For months, the ad tech world was braced for Google to be broken up. It wasn't.

Instead, a US judge has handed Google a long list of new rules, with someone watching over its shoulder for the next six years. Less dramatic than a breakup, sure. But if you hire in programmatic, ad ops or performance marketing, I think this is the bigger story. New rules change how people work every day, and that changes who you need on the team.

Here's what happened, and what I think it means for hiring.

First, Ad Tech in 30 seconds

Every ad you see on a news site is sold in a split-second auction. Three tools make it happen:

·       The publisher's ad server decides which ad fills each space. Google's is DFP, now part of Google Ad Manager.

·       The ad exchange runs the auction. Google's is AdX.

·       The advertiser's buying tool places the bids. Google's is Google Ads, formerly AdWords.

Google owns a big piece of all three. In April 2025, Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled that it had illegally used that position to tilt the market its way. This month, she decided what happens next.

What Google now has to do

The judge called a forced sale of AdX neither realistic nor needed as it’s in more than 100 million lines of Google code and untangling it could take five to eight years. New rules can be in place in around 15 months.

So instead, Google has to:

·       Plug into Prebid. Prebid is the free, open-source tool many publishers use to run one auction across lots of exchanges at once (known as header bidding). Google now has to let it pull live bids from AdX, and the connection has to work as well as Google's own.

·       Treat rivals fairly. AdX has to bid into competing ad servers on the same terms it gives DFP, and Google Ads can no longer be steered to favour Google's own tools.

·       Let publishers leave. They can now export their data to a rival ad server, and set different price floors for different exchanges.

For Google, this is a manageable headache. Ad tech is around 6% of Alphabet's revenue, and shrinking. For everyone who works in ad tech, the day job just changed.

Where it hits hiring

1. Prebid becomes non-negotiable

You used to be able to build a whole programmatic career inside Google's tools. Now Google itself has to work with Prebid, multi-exchange set-ups become the default, and job specs will follow.

Expect programmatic and ad ops briefs to ask for:

·       Hands-on Prebid set-up and troubleshooting

·       Experience running auctions across several exchanges

If your experience is mostly Google-only, it still counts. Add Prebid to it, and soon.

2. Publishers need people who can shop around

Switching ad server is suddenly a realistic option, so someone has to decide whether to switch, and to what.

That puts ad ops leads and yield managers in demand if they can show:

·       Experience comparing, choosing and migrating ad tech vendors

·       Yield management across multiple exchanges, including setting price floors exchange by exchange

Prebid experience is moving from ‘nice to have’ to expected. People who have actually led an ad server migration are still rare, and they’ll be in short supply.3. Knowing the rules becomes an edge

Six years of oversight means vendors, agency trading desks and publishers all need to understand what Google's new obligations mean in practice, and how to use them.

It won't create a wave of new job titles. But in interviews, the candidate who can explain what the ruling means for your business will stand out from the one who just read the headline.

And it's not the only change

UK ad spend grew 9.3% year on year in Q1 2026, but unevenly. Retail media, social and digital out-of-home each grew by nearly 18%, while cinema fell by about the same.

Measurement is changing too. With cookies weakened and Apple limiting tracking, more marketers are turning back to marketing mix modelling, which works from aggregated data instead of following individuals around the web.

These changes together mean that the performance marketers in most demand over the next few years are the ones who are comfortable with numbers and at home across channels, rather than experts in one closed system.

If you're looking for your next role, now's a good time to show you know where ad tech is heading. Get hands-on with Prebid, and be ready to talk about measurement beyond what the platforms report back.

If you're building a performance or digital marketing team and want to talk through what good hiring looks like right now, drop me a line.

 

Holly Wilkinson

Performance & Digital Marketing

holly@dnarecruit.com

With over 20 years in recruitment, I work with agencies and brand teams to hire performance and digital marketing talent from mid-level through to C-suite. I've built exclusive and embedded partnerships with a 95% fill rate and an average five-week time to hire. If you're scaling a marketing or digital team, or thinking about your next move within one, I'd be glad to talk it through.