The lead  ·  01

Meta is set to outearn Google in ads for the first time

In 2026, Meta is projected to pass Google in global ad revenue for the first time — roughly $243.5B vs $239.5B.

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The week in one paragraph

This was the week the machines took the wheel — and the ad-tech hierarchy got redrawn at the same time. Two handovers happened at once. First, control shifted from humans to AI agents across the whole supply chain: TikTok opened its platform to third-party AI agents, Netflix put agents on its $3B ad business, PubMatic reported 20+ agents embedded and “autonomous campaigns scaling,” OpenAI moved to automate the creative itself, and the IAB Tech Lab kept formalizing the agentic rails (MCP, A2A, gRPC) plus live-content signals in OpenRTB. Second, power shifted away from the incumbent: Meta is set to outearn Google in global ad revenue for the first time (~$243.5B vs ~$239.5B), Google’s ad-tech empire reached the remedy phase of its antitrust case (a possible AdX/DFP divestiture), Forrester’s first SSP ranking since 2014 demoted Google to a mere “challenger,” Amazon chose to integrate with the open Prebid auction rather than around it, and Disney consolidated its sell-side under its own DRAX exchange while Netflix moved off Microsoft. One thread ties it together: the ad market is being handed twice over — from people to agents, and from Google to its challengers — and both handovers push decisions further from human negotiation and deeper into closed, automated systems. The publishers who win this quarter will make their inventory legible to the agents now doing the buying, and use the cracks in Google’s dominance to build leverage and supply-path diversity before the new order hardens.