PPC Land

The EEA is the European Economic Area, a treaty area that applies most European Union single market law to 30 states: the 27 EU members plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. In advertising it functions as a geography with a legal payload. When an ad request originates inside it, a different rulebook applies to the data attached to that request.

Criteo is losing the executive who ran its product organisation for six years, handing the function to its chief technology officer on an interim basis three weeks after the commerce media group cut its full-year outlook for the second time in three months. Criteo confirmed that Todd Parsons, Chief Product Officer and President of Performance Media, is leaving the company to take a chief executive role at a private business.

A defect that stops AdMob rewarded ads from playing video on Android has run for more than a week, and the mitigation Google deployed on August 28, 2026 still leaves some publishers without a working format. Google logged an incident affecting AdMob at 21:19 UTC on Thursday, August 20, 2026, and posted the first public note five minutes later.

Amazon disclosed on August 28, 2026 that its European second-hand business now exceeds 2 billion euros in annual sales, publishing the figure alongside the return of Second Chance Deal Days across five European markets, Mexico, Brazil and the United States. The company also confirmed a returns investment of more than 4 billion dollars in Europe. The announcement, written by Charles Clark and published on Amazon's corporate news site, is formatted as a consumer shopping notice.

Googlebot is the automated software Google uses to fetch pages from the public web so they can be processed, indexed and ranked in Google Search. It exists because a search engine cannot return a result for a page it has never retrieved. Every organic listing, every Discover card and every source cited in an AI Overview traces back to a successful HTTP request made by Googlebot to a web server.

ClaudeBot is the automated program Anthropic sends across the public web to collect page content that may be used to train its Claude family of language models. It identifies itself in server logs through a user agent string, it reads the robots.txt file at the root of a domain before fetching anything else, and it stops crawling a site that tells it to stop. Anthropic describes its purpose in a single sentence: the bot collects web content that could potentially contribute to model training.

Bingbot is the automated program Microsoft uses to fetch pages from the public web so they can be indexed, ranked and served in Bing search results and in the answers Microsoft's AI systems generate. It exists for the plainest of reasons: an index can only hold documents that something went out and retrieved. Its reach extends well past Bing's own results page. Yahoo Search runs on Bing's index, DuckDuckGo draws on it, Copilot grounds answers in it, and Ecosia sourced results from it for years.

A manual action is a penalty applied to a website by a person at Google rather than by a ranking algorithm. A reviewer inspects the site, decides that it breaks one of Google's spam policies, and applies an enforcement flag that demotes the affected pages or removes them from search results entirely.

The Digital Markets Act is a European Union regulation that imposes binding conduct rules on a small set of very large technology companies in advance, rather than punishing them after a competition investigation concludes. Its formal name is Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector. The rules apply only to firms the European Commission has designated as gatekeepers, and only to the services within those firms that meet the designation test.

Meta-WebIndexer is the web crawler Meta Platforms uses to build and refresh the search index that supplies answers inside Meta AI. It exists because the assistant embedded in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger needs live web content to respond to questions about news, prices or sports, and because Meta has spent two years trying to stop sourcing that content from Google and Microsoft.