Your Ads Can Now Say "Made with AI": What Google and Meta's New Transparency Rules Mean

If you manage your own Google or Meta ads, chances are you’ve noticed changes in the last few weeks that you didn’t request or configure. It’s not a platform glitch — it’s part of a broader shift toward transparency around AI use in advertising, and it’s worth understanding before it starts affecting how your brand is perceived.

What Google’s “How this ad was made” panel is

In July 2026, Google launched a panel called “How this ad was made,” designed to visibly flag when an ad was generated or modified with artificial intelligence. The idea is that anyone viewing an ad can find out, with a single click, whether what they’re looking at — an image, a video, a piece of copy — went through generative AI tools during its creation.

It’s part of a broader trend across advertising platforms: as more advertisers use AI to produce creative faster and cheaper, pressure is also growing — both regulatory and from users themselves — to know what they’re actually looking at.

What Meta is doing at the same time

Meta, for its part, expanded its own AI creative tools: Muse Image for image generation, and agentic creative briefs that help build full campaigns from a simple description. According to figures reported by Meta itself, more than 8 million advertisers are already using one of these AI tools for their campaigns — a volume that makes clear this isn’t an experimental feature, it’s already the default workflow for a huge share of digital advertising.

Why this matters if you’re an SMB running ads

Two things change for you, whether you asked for them or not:

Your own ads may get labeled. If you use generative AI tools (built into the platforms or external ones) to create images, videos, or ad copy, it’s increasingly likely that label will show up visibly to whoever sees the ad. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — but if you weren’t expecting it, it can raise questions from customers you didn’t have to answer before.

Trust becomes an explicit competitive factor. In a feed where some ads carry a “made with AI” label and others don’t, perceived authenticity starts to play a role in which ad earns more trust — especially in sectors where credibility matters a lot (professional services, health, local businesses with a face-to-face relationship with the customer).

What you should do now (and what you shouldn’t)

There’s no need to overreact. This isn’t a ban on using AI in advertising — it’s still a legitimate, increasingly standard tool. What is worth doing:

• Review which creative tools you’re currently using for your ads and understand whether they produce content likely to get labeled.
• Don’t treat the label as something to hide. If your ad uses AI and still communicates something honest about your business, the label shouldn’t be a problem — the problem would be people feeling like something was hidden from them.
• Keep investing in creative that blends AI with real elements of your business (real photos of your team, your location, your customers) — that mix tends to build more trust than relying on 100% artificial generation, label aside.

What we still don’t know

This is a very recent change, and as with any new platform policy, several details are still being worked out in practice: how strict detection will actually be, whether there are differences between markets or languages, and how users react to the label in the medium term once it stops being a novelty. We’ll keep a close eye on how this evolves and update our recommendation if anything relevant changes for our clients’ campaigns.

Cover photo: Codioful (formerly Gradienta) / Pexels