Step-by-step playbooks you can run on Monday. Tested in real accounts.
The first measured figure is in, the bug that started it is closed, and The Trade Desk is unblocked in a beta. What a publisher stands to lose is three numbers multiplied together, and one of them is still close to zero.
Google sunset developer tokens on September 9 and moved each access level to the Cloud projects that had called the API with that token in the previous 90 days. A token that sat idle lost its access, and v22 stops answering on October 7.
Teams running several European markets argue about splitting campaigns per country, and settle it with a number somebody half-remembers. Google publishes it as the sample you need to read a result, not the volume the algorithm needs, and that changes the decision.
The whole path, in order: the Google Cloud project, the credential, the connection, and then the part that actually pays for itself. One scheduled pull becomes a dashboard, a cohort grid the interface cannot draw, a written weekly summary, and a Slack alert that stays quiet until something real moves.
You can run Google Ads from a terminal now: read the account, draft the change, spend the money, all in plain English. This is the build guide. Which of the four paths to use (scripts, the official read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a community write server, or the raw v25 API), what v25 quietly broke, and how to wire a write path that fails safe instead of fast.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that’s the whole point.
