Some Meta advertisers are logging into Ads Manager to find that the checkbox excluding specific placements from their ad sets has quietly disappeared. On August 20, consultant Jon Loomer published the in-product notice: “Excluding placements, platforms, devices and operating systems will no longer be available for your ad sets.” Social Media Today reported the same rollout that day, with no timeline attached.

Loomer characterised it as a test with plans to expand more broadly. Meta hasn’t confirmed.

The substitute Meta is offering is a system called value rules, which permit a maximum bid decrease of 90%. As PPC Land put it on August 25, “so a placement can be made expensive to win but never made impossible to win.” Meta’s own setup screen concedes the point, warning that “your overall cost per result may increase.”

The practical consequence lands hardest on Audience Network, the off-platform surface Loomer says “will find you plenty of cheap, low-quality clicks.” Advertisers who used exclusions as a hard block against that inventory now have a dial, not a switch.

There’s a workaround. Account-level Placement Controls sit under Advertising Settings and, per PPC Land, “are applied even when Advantage+ placements is switched on.” Loomer directs advertisers there.

The rollout picture is unusually murky. Elsop reported on August 26 that Meta’s Business Help Centre still describes manual placement selection as available, and the dated changes in Meta’s July 29 Marketing API v26.0 changelog are narrower, removing Instagram Explore Feed and the Messenger story position rather than exclusions wholesale.

It fits a pattern. Microsoft has moved AI-run search campaigns into general availability, and HubSpot has pushed customers onto AI-first marketing interfaces this week. Each manual lever retired is a bet by the platform that its optimizer knows better than the buyer. Advertisers are being asked to trust it, whether or not they were asked.

Sources