May Digital Marketing News Update

This month has been a busy one. Between client conversations, campaign reviews, and platform changes, here's what we're seeing, what it means, and what we'd actually do about it.

Meta is winning the paid media race and automation is a big factor. We've been watching this shift build for a while across client accounts, but the numbers have now made it official: Meta is projected to overtake Google in global digital ad revenue in 2026 for the first time ever, with 24.1% year-on-year growth versus Google's 11.9%.

What's driving it is Advantage+. Across the accounts we manage, the clients who've fully leaned into Meta's AI-powered campaign structures, giving the algorithm creative variety, clean signals, and room to optimise are consistently outperforming those still trying to control targeting manually. Meta's end-to-end AI campaigns hit a $60 billion annual run rate in 2025, and UK advertisers are seeing the same dynamic play out locally.

On Google's side, Performance Max is becoming unavoidable, and YouTube is testing sticky banner ads that stay visible after the main video ad ends. Worth a look if video is in your mix, early signs suggest it's useful for brand recall and retargeting.

Search has fundamentally changed. Most brands are still learning what it means for them. This is the conversation we're having most often with clients right now. Google AI Overviews are now appearing across a significant proportion of UK searches, and for informational queries - the kind that historically drove strong organic traffic - they're triggered almost constantly. Coverage has grown 58% in twelve months, and the UK rollout has followed closely behind the US.

We've seen organic click-through rates drop meaningfully across several client sites in categories where AI Overviews have taken over the top of the page. The wider research backs this up: one study across 68,000 queries found a 46.7% relative decline in organic clicks for affected positions. Brands cited inside AI Overviews earn 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks than those who aren't. The search results page is becoming two-tier - brands Google trusts enough to cite, and everyone else.

What actually gets you cited isn't a technical trick. It's genuine depth; expert-authored content, proper structure, real specificity… something SEO experts have been saying for a while now. The May algorithm update has made Google sharper at penalising AI-generated content that lacks editorial substance. If your content strategy has been about volume over quality, this is the moment to change that.

One more thing worth flagging on paid search: ads don't appear inside AI Overview cards, only organic citations do. That means paid impressions are being pushed further down the page in affected categories, and CPCs are rising in some areas as a result. If you haven't audited your search investment mix recently, it's worth doing.

Global social commerce crossed $100 billion in 2026, with TikTok Shop one of its main drivers - and the UK is one of TikTok Shop's most developed markets outside of Asia. Fashion, beauty, and home tech are the biggest categories here, and British consumers have been faster to adopt in-feed purchasing than many expected.

If you're still thinking of social as purely a discovery channel and sending people somewhere else to convert, you're adding friction that your competitors may not be. For any brand with a product to sell, the question is no longer whether to be on social commerce platforms but how.

We've been having more honest conversations with clients this year about attribution. Platform-reported numbers, whether that's Meta, Google, or TikTok, are increasingly unreliable as a single source of truth. Cookie erosion, walled gardens, cross-device journeys: the picture you see in Ads Manager is a partial one.

TLDR;

The platforms are automating and there's no fighting it - the brands doing well are the ones feeding the machine well: strong creative, first-party data, clear conversion signals. Search is being restructured by AI in real time, and the gap between brands Google cites and brands it doesn't is starting to show in traffic. And on measurement, if you're relying solely on platform-reported numbers, you're probably not seeing the full picture.

5 things to do this month as a result:

1. Run an AI Overview audit on your top 20 keywords. Search your most important terms in Google and note whether an AI Overview appears - and if so, whether your brand is cited in it. If you're not cited and a competitor is, that's a gap with measurable consequences. Start by identifying which of your existing content could be deepened, better structured, or attributed to a named expert to improve your chances of being pulled in.

2. Check whether your Meta results look different than they used to. Meta recently changed how it measures which ads led to a sale, it now only looks at a shorter window of time after someone sees or clicks an ad. In practice, this means some campaigns that looked like they were performing well on paper may now appear to be delivering less. Before you cut budget or panic, check whether the numbers have changed because of this reporting shift rather than because performance has actually dropped.

3. Give Advantage+ a proper test, with proper creative. If you're still running heavily manual Meta campaigns, set up an Advantage+ campaign alongside them with at least four or five creative variants. The algorithm needs range to find what works. Treat it as a genuine test, not an afterthought, and give it four to six weeks before drawing conclusions.

4. Consider a TikTok Shop strategy. If you have a physical product, the UK's TikTok Shop adoption means this is no longer optional to at least have a view on. Even if you're not ready to sell through it yet, understanding what your category looks like on there - what content is driving purchases, who the creators are - will put you ahead when you do move.

5. Cross-reference your marketing spend against your actual sales. You should know whether your real-world revenue goes up when you spend more, and down when you spend less. This month, try a simple exercise: look at a period when you increased or decreased budget on a particular channel, and check whether your overall sales figures moved in the same direction. If they did, that's a good sign. If they didn't, it's worth a conversation about whether that money is actually doing what you think it is.

Sources

• Digital Marketing Trends to Watch in May 2026 — ALM Corp

• Meta Set to Surpass Google in 2026 Ad Revenue — MediaPost

• Meta to Shoot Past Google in Digital Ad Revenue for First Time — Marketing Dive

• Latest Meta Ads Update 2026 — iCreateBrand

• Google Ads 2026 Updates: AI, Performance Max & New Features — Kleverish

• Google AI Overviews Impact on SEO: What Changed and How to Adapt in 2026 — Stackmatix

• AI Overviews Killed CTR 61%: 9 Strategies to Show Up — Dataslayer

• Google May 2026 Algorithm Updates — SEO Vendor

• 5 Marketing & Digital Trends: Week of May 11, 2026 — B2the7

• 2026 Trends and Performance Benchmarks for Google Ads and Meta Ads — Fluency