Most advertisers are asking the wrong question
Since Google began rolling out AI-powered search experiences, there’s been no shortage of speculation about what it means for advertisers. Most of it has centred on one question: where will the adverts go?
It’s an understandable reaction. If users are spending more time interacting with AI-generated responses and less time browsing traditional search results, it’s only natural to wonder how that affects paid search.
Personally, I think that’s the wrong conversation.
Advertising isn’t disappearing. People with commercial intent will still need products, services and businesses to solve their problems. If anything, recommendations become more valuable when Google’s AI has a better understanding of what someone is actually trying to achieve.
The bigger change isn’t where adverts appear. It’s what has to happen before Google is confident enough to recommend one business over another.
For years, paid search has largely been about earning the click. Success came from writing compelling adverts, choosing the right keywords and bidding effectively enough to win visibility. Those things still matter, but they won’t be enough on their own.
As AI becomes more involved in helping people make decisions, I think we’ll see greater emphasis placed on everything that happens around the advert. The quality of your product data, the relevance of your landing pages and the strength of the signals you send back to Google all become part of the same conversation.
That’s why I don’t see AI Mode as just another advertising update. I see it as the point where campaign management, website experience and data quality become much harder to separate.
AI Search Is Moving Faster Than Most Brands Realise
This shift isn’t a future trend. It’s already happening.
McKinsey research found that half of consumers now intentionally use AI-powered search engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot as part of their discovery and buying journey. The consultancy also reports that around 50% of Google searches already contain AI-generated summaries, with that figure expected to exceed 75% by 2028.
At the same time, Semrush’s analysis of more than 10 million keywords found that the proportion of searches triggering Google’s AI Overviews increased from 6.5% in January 2025 to almost 25% by July 2025, demonstrating how quickly AI-generated answers are becoming embedded within traditional search experiences.
The implication is clear: consumers are increasingly receiving recommendations, comparisons and answers before they ever click through to a website. Visibility still matters, but the quality of the experience behind that visibility matters more than ever.
Search has stopped being a list of links
One of the reasons AI Mode feels like such a significant change is that it reflects how people already behave. Very few of us search in single keywords anymore. We ask questions.
Sometimes they’re simple.
“Best electric SUV under £45,000.”
Sometimes they’re incredibly specific.
“What’s the best electric SUV for a family of five that can tow a caravan for under £45,000?”
Those two searches might look similar on the surface, but they’re asking Google to do very different jobs. The first is simply a search and the second is asking for advice.
Historically, Google would have responded by giving you a page of websites and leaving you to work out the answer yourself. You’d probably open a few tabs, compare specifications, check reviews and eventually narrow your options down.
Whereas now, AI Mode shortens that process considerably.
Rather than acting as a directory of information, Google is starting to act more like an assistant. It pulls together information from different sources, considers the context behind the question and presents what it believes are the most relevant answers. If there’s a genuinely relevant commercial recommendation, that’s where advertising has the opportunity to fit naturally into the conversation.
From a PPC perspective, that’s the bit I find most interesting.
The goal isn’t simply to appear for a keyword anymore. It’s to be relevant enough that Google has confidence recommending your product when someone asks a buying question which is quite a different challenge.
The click matters less than what happens beforehand
One thing I’ve noticed is that there’s an assumption AI Mode changes advertising overnight. I don’t think that’s quite right.
What changes first is the journey leading up to the click. Traditionally, someone might search for a vehicle, visit three or four websites, compare specifications, look at finance options and gradually narrow down their choices. By the time they submitted an enquiry, they’d already done a fair amount of research themselves.
Now, AI Mode takes some of that work away. Someone can ask follow-up questions, refine what they’re looking for and rule out options without ever leaving the search experience. They arrive on your website with a much clearer idea of what they want than they might have done a year or two ago.
That should be good news for advertisers but the challenge is that expectations rise with it.
If somebody has spent five minutes asking AI about company car tax, towing capacity or battery range, they don’t expect to land on a page that makes them hunt for the same information all over again. They’ve already had that conversation. They’re looking for confirmation, reassurance or a reason to take the next step.
That’s why I don’t think AI Mode raises the bar for campaigns as much as it raises the bar for landing pages.
The advert still has one job: persuade someone to click. The page it leads to now has a much bigger responsibility. It needs to pick up the conversation where AI left off, not send the user back to the beginning.
The biggest weakness won’t be your campaigns
I suspect one of the biggest surprises AI Mode brings is that it exposes weaknesses that have always been there.
Imagine someone asks Google:
Which hybrid SUV has the lowest company car tax?
AI summarises the options, recommends a suitable model and includes a sponsored result. Everything up to that point has worked exactly as it should.
The user clicks.
Now imagine the page they land on is a generic vehicle listing. There’s no mention of Benefit in Kind, no running cost information, no explanation of why this particular model was recommended. Just a long list of vehicles and a search filter.
From Google’s point of view, the campaign succeeded because it generated the click.
From the customer’s point of view, it probably didn’t.
They’ve gone from having a conversation that felt tailored to their question to a page that expects them to start their research all over again.
That’s the disconnect I think advertisers need to pay attention to.
For years, we could often get away with sending different types of traffic to broadly the same landing pages. If someone was prepared to spend ten or fifteen minutes researching, there was a reasonable chance they’d eventually find what they needed.
I’m not convinced people will be as patient if AI has already done most of that work for them.
The page doesn’t just need to be relevant to the advert anymore. It needs to feel like a natural continuation of the conversation they’ve just had. That’s a subtle difference, but I think it’s an important one.
AI Is Also Exposing Organisational Disconnects
The experience gap isn’t always caused by poor marketing.
Increasingly, it’s the result of disconnected teams, systems and processes. Marketing may be driving qualified traffic, but if inventory data is inaccurate, pricing isn’t synchronised or conversion tracking is incomplete, the customer experience suffers.
We’ve already seen this happening through Google Vehicle Ads, where consumers are presented with highly transparent information before they ever reach a website. AI-powered experiences are accelerating the same trend.
The brands that succeed won’t necessarily be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones that create alignment between marketing, operations, technology and customer experience.
Related reading: The Transparency Tax: Why Google Vehicle Ads Are Exposing the Hidden Cost of Organisational Silos.
Campaign management starts looking different
If AI Mode develops in the direction Google is signalling, I don’t think the role of a PPC manager changes dramatically. The priorities do.
There’ll always be a need to structure accounts well, manage budgets and write compelling creative. Those fundamentals aren’t going away.
What changes is the amount of influence the rest of your business has over campaign performance.
Take Merchant Centre as an example. Historically, many advertisers have treated it as a product feed that powers Shopping ads. Increasingly, it feels more like a source of truth that helps Google understand what you sell, how available it is and whether the information can be trusted.
The same applies to your website.
If product specifications are inconsistent, pricing is out of date or key information is buried three clicks deep, those aren’t just user experience issues anymore. They’re signals that make it harder for Google to build confidence in your business.
That’s particularly relevant in automotive, where no two retailers present their stock in exactly the same way. Some vehicle detail pages answer almost every question a buyer could have. Others provide little more than a registration number, a monthly payment and a handful of photos.
Those differences have always mattered for conversion rate and I think they’ll matter much earlier in the journey as well.
That’s why the conversations we’re having with clients are becoming broader. We’re spending less time looking solely at campaign settings and more time reviewing product feeds, landing pages, CRM integrations and offline conversion tracking. None of those things sit neatly inside Google Ads, but they all influence how effectively Google’s systems can understand and recommend a business.
In many ways, AI Mode doesn’t introduce a completely new way of advertising. It rewards the businesses that already have their house in order.
SEO, PPC and your website are becoming much harder to separate
One of the biggest shifts I see coming isn’t inside Google Ads at all. It’s in the way different disciplines within digital marketing start to overlap.
For years, it was possible to think of SEO, Paid Search and website optimisation as separate workstreams. Different teams owned different channels, worked to different KPIs and often only came together when something went wrong.
That distinction is becoming much less clear.
If your website doesn’t explain products properly, your SEO team has a problem because those pages are less likely to rank well.
Your UX team has a problem because visitors are more likely to leave without finding what they need. And, increasingly, your paid media team has the same problem.
The quality of the page someone lands on doesn’t just influence whether they convert. It influences how effectively Google can understand what your business offers in the first place.
The same applies to product information.
If pricing, availability, specifications and supporting content are accurate, consistent and easy for Google’s systems to interpret, every channel benefits. Organic visibility improves, paid campaigns have stronger foundations and customers are less likely to hit dead ends during their research.
We’ve already seen Google move in this direction with Performance Max.
The campaigns that tend to perform best aren’t simply the ones with the highest budgets. They’re the ones supported by strong product data, high-quality creative, accurate conversion tracking and websites that remove friction from the buying journey.
I don’t see AI Mode changing that principle, I think it reinforces it.
The businesses that perform well won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most on media. They’ll be the ones giving Google the clearest understanding of who they are, what they sell and why they’re the right answer for a particular customer.
That’s no longer just an SEO challenge or a PPC challenge. It’s a business challenge.
Measuring success is going to change too
One question I keep coming back to is whether we’re measuring the right things.
A potential side effect of AI Mode could be that marketing teams become obsessed with declining click volumes as this has been a typical means of evaluating campaign performance.
Those metrics aren’t going away, but they may become less useful on their own.
If AI Mode helps people answer more of their questions before they visit a website, we’d expect fewer people to click through casually. The people who do visit are more likely to have refined what they’re looking for and made a conscious decision to explore a particular business.
That changes how we should interpret performance.
A drop in clicks doesn’t automatically mean a campaign is becoming less effective if the people arriving on the website are more likely to enquire, book a test drive or complete a purchase.
We’ve seen similar shifts before. Performance Max encouraged advertisers to look beyond traditional account metrics and place more emphasis on business outcomes. AI Mode feels like another step in that direction and it also reinforces the importance of measurement outside Google Ads.
If your conversion tracking ends with an online lead form, you’re only seeing part of the picture. Feeding qualified leads, sales and revenue back into Google has been valuable for some time. As Google’s systems become better at identifying high-intent users, those signals become even more important because they help distinguish between activity and genuine commercial value.
Ultimately, I don’t think success will be defined by who generates the most traffic, it will be defined by who can demonstrate that their marketing is driving better customers, more efficiently and more consistently than their competitors.
The real winners won’t be the biggest advertisers
It’s easy to look at AI Mode and assume success will come down to who has the biggest media budget.
If Google’s goal is to help people make better decisions, then its AI needs confidence in the recommendations it makes. That confidence isn’t built through ad spend alone. It’s built through the quality of the information available, the experience users have once they click through and the signals advertisers send back about what good outcomes look like.
In many respects, that’s encouraging. It means smaller businesses aren’t necessarily competing on budget. They’re competing on how clearly they present their products, how well they answer customers’ questions and how effectively they remove friction from the buying journey.
That’s also why I don’t think organisations can afford to treat paid media, SEO, content and website optimisation as separate disciplines anymore. AI doesn’t evaluate them independently. It sees the overall experience.
The businesses that adapt quickest are unlikely to be the ones making the biggest changes to their Google Ads accounts.
They’ll be the ones improving their websites, strengthening their product data, investing in better measurement and making it easier for customers to find the information they need.
AI Mode doesn’t change the fundamentals of good marketing.
People still want clear answers. Relevant recommendations. Helpful websites. Businesses they can trust.
What’s changing is how early Google can recognise the brands that provide those things.
The advertisers that thrive won’t necessarily be the ones spending the most. They’ll be the ones making it easiest for both Google and customers to understand why they deserve to be chosen.