Inside Google Ads podcast: Episode 126 - Future of Google Ads

Does it even make sense to have a career in Google Ads anymore? 

If AI search is taking over and keywords are dead, what is even the point of Google Ads? 

Now, this is something I have been hearing in increasing amounts over time, but especially over the last month or so since Google Marketing Live. 

If you're watching, you'll notice I'm sitting on my couch right now rather than at my desk because I want to just have a real heart-to-heart with you about how I'm thinking about this question and how I recommend you think about it as well. 

So, in this episode, we are going to be talking about the future of Google Ads and specifically the future for Google Ads practitioners, whether you are a business owner, learning Google Ads, agency, freelancer, or in-house marketer. 

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working with big brands at Google and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Episode 126: The Future of Google Ads. 

Now, whether you've been working with Google Ads for a month, a year, or a decade, you know that change is one of the only constants in paid ads. So AI and automation is not totally new to us. In fact, Smart bidding has been around for a decade. Performance Max has been around for four or five years now. But I will agree that something feels distinctly different about this moment.

This is the first time we actually heard a Google executive say publicly, and I quote, "You can't choose keywords anymore." 

That is new. Last year we heard about keywordless targeting. Now Google is saying you can't choose keywords anymore. 

Spoiler alert: you still can. That's why Episode 123 was all about keyword research.

The other thing that feels distinctly different now as well is ads in AI experiences on Google through things like ads in AI mode and the expansion of AI Max beyond Search to Shopping, but also things like ChatGPT ads that are absolutely going on in the marketplace. 

However, in spite of all these changes, I actually think this is the best time ever to be a Google Ads practitioner. The most complicated, sure, but the time with the most opportunity and the most exciting things we get to do with ads. 

As always, I like to break down my understanding of any Google Ads concept into its three core components: 

1. Bidding

2. Targeting

3. Creative 

So, let's do that right now. 

Bidding is the part that has been automated for the most amount of time. And you know by now that I advocate for Smart bidding in the most scenarios possible.

I'm actually writing my second book about bidding right now, Inside Google Ads: Everything You Need to Know About Bidding. 

And so, I feel a little bit of relief. Selfishly, bidding is actually the area that has changed the least over the last couple of years. We have our four key smart bidding strategies: 

1. Max Conversions

2. Max Conversion Value

3. Target CPA

4. Target ROAS

And combined with your conversion tracking, this is how you tell Google what you want your campaigns to achieve.

And this is a change that I still meet practitioners who are still not on board with, but this train has left the station. Google Ads is no longer about locking down what happens in the SERP, Exact Match keywords, negatives, and pinning, so that hopefully a conversion happens later. Instead, Google Ads is about feeding your conversation data and as we spoke about in the last episode, your customer data back into the Google Ads platform, letting it know the goal you want to achieve with that data and then allowing it to get there.

The bidding innovations we are seeing now are ones that are incremental and support this vision of helping you help Google achieve your goals. 

For example, Smart Bidding Exploration lets you experiment with different Target ROAS to see if it drives incrementality. Journey-aware bidding allows small budget advertisers to leverage Target CPA in a way they might not have been able to before. And then customer lifecycle goals with things like new customer acquisition, customer retention, and New Prospect mode are all ways to leverage your audience data with your conversion tracking to let Google bid for new customers only or people who've never been to your website before or your best customers only.

So, even if you're still feeling apprehensive about AI targeting or AI creative, I assure you AI bidding is the way to go. If you're not on board with that, you're definitely not going to be on board with where we're going for the rest of this episode.

But importantly, just because it's AI-powered bidding, it doesn't mean it's humanless bidding. I just listed off all the different things and features and tools that you need in order to make that bidding work. So, you still need a strategy, a human strategy that you can bring to Google's AI so that together you can achieve the results you need. 

Do not outsource your thinking to AI. Your strategy is for AI to execute.

Now, let's talk about AI targeting. This is the one that Google has wanted us to get on board with for a while with Performance Max, where you don't get to pick your keywords or targeting. I know we have search themes and audience signals, as I spoke about in Episode 105. 

But those are mostly placebos and we're at this interesting point now where, on the one hand, we know Exact Match no longer means exact and Google says keywords are going away. True. But on the other hand, you can still use Exact Match keywords today and drive great results. In fact, for many businesses, especially smaller businesses, that is the way to drive good results.

So, how do we reconcile these two things?

Keywords are not dying and your targeting control is not going away; it's just changing. For example, three episodes ago, I did a whole episode about keyword research. That is still important because today, right now, yes, you still use keywords. At a Google event I recently went to in Toronto, they shared that one in six Google searches comes in a medium other than text. So one in six searches comes through voice or image or something else. And that's really powerful. But at the same time, five in six searches are still text! While AI mode and AI overviews are growing, they're still not the majority. The majority of people are still typing their Search phrases into Google which match to your keywords to show your ads.

So you don't need to completely change the way you do things today, but you do need to start preparing for where we can clearly see things are going. I've been revisiting my perspective around solutions like Broad Match and AI Max, and I'm actually getting on board the AI Max train now much more than I was even a month ago. 

In fact, on one of my Google Ads coaching calls last week, this was a small budget advertiser who only had about $30 a day to spend, and I recommended AI Max as the “best of bad options” for their scenario and here’s why.

From a targeting perspective, Broad Match and AI Max are similar, but AI Max brings a few key features that Broad Match just doesn't have. 

First is text customization, which previously I hated, but now I'm becoming more on board with because if you're going to serve an ad in a place like AI mode, you absolutely want to give Google the leeway to craft an ad that's going to really appeal to that user's query in a way that Broad Match just can't.

We also have these great branded controls coming into AI Max. For example, not only can you restrict the searches to certain brands or exclude certain brands, there's a new feature now in AI Max only where you can only show ads on unbranded searches. So, if an issue you've had before with Broad Match or AI Max is just doing a ton of competitor terms or adjacent businesses, check one toggle and that is no more.

Just like we knew Display campaigns were going to die because there were no Display feature innovations in the last couple of years, we know now that Standard Search and Standard Shopping are not going to see any more innovations because all the new features are coming into AI Max for Search and AI Max for Shopping. So what this means for your targeting is that yes, today you can still do your narrow targeting, pick your audiences, and pick your Exact Match keywords. That's okay. But also know that by a year from now, or maybe two years from now, that will not work as well as it used to.

And this is actually the most common reason I see people booking Google Ads coaching calls with me. They'll say, "What I've always done is not working as well anymore." 

You're not alone, and we’ve got to start learning and adapting. So if you have never turned on AI Max before, think about where you can strategically use this and test this to see what it can do for you. Of course, on day one and day two, it's going to be dumb. But as it starts to learn, get conversions, and work under your bid strategy, it will get good results for your business.

AI-powered targeting, whether through keywords, audiences, or content, will become the new norm. And while we are not there yet, I now clearly see that we will get there soon, within a year or two. So climb on board and start your testing now, because the worst thing you could do is stick with your exact controlled way of doing things, watch the world change around you, and then suddenly find yourself in a world where your old-school 2020s strategy doesn't work anymore and you did not use that opportunity to figure out how you or your clients are going to adapt.

Of course, if you want help with this mindset shift or figuring out the right way to test these new features, you can book a call with me at jyll.ca. 

Now that we've tackled bidding and targeting, let's talk about creative. 

For years, this is the place where I've said bidding yes, targeting maybe, but creative no,as in, no place for AI here. 

However, there are a lot of AI creative features in Google Ads now, whether it's text customization in AI Max (what automatically created assets are now called), or assets like site links, callouts, and images. We dove into those in detail in Episode 118.

Then there are AI-edited and generated images and videos, which are becoming a bigger part of Demand Gen or PMax campaign creation and optimization in Google Ads. 

So how should you think about leveraging AI creative? I'm going to repeat something I said earlier: The thinking still needs to be human. The strategy is still human. The insight still comes from humans. You have information that only you have, and you share that with these AI creative tools, and then you’re setting Google up to edit, propose, or create new creative that works well for you.

The feature that I am most excited to test in Google Ads right now (I have not tried this as of this recording) is the AI Brief. This is coming to AI Max for Search, coming to AI Max for Shopping, and PMax. It's a way for you to prompt the system about what kind of searches, audiences, and messaging you want. 

That messaging piece is super key. Because think about it, in the past, we would use keywords and negatives or placements and audience exclusions. Now, the new way that targeting is going is through AI Brief. You just use plain English to say what you want and don't want from a targeting and creative perspective.

Because let's face it, automatically created assets up until now have been benign at best similar to stuff you may have done or really terrible at worst. I've seen some bad examples of AI-generated headlines. But when that happens, I don't just blame the AI for being stupid. Now that we have tools like AI Brief, we can tell it what we need. And remember, one of the key places Google Ads AI gets information is from your landing page. You, the human, are still 100% in control of your landing page. So if you're not liking the automated targeting or creative coming into Google Ads, curse the AI, but then go back to your landing page and see what might need to be fixed to make it clear to Google's AI what kind of messaging and user you want.

A completely AI-generated image and video still gives me the heebie-jeebies; it's not quite there yet. Will it ever be totally there crossing that uncanny valley so that we can’t tell the difference? Maybe. But my action for you is to not just turn off all the automated AI creative features. Just as with my advice about targeting, start testing and see if it could potentially be helpful. If you're in a sensitive industry, fine, but if you're an e-commerce or service business where the risk is low, turn it on, prompt it with that AI Brief, and see what it can generate for you.

When I interviewed Ginny Marvin in Episode 121, she said something I absolutely agree with and have been repeating it ever since: the role of the marketer is changing, but marketing is more important than ever. Those foundations that honestly a lot of Google practitioners never learned of understanding who your target audience is, what they need, and how your product fulfills that need are vital. If you have a great understanding of those basics, you can bring that to AI and achieve extraordinary results. 

AI is an average maker. It lifts up the floor, letting people with no skills achieve average results. But that doesn't mean your career is over. It means your mandate is to bring your human intelligence, expertise and information context to the AI so that while others are raising the floor, you are raising the roof. You are achieving extraordinary results through leveraging AI tools paired with your expertise in new ways.

Yes, I really did just raise the roof in 2026 online, so this will be here forever to haunt me. 

But that visual is important: others are raising the floor with AI, but that's not good enough for you. Be above average and raise the roof by pairing your expertise with Google's AI. 

So, does it still make sense to study and learn Google Ads in 2026? 

Absolutely. While we have amazing new tools at our disposal and customer behavior is changing, the foundations are remarkably unchanged. People come to Google by the billions every day with questions that need answering. If you have a relevant answer and a high-quality experience for them, you will win on Google and in business.

Because yes, ad quality is exactly the same in AI mode or AI Overviews as it has been in Search. People still want a reliable solution to their problem, whether they're getting it from AI mode or a traditional Shopping result. 

As always, the only constant in our industry is change and it’s an absolute pleasure and privilege to be one of the people guiding you through these changes as Google Ads continues to evolve. 

Of course, if you're feeling stuck or want a second opinion, you can book a call with me at jyll.ca or follow the link in the episode description. These are the exact kind of conversations I'm having with clients every week. I'd be happy to help you as well. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time inside Google Ads.