This year’s Google Marketing Live event focused heavily on how AI is transforming the advertising landscape, making it easier for businesses to connect with customers and drive results. The core message was clear: Google’s AI advantage is your business advantage, helping you find valuable customers and move them from discovery to decision more efficiently.
Consumers are no longer following a straight path. They’re constantly online, switching between searching, streaming, scrolling, and shopping. This means the old way of planning marketing funnels doesn’t quite cut it anymore. The key is to be present where your customers are, right when they’re making decisions, and to get the best returns on your efforts. Google and YouTube are uniquely positioned to help with this, reaching customers across all these behaviours with significant trust and reach. In fact, 83% of people use Google or YouTube daily, and over 5 trillion searches happen globally each year.
AI Supercharges Search
AI is giving Google Search new superpowers, moving beyond just providing information to offering intelligence. This allows users to ask virtually anything, and they’re loving the results. AI Overviews, a recent launch, has been incredibly successful, leading to happier users and more frequent searches. In major markets like the US and India, AI Overviews are boosting search result scores by over 10%. For those wanting a more in-depth AI search experience, AI Mode is rolling out, offering advanced reasoning, multimodality, and conversational follow-ups directly within search.
The Future of Advertising is Here
Advertising has seen big changes, but what’s happening now is arguably the biggest shift yet. The future of advertising isn’t coming; it’s already here. For advertisers, this evolution in search means three key areas of opportunity:
Key Takeaways
- AI-Powered Discovery: Gemini models in Search can understand complex questions and identify commercial intent even in searches that don’t explicitly state it. This means ads can appear at the right moment, offering helpful solutions, like an airline-approved pet carrier for someone searching about bringing small dogs on flights. Ads are expanding into AI Overviews on desktop and mobile, and experiments are underway in AI Mode.
- Multimodal Understanding: Search is already great at capturing intent, but new signals allow Google to understand the ‘why’ behind a search, not just the ‘what’. This moves from matching keywords to predicting future needs, enabling more precise ad delivery.
- Agentic Action: Search is evolving to help consumers take action more quickly, streamlining the path to conversion.
AI and ROI: A Powerful Combination
Google’s AI-powered solutions are designed to give you the best return on your advertising investment. Combining Google Search and YouTube campaigns has been shown to drive significantly higher returns compared to other media combined. To take advantage of these new experiences, AI-powered campaigns are the way forward. The "Power Pack" offers next-generation ad solutions:
- Performance Max: Utilises Google’s channels and AI for unified campaigns.
- AI Max for Search: Specifically built for the evolving search landscape.
- Demand Gen: Creates and converts demand across visual surfaces like Search and YouTube.
It’s becoming clear that manually building campaigns or choosing keyword lists is no longer practical, especially with natural language queries and visual searches. AI Max for Search campaigns aims to simplify this, making campaigns ready for today’s search behaviour with a single click.
YouTube: The Discovery Powerhouse
Video ads are becoming more prominent, appearing on surfaces like Search and Google Shopping. YouTube remains a key platform for discovery and prospecting. Demand Gen campaigns on YouTube are particularly effective for finding new customers, with a significant portion of conversions coming from users who hadn’t seen the brand’s ads on Google Search recently. YouTube is also becoming more shoppable, with shopping ads on Connected TVs allowing viewers to interact with products and complete purchases on their phones. Shorts is also evolving into a smoother shopping experience, allowing users to explore and buy products without leaving the app.
Creator Partnerships and Asset Studio
Google Ads now features a Creator Partnerships Hub, making it easier to find the right creators for your brand by searching keywords or genres. This helps connect brands with creators to capture audience attention. Generative AI is also supercharging the creative process. Asset Studio, launching later this year, will be a unified creative destination within Google Ads. It allows users to generate infinite variations of creative assets from product images, turning them into professional-looking ads and videos quickly and efficiently.
Modern Measurement for AI Performance
To keep up with AI-powered campaigns and creative scaling, measurement needs to be equally advanced. Google’s modern measurement plan includes:
- Smarter Attribution: Providing better insights into campaign performance.
- Faster Incrementality Testing: Helping to understand what’s truly driving results.
- Data Manager: A central hub to connect all data sources (web, stores, CRM, apps) and make your data work harder for peak performance.
This plan focuses on cross-channel measurement, data-driven attribution, and incrementality experiments, all fuelled by your own data.
Top 5 Takeaways from GML 2025
- Be Where Customers Are: The customer journey is dynamic. Be present in real-time across search, streaming, scrolling, and shopping. Google and YouTube together help move consumers from discovery to decision faster.
- AI Powers Search: AI is giving Google Search superpowers, creating more meaningful ways for you to reach customers.
- YouTube is Key for Discovery: It’s a powerhouse for building brands and finding new customers you can’t reach elsewhere.
- Maximise ROI with the Power Pack: Google’s best AI models are integrated into next-gen campaigns (Performance Max, AI Max for Search, Demand Gen) for Search and YouTube, offering choice, transparency, and control.
- Fuel Your AI: Your creative, measurement, and data are the fuel for AI performance. The Google Ads AI Essentials assessment can help you prioritise how to best use Google AI.
Everything you need to maximise growth with Google AI is available, making it an exciting time for marketers.
