This week, the platforms' own AI started eating the business that pays for it. Google told investors AI is driving its best query growth in five years, then its ad chief listed AI Mode among the reasons search ads slowed. Amazon's ad growth fell from 26% to 11%, and Amazon blamed the calendar. Reddit grew ads 54% while Google sent it a million fewer visits a week, so Reddit is locking the front door. DoorDash agreed to buy Instacart for $17 billion, roughly a third of what Instacart was worth in 2021. FreeWheel, the plumbing of premium video, is moving in with NBCU. And ID5 says nothing on a device can block a server, while Apple is writing code to grow its list without an update.

The pattern this week: every platform had a number for its growth and a story for its slowdown. Nobody had a number for who is paying for the AI. ADOTAT+ members get the AI Mode ledger in the File.

Alphabet booked $127.6 billion in the third quarter, up 25%, and Sundar Pichai told investors the company now runs at a half-trillion-dollar revenue rate. Search and other ads grew 12% to $63.35 billion. YouTube ads grew 9.2% to $11.21 billion. Google Network, the line that pays publishers, grew 1.4%. Pichai said AI is pushing overall query growth, commercial queries included, to its fastest pace in five years.

Then JPMorgan's Doug Anmuth read the trend line out loud: search ad growth went from 19% in the first quarter to 17% in the second to 12% in the third. Was Google showing fewer ads in AI search? Chief business officer Philipp Schindler called foreign exchange the single largest driver of the slowdown, pointed to retail and to a World Cup-inflated second quarter, and then conceded that strong growth in AI Mode queries "had an impact" because AI Mode monetizes less. Shares fell hard after hours. The next day Google confirmed it is testing sponsored products blended into AI Mode's shopping results. More queries, fewer ads per query, and the fix is more ads per answer. And if you were going to ask your Google rep for an opt-out, Google's own Ads Help page already answers for AI Overviews: no opt-out, no way to target the placement, and no segmented reporting. ADOTAT+ members get the full ledger in the File.

Amazon's advertising revenue rose 10.9% to $19.64 billion in the third quarter, after growing 26% in the second. By PPC Land's arithmetic, the line actually fell $172 million from Q2, in a quarter when Amazon kept adding sports rights, agentic tools and new formats. Amazon's explanation was "timing anomalies primarily related to Prime Day (and a couple other timing factors)." Prime Day moved into June in most big markets, and Andy Jassy also pointed to a third quarter with no NBA games. Amazon guided fourth-quarter ad growth to the high teens, below the 22% it posted a year earlier.

The calendar is real. So is the asterisk: Amazon gave the slowdown an explanation and did not give the growth an adjusted number. Put the second and third quarters together and growth was about 18%, by PPC Land's math, slower than the 22% Amazon booked in the fourth quarter of 2025. Jassy also told analysts that AI shopping agents are not hurting the ad business, because few customers shop that way yet. "Yet" is doing a lot of work in a business built on sponsored products that humans scroll past. Ask your Amazon team for Q2 and Q3 sponsored products growth on your own account, combined, before you lock 2027 budgets.

Reddit's ad revenue rose 54% to $847 million, and revenue per U.S. user rose 53%. Then came the warning in the shareholder letter: search referrals fell by more than 1 million a week in October, and daily uniques could fall by a low-double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter. U.S. daily uniques already slipped to 50.7 million. Steve Huffman did not hedge about where the traffic went: "AI Mode does not drive traffic, not for us and not for anybody." Google, he added, is crawling Reddit as hard as ever. It just stopped sending the people.

Reddit's answer is to lock the front door. It will test a logged-in-only Reddit in select markets outside the U.S., with logins as the norm after two decades of open browsing. In the second quarter, 77.7 million of Reddit's 130.3 million daily uniques were logged out, nearly 60%. Logged-in users already drive more than 80% of monetization, so the math works for Reddit. Fewer visitors, paying more, behind a wall Google can't walk through. If you buy Reddit for reach, ask what your reach looks like once six in ten visitors hit a login screen.

DoorDash agreed to buy Instacart for $65 a share, about $17 billion, a 26% premium to its October 22 close. In 2021, when DoorDash first looked, Instacart was valued between $40 billion and $50 billion. What DoorDash gets in the box is a grocery ad business: Instacart's advertising and other revenue rose 23% to $331 million last quarter, about 30% of its revenue. DoorDash, which already runs a billion-dollar ad business, didn't break out its own ad number. The deal isn't expected to close until the end of 2027 or the first half of 2028, and DoorDash owes $1.25 billion if antitrust regulators block it.

Two details sit next to each other nicely. The merger agreement gives DoorDash approval over Instacart contracts that grant AI companies access to its data. And the same week, the FTC ordered nine companies, DoorDash and Instacart among them, to explain how they use consumer data to set prices and pay, with 45 days to answer. The FTC wants to know how these two use your data. DoorDash wants a veto over who else gets to. If you buy both grocery ad networks today, ask now what happens to your rate cards, your data separation and your measurement when they become one.

When Comcast spins off NBCUniversal next year, FreeWheel goes with NBCU, according to internal Comcast communications reported by tipsheet.ai. FreeWheel confirmed it in a blog post that calls the move "closer alignment" with ad technology, good for what it calls the premium video ecosystem. The cynical read is that Comcast tasted programmatic and spat it out, the way AT&T did with Xandr. Ari Paparo, who sold Beeswax to FreeWheel, reads it the other way: NBC wants to own the tech.

Either way, the ad server that much of premium TV runs on now belongs to one of the networks it serves. Mike Shields reports rumors, without saying where he heard them, that Skydance is weighing dropping FreeWheel, and notes the obvious reason: a network may not want its ad data living on a server owned by a rival. An ad server owned by one network is a harder sell to every other network. If your CTV buys run through FreeWheel, ask who at NBCU can see your campaign data after the spinoff, and put the answer in the contract.

Apple's Safari block has the identity business heading for the server room. ID5 is moving more of its infrastructure server-side, and CEO Mathieu Roche told Digiday that going server-side is more resilient because "you're not on the device anymore." Others are rallying around the IAB Tech Lab's Trusted Server Framework, which moves ad calls onto servers the publisher controls. Permutive, meanwhile, simply spun up new domains that weren't on the list.

Here's the problem with outrunning a list: Apple has written new WebKit code that lets it add companies whenever it likes, without waiting for a software update. It hasn't shipped yet. A member of Tech Lab's own Trusted Server working group conceded there is no absolute guarantee any one fix holds, and skeptics wonder whether Apple will read server-side identity as privacy or as a dodge. Large publishers can reroute in days. Small ones without engineers pay for the servers or lose the signal. The industry's answer to Apple deciding who can talk to Safari is to stop talking to Safari. That holds until Apple decides it doesn't like what the publisher's server is saying.

A viral post claims a Samsung TV keeps an always-on mic listening for barking dogs and crying babies, and reports back to serve ads. TechRadar notes Samsung marketed the listening as family and pet care, and reportedly dropped the baby feature after it couldn't tell a crying baby on TV from a real one. Consumers can't tell a feature from surveillance either. ACR sellers should assume the next viral post is about them.

A Paris appeals court threw out both of Meta's appeals on October 29 and ordered it to hand French publishers revenue and content-use data in its neighbouring rights talks. The court found the transparency needed to set a fair price did not appear to be met, and members of APIG and DVP, more than 1,200 titles between them, have received nothing since their Meta deals expired at the turn of 2025. "Fair" is easy to promise when you're the only one holding the numbers.

Meta switched on its product browsing enhancement by default for ads already running, starting October 28, unless the business opts out. Thursday we wrote about OpenAI and Meta rewriting ads you never approved. This is the same move, wearing an opt-out.

SiriusXM's ad revenue was $456 million, against $455 million a year ago, and podcast ad growth slowed to 20% from nearly 50% a year earlier. Video podcasts are the hottest pitch in audio. The audio ad line is flat.

T-Mobile owns Vistar Media and Blis, bought for about $801 million in cash, and its earnings release and 10-Q give no revenue figure for either. A carrier that knows where every phone is should be able to tell investors what its ad business makes.

France's CNIL fined two Fnac companies a combined €7 million after their app kept sending a user identifier and viewed products to a third party after users tapped "Continue without accepting." "Strictly necessary" didn't survive contact with a regulator who read the network logs.

Guideline says automotive will take less than 10% of U.S. ad spend this year for the first time, and local campaigns hit 40% of linear TV spend, double 2023's share. National TV lost its most reliable advertiser to the local dealer group.

Semrush will stop tracking Microsoft Copilot on November 9, citing access changes that block data collection. Brands are being sold AI visibility dashboards for assistants that are closing the door on the dashboards.

This issue draws on third-quarter results and filings from Alphabet, Amazon, Reddit, DoorDash and Instacart as reported by AdExchanger, PPC Land and The Desk, the published transcript of Alphabet's October 28 call, Google's Ads Help page on ads in AI Overviews, plus reporting by AdExchanger (Google, Reddit, FreeWheel, server-side identity, Samsung, the FTC pricing inquiry), PPC Land (Amazon, Instacart, DoorDash, Reddit, Meta in Paris, CNIL, SiriusXM, T-Mobile, Semrush), Digiday (ID5 and Trusted Server), Next in Media (Skydance), Search Engine Roundtable (AI Mode ads), TechRadar (Samsung) and the Wall Street Journal (auto spend); PPC Land's sequential and combined-quarter figures are its own calculations, the Skydance item rests on unsourced rumor, the Samsung claims come from an anonymous poster, and click-through and performance figures are company claims. Google, Amazon, Reddit, DoorDash, Instacart, NBCUniversal, FreeWheel, ID5, Apple and Meta were not contacted for this issue, so their positions come from their own statements, filings and the original coverage; any response will run as a dated update. ADOTAT has no financial relationship with any company named, sponsor Troutman Amin had no say over editorial, and Pesach Lattin has known many ad tech executives for roughly 20 years, including as a competitor while running the ad network Vizi.

ADOTAT+ members got the File this week. You got the headline.

Here's what's on the other side. The three numbers Google didn't lead with, and the 21 times its executives said the names of AI models and chips on a call where the Network business went unmentioned. What Google's ad chief actually conceded about AI Mode, the ad test Google confirmed the very next morning, and the Google help page that already tells advertisers they can't opt out of ads in its AI answers, or see them on their own.

Then the part your Google rep won't bring up at lunch: who else is paying for AI Mode, from Reddit's vanishing referrals to the SEO tools that say Google is feeding them poisoned results, and six questions to put to Google before AI Mode quietly becomes a line in your search budget.

Join ADOTAT+ and read it before your 2027 search plan gets signed.