Jensen Huang quits Nvidia as Google ships Gemini 4 Hydrogen

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This is Marketing Is Calling, the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter from PPC Land. It's Friday, November 13, 2026 This episode is read by an AI voice. Today, Jensen Huang resigns from Nvidia after 33 years. Google puts its biggest search model in front of everyone. Google Ads finally shows advertisers what invalid traffic it didn't charge them for. European regulators get tough on cross-site tracking, and broadcasters cut their forecasts as streaming keeps growing.

We start with a resignation nobody in tech expected to see. On Thursday, November 12, before the US markets opened, Nvidia said Jensen Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and board member, effective immediately. He co-founded the company and ran it for 33 years, turning a graphics card business into the engine of the AI boom. The release gave no reason, but it followed reports that Huang had an affair with a woman alleged to be a Chinese spy, and another with a vice president who reported to him.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress becomes interim chief executive and keeps the finance job too. Harvey Jones, a director since 1993, becomes the board's first ever chair. CNBC's Carl Quintanella said the newsroom had been bracing for it all week. His words, it has the potential to be the biggest corporate scandal in decades. Nvidia reports its quarterly results on November 17

A few hours later, Google made its own big move. It rolled out Gemini 4 Hydrogen in search, globally for all users, not just subscribers. It's now the default model in AI mode, and it handles the harder questions in AI overviews. Google's Nick Fox called it the biggest model improvement to search yet. Google says it understands messy questions better, searches across more subtopics at once, shows more tables and visuals, and links to a broader set of sites. It also lands in the middle of Google's core update, which started on November 10 So if your rankings or your AI traffic looks strange right now, there's a lot going on at once.

And the traffic picture keeps shifting. Sparctoro found visits to the top million websites have fallen about 12% since early 2022, even as the number of people online grew by about a quarter. Press Gazette found only 10 of the 50 biggest English language news sites grew their traffic in October. The New York Times was the only one in the top 10 And the Online News Association is pausing its annual conference and cutting five staff.

Google's rivals are pitching the opposite. Microsoft is promoting a way to switch off AI answers in Bing, either with a browser extension or by typing minus AI after a search. The catch? The extension also makes Bing your default search engine. And Opera says its iPhone browser gained 46% more US users in a year. Google, meanwhile, is nudging Chrome users to ask Gemini about product reviews, right there in the browser.

Now to the agents. The venture firm Andreessen Horowitz says companies now have to court AI agents as customers. Their essay opens with this line, the primary users of the Internet are no longer human.

Shoppers aren't so sure. A Salesforce survey found 76% of people don't want an AI agent buying things for them. And among those who've tried one, 27% said it bought something too expensive.

Which, to be fair, also describes most teenagers with a credit card. Measuring any of this is still hard. The IAB published a blueprint for attribution in the AI era, and its message was blunt. The evidence sits inside the AI platforms, where advertisers can't see it. One publisher executive put it well, publishers are feeding the answers, but they don't have the receipts. Some publishers won't pay. Yahoo! became the first licensee of a new collective, the Internet Licensing Collective, which pays publishers when AI uses their content. Its founder compares it to Spotify. And Anthropix new usage policy bans using Claude to build fake websites designed to game AI answers.

Over to Google Ads. For the first time, advertisers can see how much invalid traffic Google filtered out and how much it credited back afterwards. It's a new card on the overview page. Google says advertisers' exposure to invalid leads fell by 30% this year. And a Google spokesperson told AdExchanger, the systems look at all traffic, including agents. Meanwhile, the defaults keep moving toward automation. Google Ads Editor version 2.14 switches AI max on by default for new search campaigns. Google also made clear that ads using AI to impersonate public figures are banned, even if they say they used AI. Break that rule, and the account is suspended without warning.

OpenAI kept building its ad business too. ChatGPT Ads now offers target cost per acquisition and target cost per click, and the old maximum bid settings retire on January 1st.