The Current

This is probably the most immediately useful thing that's happened in a while, and almost nobody's talking about it. Google added a new property type to Search Console called platform properties (introduced on 7 July and rolled out to every account by the end of that month), which lets you connect an Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube account directly and see how those posts perform in Google Search and Discover. There's no website required and no domain to verify, you just verify the account you already have.

It's free, it takes about five minutes, and it's the only place I know of that tells you the words people typed before they found you.

What you get back is the part that matters: the actual search terms people typed before they landed on one of your posts, plus clicks and impressions per post. Most small businesses have no idea their social content shows up in Google at all, let alone which words are bringing people to it, and the platforms themselves have never told you this.

So the practical version: connect your accounts this week, leave it a fortnight, then read the query list and start writing your captions and on-screen text using the words that are actually showing up there rather than the words you assume people use. That's a real, specific change you can make off the back of your own data instead of someone else's advice.

DoubleVerify published a global study on 29 July, built on a survey of 22,000 consumers across 22 markets plus a bit over 2,000 marketers, and the interesting bit is the split rather than the headline. Those two numbers sitting side by side tell you it isn't really the AI that people are reacting to, it's whether the thing looks finished.

Canva's State of Marketing and AI report earlier this year, which surveyed 3,547 consumers across seven markets including Australia, points the same way from a different angle. So there's a preference for human work sitting underneath all of it, and there's also a fairly clear signal that being upfront costs you less than being caught.

The cheap-looking AI ad isn't neutral, it actively costs you something with roughly four in ten of the people who see it.

We use AI content ourselves and we're not going to pretend otherwise, so here's our honest read: use it to make more, test more and move faster, but hold it to the same standard you'd hold a shoot to, and say when you've used it.

On 10 August YouTube announced the biggest shake-up to its Partner Program in years. From 1 February 2027, new creators applying will need double what they used to for either path in.

Separately, existing channels will need 10 million qualified Shorts views in a rolling 90-day window to keep receiving a share of Shorts ad and subscription revenue. Fall below that and you stay in the program and keep earning on long-form; the Shorts share switches back on automatically if you cross the line again.

If you're a business rather than a creator, the money side of this almost certainly doesn't touch you, because YouTube payouts were never going to be where your return came from. The direction is the part worth reading. YouTube is making it meaningfully harder to earn by simply producing a lot, so if your plan for the channel was "post plenty of Shorts and see what sticks," that's the exact plan getting squeezed. What still works is what worked before: fewer, better videos aimed at the people who might actually buy from you rather than at a threshold.

IAB Australia's most recent published quarter has the local internet advertising market at $4.9 billion for the March quarter, up 15.3% on the same quarter last year and the strongest March quarter on record. The breakdown underneath is the useful part, because video was the fastest-growing major segment at 20.4%, and inside video, social video grew faster than anything else measured:

Year-on-year growth in Australian internet ad revenue, March quarter 2026 vs March quarter 2025: social video, all video, the total market, and search and directories. Source: IAB Australia Internet Advertising Revenue Report, March quarter 2026.

Two honest caveats before you read too much into it. This is the March quarter, so it's a few months behind us and the June quarter numbers aren't public yet, and growth in spend is not the same thing as growth in results, and more money chasing the same attention is also what makes ads more expensive over time.

The rest of the Australian market has already decided social video is where the money goes.

Still, I think it tells you something worth knowing, which is that the rest of the Australian market has already decided social video is where the money goes, so if you're still putting your effort mostly into static posts, you're working against where the attention and the budget are both heading. It also means the creative bar keeps rising, because you're not competing with the business down the road any more, you're competing with everyone who's decided to spend on video this year.

OpenAI has been rolling advertising into ChatGPT in stages through this year, and the step that actually matters for a small business happened in May, when the self-serve platform opened with no minimum spend at all. Before that it was an enterprise pilot with a floor high enough that none of this was your problem. On 11 August it expanded into the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea. Ads only show to people on the free and lower tiers; paying subscribers don't see them.

Australia isn't on the list yet, so there's nothing for you to do this week. I'm flagging it because a genuinely new ad platform opening to businesses of any size doesn't happen often, and the early period on a platform like that is usually when it's cheapest.

What I won't do is tell you it works, because nobody outside OpenAI knows yet what this performs like at small budgets, and there's no independent benchmark data worth quoting. When there is, and when it reaches Australia, we'll say so plainly here either way.