI has not said whether ads contracted through a sales representative are also included (PPC Land).

2. Meta — terms placing responsibility for AI-altered ads on the advertiser, now effective November 20 (fact)

On October 22, Adweek reported that Meta's revised Commercial Terms include a new section called "AI Features" (we confirmed this through the content quoted by PPC Land; we could not open the original Adweek article or Meta's original terms page ourselves). According to the report, the section states that the advertiser is "solely responsible" for changes Meta's AI features make to ads, and this includes features Meta turned on itself. Under the previous terms, advertisers were responsible only when they had chosen to use Meta's AI creative tools themselves; Adweek's reading is that the new language drops that condition. Meta explained that this revision consolidates previously scattered generative-AI-related terms into the main terms and does not change the rules themselves, and a spokesperson said each Advantage+ feature can be turned off individually in Ads Manager.

Cases from the field were reported alongside. The ad agency Exverus said that in campaigns where it had not turned the features on, sitelinks were added, copy was translated, and images and carousels generated from photos were applied, so it pulled running ads to fix them; the online bookstore Bookshop.org said that during an account update, generative AI features were turned on and illustrations were added to its ads, after which it turned off all of Meta's AI ad features. Agencies said the opt-out options are scattered inside collapsed menus and have to be turned off one by one.

The same terms also include a crawling (collection) clause. It says Meta (or a party acting on its behalf) may access, index, and crawl websites connected to the products and services of businesses that use Meta ads, Facebook Pages, or Instagram business accounts, and may create test accounts to access those sites (PPC Land, TNW). The phrase "train (AI)" in the original wording was changed after pushback to "development, improvement, research, and maintenance of ads and business products," but publishers believe room for AI training remains. The News/Media Alliance, a US publishers' group, sent a letter demanding the terms be withdrawn; TNW reported that European publishers asked EU and UK competition authorities to halt enforcement; and MLex reported that the UK competition authority asked Meta for an explanation.

Then, on October 23, Meta pushed the effective date from October 30 to November 20. In a statement to Reuters, a Meta spokesperson said it was "to allow more time to explain to partners and stakeholders what is changing and what is not" (Reuters, TNW, PPC Land). There was no promise to revise the wording, and PPC Land reported that several hours after the announcement, Meta's UK English terms preview page still read "effective October 30." In other words, as of October 25, the situation is that three weeks have been gained, but the clauses are unchanged.

3. AI summaries appear for 88% of Google commercial search terms — but the number counts "appearances" only (fact)

On October 21, the search tool company Semrush released a study that tracked 400 commercial search terms in US desktop search every month for one year (September 2025 to August 2026). It covered three industries (banking, software, e-commerce) and five modifiers: "alternatives," "best X for Y," "pricing," "reviews," and "brand vs. brand." The share of search terms showing AI Overviews rose from 45.75% to 88%, and 97.08% when weighted by search volume (announced by the research firm). E-commerce rose the most of any industry, from 32.62% to 85.11%, and terms with "reviews" showed the largest increase, from 30.14% to nearly 90%.

Two caveats are needed when reading these numbers. First, the study only counted whether an AI summary "appears" and has no click or visit data. Second, the sample is small (400 search terms, 3 industries, US desktop), and Semrush is a company that sells the remedy the findings point to (search optimization tools), a point PPC Land raised. PPC Land also presented separate small studies finding that AI traffic is very small compared with Google search traffic, but their samples were in the range of dozens to 100 sites, so we have not carried those figures in this article.

Reading the three stories together (interpretation)

What the three stories share is a direction in which defaults leave the hands of advertisers and site operators. Ad creative gets rewritten by AI even if you did not turn it on (OpenAI: on by default; Meta: agencies reported it being applied without them turning it on), responsibility falls on the advertiser who never previewed the result (the Meta terms report), and the first screen of search is filled with an AI summary instead of our page. From the platforms' side, there is a logic of "automatically generate more variations to improve performance," and performance probably does improve in some cases. But for a small team, the issue is not performance but control. If a translated line changes meaning, if the destination URL switches to a different page, if an auto-generated image clashes with the brand, the advertiser has never seen that variation beforehand.

In particular, for teams like ours that handle a product whose principle is not to use words like "safe" (the principle of the ingredient-label app we wrote about in NO.3), automatic variations carry one more risk: generating prohibited expressions. A definitive phrase that was not in the advertiser's original copy could be generated as a "better-matching headline," and the responsibility sits with the advertiser. This risk is not mentioned separately in either OpenAI's or Meta's documents; it is an interpretation we added after reading both.

Meta's crawling clause applies to teams that do not run ads, too. Simply using a Facebook Page or an Instagram business account makes you a "business tools user," and the website connected to that account becomes a crawling target. It is safer to view the time until November 20 not as time for the clause to change but as time for us to decide.

If it were us — three settings to open this week (practice)

Our PR operates on the principle of spending no money on ads, so ChatGPT Ads and Meta ads are not something we run but something we "observe." Even so, half of items 1 and 2 below apply to us, and all of it applies to readers who run ads.

Build a "default settings checklist" for your ad accounts, and keep screenshots. If you use ChatGPT Ads, check before October 29 how creative enhancements is set at the account level in Ads Manager settings, and, remembering that campaign-level settings override the account default, check each campaign once. If you use Meta ads, open each Advantage+ creative enhancement item (translation, sitelinks, image expansion, carousel generation, and so on) at the ad level and confirm whether it is on or off. Either way, the key is to record the date you checked and keep a screen capture. If the terms say "advertiser solely responsible," then our record of what we turned off and what we turned on is the only defense we have. If you decide to leave it on, assign a person and a cadence for periodically checking "which variations were produced" in the ad reports.
Keep a list of prohibited expressions on both the ad copy and the landing page. Automatic variations use the original ad copy and landing page content as their raw material. So words we have decided not to use, like "safe," "harmless," "100%," and "lowest price," should be removed not only from ad copy but also from landing pages. Words that are not in the material are less likely to appear in variations (this inference comes from the OpenAI help document's description of "based on existing ads and landing page content"; nowhere is there a guarantee that variations will never produce words outside the material). This item applies to us as well, even though we do not run ads, because our product pages are the raw material for AI summaries and AI answers.
Decide on Meta's crawling clause before November 20, and record AI summaries monthly. First, check what is currently written in your site's robots.txt. Meta has said you can express your intent through robots.txt (TNW), but the terms do not mention robots.txt, and there is a point (PPC Land) that a single Meta crawler token is used for both indexing and AI purposes, so first check whether blocking the crawler affects features like link previews before deciding. AI summaries cannot be blocked, so record the impressions and clicks of our key pages in Google Search Console monthly, and starting with pages where "impressions are flat but clicks are down," strengthen the sentences that directly answer the question (what it does, what it does not do, sources). This is a direct continuation of check item 3 in NO.27.

What we did not pick this time

PPC Land's IAB Europe survey (86% of marketers use AI, 48% have rules for ads), a report that Meta will turn on "product browsing" by default for existing ads on October 28, and Netflix lowering its ad revenue target were not included because they had a single source or we could not confirm the original text. Microsoft's proposal from the same week to "treat AI agents as untrusted insiders" and the report on OpenAI lifting oversight of its coding agent are worth covering separately and have been held for a future article.

What we could not confirm in this news

ChatGPT Ads: Because the effective date shown in OpenAI's help document differs by source and timing (10/29, 10/30, and a later notation), we could not confirm the exact date. We could not confirm whether it also applies to ads placed through a sales representative, or whether there is a report that separates the performance of each variation from the original.
Meta terms: We could not find anywhere the full text of the "AI Features" section is published, and the original Adweek article and Meta's original terms page would not open on our end, so we confirmed through PPC Land, TNW, and Reuters reports. The reports did not include a direct answer from Meta on whether advertisers are responsible even for features Meta turned on themselves. We do not know whether the wording will change when enforcement begins on November 20.
Semrush study: There is no click or visit data, and Korean search results were not part of the study. We could not confirm what share of Korean-language commercial search terms show an AI summary.

Read alongside

We opened and checked sources of different kinds directly. Company official documents, research firm primary data, and wire service and media reports are listed separately.

Company official documents:

help.openai.comCreative enhancements for ChatGPT Ads (OpenAI Help Center)English, company help document (feature scope, how to disable, no previews)

Research primary data:

semrush.comAI Overviews have nearly doubled across five commercial search modifiers [Study] (Semrush)English, research firm primary data (has an interest as a seller of search tools)

Wire service and media reports: