The Click Brief- May 2026

Jeremy Packee and Emily Anderson break down the biggest paid media story of the year so far: Google Marketing Live 2026. With Google unveiling a wave of AI-focused updates across search, shopping, creative, measurement, and campaign management, Jeremy and Emily unpack what these announcements actually mean for advertisers, and which ones are worth paying attention to right now.

The conversation covers Google’s push toward AI-powered search experiences, agentic commerce, predictive measurement, Demand Gen expansion, AI Max, Merchant Center updates, and new tools designed to help marketers automate more of their workflows. Along the way, they discuss where these changes create real opportunities, where questions still remain, and why clean first-party data is becoming more important than ever.

As always, the focus isn’t on the headlines alone, it’s on what marketers should be testing, watching, and preparing for as Google’s advertising ecosystem becomes increasingly driven by AI.

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Top Takeaways

Biggest Shift
Google is transforming search from a keyword-driven experience into an AI-powered conversation, creating new opportunities, and new challenges, for advertisers trying to maintain visibility and control.

Most Interesting Announcement
Universal Cart and the Universal Commerce Protocol could allow users to discover, evaluate, and purchase products directly within Google experiences without ever visiting a website.

Biggest Opportunity
Merchant Center is evolving into a strategic AI input layer. Advertisers with clean product feeds, rich attributes, lifestyle imagery, and strong first-party data may gain a significant advantage in AI-powered shopping experiences.

Measurement Upgrade
Google introduced predictive conversion metrics designed to connect upper-funnel activity, branded searches, video views, and site engagement to future conversion value beyond traditional attribution windows.

Tool Worth Testing
Ask Advisor continues expanding across Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and other platforms, helping marketers surface insights and troubleshoot issues more efficiently.

Other Platform Updates

• AI Mode continues expanding as Google’s preferred search experience
• AI Max is becoming more prominent within Search campaigns and broad match targeting
• Demand Gen is receiving new attribution, testing, and measurement capabilities
• Google is introducing AI-powered lead qualification directly within search ads
• AI Brief provides advertisers with a way to guide AI-generated creative using brand instructions and campaign goals
• Asset Studio adds expanded video generation and one-click creative testing workflows
• Product feeds are expanding into additional surfaces, including paused YouTube ads and Google Maps placements
• Creator partnership content can now be boosted more easily through Demand Gen campaigns
• Google is emphasizing first-party data, modeled measurement, and causality testing as core inputs for AI-powered optimization

Final Take

Google’s vision is clear: more automation, more AI, more conversational experiences, and more commerce happening directly inside Google’s ecosystem. The challenge for marketers isn’t whether to adopt these tools—it’s understanding where they create real value, where they still require human oversight, and how to maintain control over data, measurement, and business outcomes as advertising becomes increasingly AI-driven.

Episode Transcript

Jeremy: Hello and welcome to the ClickBrief podcast.

Emily: Your monthly download of what’s new and what matters in digital advertising and paid media.

Jeremy: I’m Jeremy Packee here with Emily Anderson.

Emily: May was the most impactful month for paid media this year. Honestly, maybe even the last two years as we go through this, Google Marketing Live pushed ad ecosystems further towards the AI native search, agentic commerce, AI assistant creative, cross product assistance, and more modeled measurement. I

Jeremy: Know it’s a

Emily: Lot. This is a heavy one. It is. Jeremy, shout out to him. He is the one who actually physically writes the click brief. We both try to keep track through the month. This month was crazy, but he does a great job of collecting everything and then also breaking it down into layman’s terms. So I’ll let him kind of kick us off here, but it’s going to be a heavy focus on Google Marketing Live today.

Jeremy: Sure. A lot of what Google announced is still in testing beta or in a phased rollout, but it was a very big strategy month and almost like a taste of the future in my opinion. And the future is kind of starting now. Not every announcement was a change your account tomorrow moment and it shouldn’t be. That would be kind of wild if they’re like, “You need to change everything.” But they definitely laid the groundwork to do some of that over the next few months possibly. Like Emily said, our big read in the month, platforms are giving marketers more AI, more modeled measurements, some steering wheels, powerful tools, less visibility on what’s happening. And it’s less about the micro changes and more about validation. So incrementality, protecting intent and keeping your first party measurement clean. And yeah, we’re going to talk about Google marketing live the most.

Emily: Before we dive into it,

Jeremy: I have

Emily: A question for you.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: So obviously a lot of this we kind of saw coming because we see the platform starts making changes or we get into betas before things are announced.

Jeremy: Yep.

Emily: Was there anything that you saw from Google Marketing Live that you didn’t see coming or you were very surprised by?

Jeremy: Yeah. We have a section on this specifically, but the Universal Cart I thought was so cool. And we’ll talk about this in a little bit, but I’ll just give you a preview. Basically, you’re going to be able to search on AI mode or be on YouTube or even watch YouTube on your TV. I think Gmail was included as well and you’re going to be able to just buy something right from that without going to the site. This

Emily: Is like, I think Mike, our coworker was like, “Can’t wait for my kid to buy some crazy shit on it.

Jeremy: ” In one

Emily: Click. And

Jeremy: That’s definitely going to happen and we’re going to have to see how it rolls out. But I even think that even starts competing with Amazon. Amazon. Where it’s like, okay, if I search for my running shoes and let’s just say I typed in running shoes for pavement, one, I can make that way more conversational way longer, but also still the fact that Google’s going to have this history of me. It might already know it’s going to be like size 10, he likes this color. And if I can just check out right in AI mode or Gemini or whatever, that’s just really powerful and different and convenient for everybody. But one thing I was thinking about, we’re getting kind of right into it, is that devaluing some of the website. We put all this effort into making websites look pretty and it has the perfect images and the perfect copy, which still matters because A, I’ll be scraping that and throwing that in these conversational searches, I guess.

But it’s just something to think about. You might not be optimizing for a human on your website. Totally. You have to consider optimizing for the UCP, the Universal Commerce protocol and how that’s going to show up in these conversational queries. And if that’s sort of a black box and you don’t have visibility into what’s going on, that’s kind of scary.

Emily: Yeah. I think e-commerce advertisers got a taste of that with, like you mentioned with Amazon with the buy now button. I mean, you really don’t have a website. I mean, obviously if you scroll through the product, they give you some- And you can go to the store page. But yeah, I primarily buy … If I’m on Amazon, I’m accepting that maybe there’s an element of sketch to this product. I’m okay with that. Element of sketch. But I’m also looking at heavy reviews. That’s another

Jeremy: Good point. Reviews are going to matter on the website because reviews can be pulled into-

Emily: And Google’s already doing

Jeremy: That. Yeah. And AI is going to be using that to put it in the ads themselves. And these ads are becoming much more AI mode sort of friendly, conversational friendly because it’s kind of a weird experience what maybe is even happening right now and maybe what’s happened in the last six months to a year with AI mode, you’ll do a search and it’ll just show a shopping ad at the bottom. That’s a weird experience kind of. There’s a conversation happening and then there’s just this billboard, bunch of billboards. It’s like when you go on the freeway and you’re like, “Oh my God, these are all injury attorneys.” You know what I mean?That’s what it feels like. It’s like

Emily: Injury or divorce attorney.

Jeremy: So yes. Yeah, you’re right. So the ads now are becoming conversational and your website and your Google Merchant Center feed, this is now this database of this is where everything’s being pulled from. But yeah, I know we kind of just got into a little- We just kind

Emily: Of jumped in. I was just curious because some of these we kind of saw coming, but yeah, I mean, that’s a great call out as well.

Jeremy: And we talked about a lot of this stuff, like you said, announced a lot of this over the last three months. So a lot of this stuff wasn’t really new, but we got actual details.

Emily: Right. Yes,

Jeremy: Absolutely. So that was the big change.

Emily: But okay, cool. We can get into it now. I just wanted to … That was a question.

Jeremy: Yeah. Overall, Google Marketing Live, this is one big connected AI feedback loop is kind of like what they talked about. Insights, creative bidding, measurement are no longer being treated as separate parts of the account. Google wants each piece to inform the next. So audience and search behavior that shapes creative. And like I mentioned before, remember, you can let Google look at your photos, your emails. So it can know everything about you and make super tailored creative.You might be recommended. We could do the same search and you might get a different product.

Emily: Totally.

Jeremy: And you should. And that’s kind of how it should work.

Emily: And that was kind of a light bulb. I don’t know if it was a light bulb moment for me, maybe that’s giving this too much credit, but something I kind of realized. So I do SQRs like every other PPC marketer

Jeremy: Pretty

Emily: Religiously and traditionally you would be appalled at some of the search terms that you see convert. But what I have to keep in mind and what I think other advertisers have to keep in mind is although that search term that the user converted on might not seem completely relevant, Google’s algorithm knows what that user was searching in the past, has way more data than we would ever know. So that’s why, I mean, again, just continuing to harp on making sure your CRM data is accurate and what you’re feeding back to Google as a legit lead versus a fake huge lead. Good signals. That’s almost like I would spend more time making sure that is crispy clean rather than doing SQRs at this point because I am seeing broader and broader SQRs even for like if I’m running a campaign even for exact match or

Jeremy: Phrase

Emily: Match keywords, it doesn’t care.

Jeremy: Everything’s broad match kind of.

Emily: It don’t care at all.

Jeremy: And it doesn’t even show you. 50% of your searches are hidden and that might be one just because Google’s doing that. But two, that could, I don’t know, is that a half an hour long conversation with AI mode that led to that search? So how would they even- So

Emily: How would they allot a query

Jeremy: To that? And they try to do that a litle bit. They’re kind of trying to infer intent and put that in the search terms. I think I have a little section on

Emily: That. Yes, you do. That was an interesting part too. And I think that’s where that kind of moment for me came up during this. But they have to do that. So I don’t know, pretty interesting stuff all around there.

Jeremy: But if it’s obviously bad, like Emily said for the search query reports, you still should add it as a negative. But with the increase in AI Max specifically, if you are running that and your competitors are running that, you’re all bidding on each other’s brands. It’s essentially I see in Amax. It’s like your competitors are going to become a part of it. So I’ve actually noticed that some brand CPCs have gone up in the last couple months and my theory is Google’s been pushing AI Max for everybody. So now our competitors are bidding on our brand and probably don’t even know it.

Emily: 100%. Yep. I’ve been seeing the same.

Jeremy: I’m talking like

Emily: 100%

Jeremy: Increase.

Emily: Yeah. I am 100% seeing the same thing. So what a win for Google. Yeah. And then when you look, I mean to really nail that down, you go into auction insights and then you’ll see like, oh, why all of a sudden … And then you might think, oh, they must be doing this on purpose. And

Jeremy: Probably

Emily: They might be, but odds are they? I bet they’re

Jeremy: Probably aren’t. It’s just AI Max.

Emily: Yeah. Especially if maybe they’re not super advanced, maybe it’s a smaller business kind of just doing it in- house. I don’t know. And

Jeremy: Imagine for people that are just like, let’s say you have a brand campaign, like a brand search campaign and you’re being told to turn on AI Max, that is not a brand search campaign anymore, unless you put the brand controls on it and you know the second part to it. But if you’re just putting AI Max on all of your campaigns-

Emily: Which I think is what it defaults to now when you create

Jeremy: A

Emily: New campaign.

Jeremy: Oh, AI Max on?

Emily: Yes.

Jeremy: Oh, interesting.

Emily: I think you have to go turn it off.

Jeremy: Okay. I guess I should have assumed that, but-

Emily: I’m not 100% sure, but- I bet that’s right. Check it. If you’ve recently lost your search campaign and you’re not sure, go into the campaign settings and look, but I’m pretty sure if it’s not a default, now it’s going to be.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think I saw the default in editor. I launched campaign as editor and I turned that off, but I guess I didn’t realize if I made that right in the interface, I’d probably do that as well. Got it. Well, cool. Yeah, let’s get into the high impact updates, which I think all of these were high impact just conceptually. Google pushes search farther into AI mode. So Google used GML to, that’s Google Marketing Live, to reinforce that search is becoming more conversational, longer form and AI mediated. So Google said that AI mode has changed how people search by letting users have a back and forth conversation directly with search. Google also said that search queries reached an all- time high last quarter and framed AI as one of the main reasons people are asking more complex questions. I mean, that makes sense.

Emily: Ching, ching, ching.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. Right. Ching, ching. If they can figure out how to put the

Emily: Ads

Jeremy: In there. They’re making more

Emily: Money. Yeah. I mean, because now before you would have a user search one query, go to a website, be done. Now out of one user, you might be getting several queries because they’re interacting with AI mode and then that’s that many more opportunities to serve ad impressions.

Jeremy: And one of the biggest, I think this was in the presentation, so these are not my words. I don’t know who came up with this. I’ll just say Google. They said the best ads are answers. I couldn’t agree more with that though. If people are going into AI mode looking for answers and you just have just an ad just with the product title, that feels outdated kind of in that experience. I’m not saying that doesn’t work everywhere. It certainly works. And if you go to google.com right now and you just click enter, it’s still going to give you the classic Google results, but AI mode is right there. If you click the button, it’s like the default is AI mode. And I literally did this yesterday because I was like, if I just go to Google and I click enter, is it AI mode? And I use Safari, I think.

I thought I tested it on Chrome two, but the default wasn’t AI mode, but anybody that physically clicks, thinks they have to click to enter, that’s AI mode. Yeah. I

Emily: Was going to say- So it’s in the middle. I do it on my phone and I just have Safari on my phone here and I usually always just search in the URL

Jeremy: Bar,

Emily: It defaults to AI mode.

Jeremy: It does.

Emily: Yep. And then you can just kind of expand it and have a straight up conversation and I’m not going to lie,

Jeremy: I

Emily: Do. 100%.

Jeremy: I do 90% of my searches in Amode. I think AmMode’s great. I think it’s gotten much better. I don’t know if everybody has this or if it’s just because we have a paid Google plan, but you can also just click the little button and click Pro. It’s almost like a better response versus the regular one. I don’t have that on my phone, if that makes sense. I’ll get a response and I’ll be like, “Try that again and then I’ll click it on Pro just to make sure it works.” So yeah, I think that’s just evidence that paid search is drifting towards the answer engine inside of it. So fortunately, maybe unfortunately to a certain extent as well, it’s not always going to be taking people to the websites and we’re going to talk in a minute about that universal cart. Unless you’re doing more research, which I guess you would go to the website to maybe double check.

Emily: It’d be interesting what the price point of when people are like, okay, we need to go.

Jeremy: Yeah. Are you still going to go to the website before buying? I think maybe I will- I think for a certain

Emily: Price point,

Jeremy: Depending on what I- Yeah, it’s over 50 bucks even. I maybe would consider it. But if it’s like- Or if

Emily: It’s something I really want to make sure is right for safety or reasons or something like that.

Jeremy: Like kids related or something. Kids

Emily: Related or yeah, just kind of validating.

Jeremy: But if I’m buying a squirt gun or something, I might just be buy.

Emily: Well, that’s me on Amazon.

Jeremy: Exactly. You accept

Emily: The level of sketch that might come

Jeremy: In. And I think that’s going to be huge though. If people treat that like Amazon, I think it’s going to be so normalized that you just can buy in there that we’re going to forget to a certain extent that we always went to the website and checked out everything and bought it. Because Amazon, you click the product and you kind of just like, “Oh, okay, this is decently reviewed and you buy.” So I think that’s super, super interesting. I guess the cautionary tale is you have to try to keep what’s showing up in check. What are you looking like in that experience? So your website’s still going to matter the features of the ad, like the AI, what can I remember it?

Oh AI brief. The AI brief is going to matter kind of like showing Google how you want to show up. So all those things are going to matter. But my takeaway is you’re not going to have control in all these experiences. You’re not going to be able to exactly say how you want the ad to show up to Emily versus me and you probably don’t want to. There’s too many variables. Everybody’s a little bit different. So just find that really interesting. Next high impact update, direct offers, AI powered shopping ads and conversational attributes bring more commerce into AI search. Google announced several updates tied to AI powered search and shopping experiences, direct offers. We talked about this a while ago, but they gave more examples. They can dynamically generate tailored promotions for high intent shoppers, including discounts, coupons, custom deals and bundles based on promotional rules by the advertiser.

So that’s just a lot like general promotions. They just show up here. So it feels a little bit different. I was going to say

Emily: They’ll make up promotions.

Jeremy: I mean, you do

Emily: Have to have that dialed

Jeremy: In

Emily: With the instructions, like you said.

Jeremy: So Google also showed AI-powered shopping ads that add a plain language summary or explanation above the standard product information, helping shoppers understand why a product fits the question they asked. So more like an answer. I think the difference between search ads and shopping ads definitely feels more non-existent in this environment, which is maybe why they’re adding AI Max to standard shopping. I just made that connection right now. They’re kind of just blending. It feels like it’s blended.

Emily: Yep. I feel like it will have shopping ads might have more text in the future

Jeremy: To give that

Emily: Additional context, but

Jeremy: Then

Emily: It will have that link like traditional shopping has like product shop link RIP, traditional shopping.

Jeremy: I

Emily: Love

Jeremy: You. No, not RIP, I feel like it’s going to be back forever now that it got AI Max. If you have something AI attached to name, Google’s not bailing on it.

Emily: Max Plus-

Jeremy: Exactly. You’re good.

Emily: SE. But it won’t work like it did. I

Jeremy: Think you can toggle it on and off. So I agree. Okay. Yeah. Another important piece are these conversational attributes in merchant centers. So some that I saw were question and answer, document link, related product, item, group title, variant option, popularity rank. So these are additional product data attributes designed for more detailed conversational searches on services like AI mode. They can help Google answer more specific questions, recommend complimentary products and use richer product information beyond traditional feed fields. So this is an element of maybe Google trying to give some control where it’s like, if somebody asks this question, how do you want us to answer it? Who knows if brands are just going to put straight up lies in there. But if it fits, I would say this makes sense. We’re going to be doing this for a client where if they ask something, we want to guide them that this is the answer, so that’s good.

It’s

Emily: Small or Amazon kind of recently added frequently returned

Jeremy: Or frequently

Emily: Kept

Jeremy: Items, but that’s

Emily: Added clearly by Amazon.

Jeremy: And then Amazon Alexa Shopping, which they rebranded, that AI agent, that’s pretty good for shopping Amazon. I just started using

Emily: That. But yeah, I feel like right now when you’re looking at feed optimization, you’re primarily looking at title and making sure all the attributes are here. I think this is kind of like feed optimization 2.0. When I think about all the brands that we audit or work with that come to us and they don’t have a clean feed,

Jeremy: Just like

Emily: Tons of opportunity, one for them. But now it’s like an additional opportunity if you are an e-comm brand and you do have a clean feed, now

Jeremy: You

Emily: Can go to that next level and add these additional attributes and the cleaner the feed, the more often your product’s going to be shown and you have that higher of a chance of a sale coming through.

Jeremy: Yeah, just fully decked out feed. One of the things I put in the actual blog post was the big takeaway is merchant center is turning into a strategic AI input, not just a shopping feed manager. So the brands that give Google better structured data, lifestyle images, videos, you can attach videos in the feed. Lifestyle images are huge. That’s a litle bit different than just additional images. Having all of those in there, one is just good in general, because we’ve seen the carousel style ads on the shopping feed, but Google’s going to be using that in those experiences to try to tailor that. Almost like Meta, like in Dramada, we have how many conversations about that. Google’s going to try to target the right person with the right ad. Totally. It’s the same. Everybody’s doing the same thing kind of in their own way. It’s just that Google’s been more not … I feel like they haven’t been seen as much as Meta in the same way.

It’s kind of always been search intent, lower mid-funnel and there’s now this push to take this money from Meta in a way, be more social, act like more like a social platform.

Emily: I feel like maybe that comes down to as a user, it’s more obvious when you see an ad on Meta than you do on Google, I think.

Jeremy: In

Emily: What way? For example, when you’re scrolling your feed, it’s usually pretty obvious where the ad is because you’re not following that person or it’s clearly a product related app. When you’re just, and I’m just talking Google search here, it’s not as obvious. If you do a search, I did do a career day with middle school kids and I was talking about the Google Search page and basically showing, okay, this is an ad and this is not an ad.

Jeremy: Wait, you’re teaching them Google search?

Emily: No, just like paid advertising in

Jeremy: General

Emily: At the simplest form of it. Oh, cool. Yeah, it was actually really fun and they had a lot of good questions and these are eighth graders so they use the internet, but that was the first time someone had explained to them these are paid advertisements that wasn’t necessarily clear on the serve page. Obviously if you’re on YouTube and you get that cool-

Jeremy: I think my mom has no clue anything’s in my head. That’s

Emily: What I mean.

Jeremy: No clue. They just click the top link. I’m like, oh, that’s what I need. I got you as a big marketer. I got you that easily.

Emily: Yeah.

Jeremy: So I

Emily: Feel like Google’s been able to kind of like they have that advantage over Meta in that sense is my thought on it because it’s just not as obvious.

Jeremy: I could see that. And I think in this AI mode is going to be so native to that-

Emily: Totally.

Jeremy: Even

Emily: Less obvious.

Jeremy: Yeah. It just can be like, oh, look, this product, it says right here in this ad, this helps headaches for people that like sunflowers. You know

Emily: What I mean? It’s going to be terrible and great at

Jeremy: The same time. Exactly. Yeah. Everything’s going to be perfectly curated. Next update, business agent for leads turns search ads into conversational lead capture. So Google introduced this business agent for leads and agentic ad experience built to help advertisers qualify prospects directly from search instead of sending every user to a static landing page or basic lead form. The ad can answer questions in real time using information grounded in the advertiser’s website. So again,

Your website, I guess I was talking earlier, it could be deep prioritized for humans and I think that’s what this is saying sort of again too, granted they’re still going to the website, but if you’re asking questions, if you had this on, I don’t know if it’s going to be like a checkbox on type situation, but if somebody, let’s say you’re, I don’t know, if Zillow did this or something and I don’t know why Zillow began leads, but let’s just say you’re looking for a property, maybe a real estate agent or something and you’re like, “I’m looking for three bedroom houses that are on a hill that, I don’t know, have a basement and it was recently updated and has a pool.” I don’t know, if you had that conversation in there and it’s like, we have three houses from that reach out to Emily and you can just fill out that lead, that could be pretty qualified, qualifying them there, it also could not work.

Emily: Yeah. I mean,

Jeremy: I think

Emily: That goes back to what Meta did and LinkedIn eventually with the form fill ads where you could just directly fill out the form instead of going to Meta. I’ve had mixed success with that. I’ve had it work extremely well for clients, especially clients who are willing to go through the leads almost manually and whether that’s reaching out to them or in some other way. But I also have seen then an influx of spammy leads. Now, Meta’s done some additional things on their end to reduce the amount. I think it was a similar to a caption on there.

Jeremy: They’ve also done- The verification by

Emily: Text or phone or something. Yeah, something like that. So they have done something. So interesting to see how this rolls out, not surprised they’re moving more into this. One thing from Google Marketing Live that I like to see is they’re definitely, in addition, they’ve always, I feel like, been taking steps with to make e-comm experience better, but it does feel like they made some at least announcements to lead generation marketing as well and really hit on that

Jeremy: With

Emily: Not only this, but the future Google CRM system

Jeremy: That we’ll talk about in a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. And I think the cautionary thing is here, and maybe Google give visibility into this is like, what is that little chatbot saying? What is that Agentic experience like? What if it’s like, we don’t have houses? I’m sure it wouldn’t be that far off because it’s like Gemini powered and I feel Gemini in general has been getting better. And one thing I guess I would have to look into is, because there are those little leads that can happen right on Google. I think you’re talking about that, but like-

Emily: Oh, I guess they have lead forms too.

Jeremy: Yeah, they do. They do. But I don’t know if that’s what this 100% is.

Emily: This is more like a conversation.

Jeremy: Yeah. It’s like just to qualify the person for the ad, which is cool. Do you pay for it if somebody interacts with it? I never really thought about that either. So yeah, more to come on this, but definitely interesting.

Emily: Oh yeah, my note is still requires users to read and comprehend. Yeah, that’s true. Might be a problem. It’s true. But true, people have lizard ring- Or just accidentally click on it or something. Right. And people just want an easy answer. I mean, that’s why AI mode and all these LLMs are so popular. It’s like that’s society. We want quick, fast, easy answers. The time- You don’t want to search for it, ironically. Walking down to the library, picking out a book and

Jeremy: Having

Emily: To do manual book research, that is over. I can scarred from that from elementary school. I remember a book report on brackets.

Jeremy: I thought you went way back to manual book research.

Emily: Yeah. We are far from those days.

Jeremy: I need to find a good product. I’m going to go to manual book research. Now, if I want to

Emily: Find a fact about Raccoon, I can give you 60 facts on the ready.

Jeremy: Oh, dang. Wow. I

Emily: Mean, just by searching.

Jeremy: Saying- Hit your grow up for raccoon fast. You don’t need to go to an LLM.

Emily: Yeah, just go directly to Mittenbox.

Jeremy: That’s hilarious. Next one. So AI brief, we announced this a while ago. I feel like maybe it was just last month, it could have been two months ago, but Google announced AI brief as a new way to guide AI Max. Oh, I said right here, we announced this in April, but they expanded on it. Google described it like giving an agency a creative brief advertisers can share brand context, audience direction, campaign goals and guardrails in conversational language AI brief then interprets this as instructions and creates guidelines with previews that advertisers can review and refine before moving forward. So I haven’t seen that second part of this section. I want to triple verify that when I see it, because that’s kind of neat to see how it could verify it if they give a good experience for that. But overall, if you’re letting AI create ad copy, you have to put stuff in here.

You have to. You have to say maybe don’t say cheap, I don’t know, don’t say certain things or do say certain things. Or we always say besties, not customers and stuff like that.

Emily: Brand language.

Jeremy: Yeah, just the overall language. I think that’s important.

Emily: And honestly, if you were like, wow, I don’t have this at all, a great place to start is you could literally upload your website to one of these Geminis, chat and tell me, kind of create guidelines. Gemi. Yeah. I mean, no one knows who they are anymore. Just let the robots tell you, but not really. You can look at like, okay, I’ve used this past ad copy. What are these languages and words have in common? And then start there and then obviously manually review and refine. We’ll see. Any of this stuff, like when I tested Nana Banana, I was not impressed by that tool. So I think I need to see some examples before I get excited or recommend this.

Jeremy: That’s what I’m saying. If we can see the previews, that’s interesting because some of the examples they gave either on their blog post or in GML, I can’t remember, but it was like for people into fitness, talk like this. You know what I mean? So you could give a lot. I wonder if you could be like, for men, for women, for parents, that could be a good one. For parents, highlight the safety for grandparents- Highlight

Emily: The fun. …

Jeremy: Just put a buy down button.

Emily: Yeah. Yeah.

Jeremy: So stuff like that is just, I think it’s going to be important, but you could also just let it rip and see what happens, but then you have no brand control, which Google would absolutely love, but then that would be very scary. I

Emily: Kind of wish I had a test brand and just like-

Jeremy: Right. Hey, just turn it on.

Emily: Just like any, I don’t know what I would sell, but just to see what happened.

Jeremy: Right, because it’s going to use- And it would probably

Emily: Work better than I would want it to.

Jeremy: Exactly. I would want to know. So sometimes unfinished stuff. Anyone has something they want to do

Emily: Unhinged.

Jeremy: Yeah.

Emily: Maybe raccoon apparel.

Jeremy: Man, you got your own lane

Emily: Market.

Jeremy: So this next one, we kind of touched on this a little bit. Universal commerce protocol and universal cart moved Google further into agentic commerce. So basically Google highlighted UCP, that’s the Universal Commerce Protocol again, as a common language that connects agents and merchants. Google said that UCP allows live merchant data, including inventory, account linking and loyalty benefits to flow into customers real time searches and in AI mode. They also discuss universal cart and agentic shopping cart that works across merchants and Google products. Users may be able to add products while searching, chatting with Gemini, watching YouTube. So searching in AI mode, Or reading Gmail. So yes, you will be able to buy right off YouTube, which is pretty wild. And I think you’ll be able to do it from your TV with your Roku remote as

Emily: Well.You can do a litle bit of that right now.

Jeremy: But imagine if it’s like buy this product.

Emily: I got that. I

Jeremy: Got

Emily: Served a $12 bag of Doritos. I’m sure it was giant, but it was on my Roku stick. Click now. And I was like, wow, that’s insane.

Jeremy: But that is connected to your- Amazon. Oh, gotcha. So you’re watching on Prime?

Emily: Yes, I must

Jeremy: Have been.

Emily: Through Rocoustic, got a Prime

Jeremy: Ad

Emily: For Doritos, pops up.

Jeremy: So add to

Emily: Cart buy now.

Jeremy: So similar to that, but Google’s trying to do with the entire internet. Their whole shopping graph, it’s a crazy amount of products. Pretty

Emily: Wild.

Jeremy: Got to be

Emily: Bad for impulse buying at 20 AM.

Jeremy: Yes, exactly.

Emily: And

Jeremy: I’m about

Emily: To have a newborn. So if that rolls out in August, we-

Jeremy: Hit it with those $50 Doritos with you. I

Emily: Am in trouble. Oh, I’m definitely-

Jeremy: With the raccoon images.

Emily: Definitely buying the $12 bag of Doritos.

Jeremy: The GML demo showed a buy now button connected to a branded checkout screen on YouTube with shipping and payment information prefilled and the payment completed through Google Pay. So I think- I was

Emily: Going to say it has to be Google Pay, right?

Jeremy: Yeah, GPA is the way they have it set up. I think they probably have Klarna and I’m sure some of that stuff will be set up in the

Emily: Future.

Jeremy: I don’t use Google

Emily: Pay. I use Apple Pay.

Jeremy: I don’t even know really what GooglePay is. You just connect your credit card to it.

Emily: Yeah,

Jeremy: It’s the same thing. It’s the

Emily: Same thing. I just don’t have it set up

Jeremy: Because most stuff

Emily: Takes Apple Pay.

Jeremy: For sure. Yeah, I love Apple Pay. I’ll probably set this up if it makes shopping really easy and it’s just connected to my cart. Gosh, I

Emily: Wonder how this is going to impact. I just thought of this. Obviously Amazon has a returns problem where they get way too many returns and it burns and churns through products. How is that going to impact rates?

Jeremy: It’s going to be all in the

Emily: Retailer. It

Jeremy: Is. So

Emily: I don’t think

Jeremy: Google’s going to worry about it at all. Oh, Google doesn’t

Emily: Care. But they would worry about it if retailers all of a sudden like, wow, our sales are through the roof, but our returns are terrible. And now it’s costing

Jeremy: Us way

Emily: More money than

Jeremy: Before.

Emily: Turn this offer.

Jeremy: Well, I think you can just not opt to be in this experience, but I would say if you have the ability, I think people on Shopify are always at an advantage because Shopify just stays ahead and they’re just going to set your stuff up. I bet it’ll be a couple clicks to be on UCP because that connects everything. That’s the language of agentic shopping for Google. So you got to think of how complex that is to connect all these different sites and it works with promo codes and it checks out through their site, but through the Google experience. I said it was really ambitious. I think it’s always been- On the map. … Google’s dream to make this happen. I think this is it. And I don’t think

Emily: It’s happening overnight. Like

Jeremy: You said- But this is going to be it.

Emily: We’re moving in that direction.

Jeremy: So obviously you want your product data accurate, product detail’s accurate. Your

Emily: Return

Jeremy: Policy accurate. I’d never even thought about the return policy. That’s a good point. And you obviously could always, from my understanding, you’re going to be able to opt out of this, but I can’t imagine besides your point why you wouldn’t want to be a part of it. If Google’s recommending this product, you could just buy it right there and you’ve literally been having a conversation with Google for the last 20 minutes about what you want. If people trust AI mode, are you going to go to the website to make that purchase? Why would you? It’s going to feel clunky. I don’t want to go all the way to the website. It’s the same reason we buy on Amazon.

Emily: Yeah. I don’t know. It’d be interesting. I mean, I just feel like because of the industry we’re in, we are hyper aware and accepting and adoption of this new technology in AI mode, whereas-

Jeremy: We’re haters though too sometimes.

Emily: Oh, totally. We got a tinfoil hats in our back pocket. But at the same time, I have friends who don’t work in this space at all. They’re veterinarians, they’re doctor and they don’t even know. They couldn’t tell you what an LLM is or AI mode. They’re just searching. And that I think is still going to be the average user, the majority of the population for the foreseeable future. But

Jeremy: When that default is AI mode and they’re just going to be able to buy in that, I think it’s going to feel so natural. That they just don’t even think about it. When AI mode came out, it was almost laughable in a way, in my opinion. It was. No hate Google, but it was not great. And now even people on our team and I jokingly talk about my mom, she’ll just search and if that’s a default experience, that’s what she’s using. I

Emily: Know. And that’s what’s nerve-wracking when they had that study that came out that it was wrong 1% of the time.

Jeremy: And

Emily: When you have the amount of search queries

Jeremy: That are going

Emily: Through and it’s wrong 1%, that’s a lot of misinformation.

Jeremy: And if it’s pulling from your website that’s wrong, then it’s like

Emily: … Yeah. Or just I’ve had two … Now I’ll get questions from clients or other people of basically screenshots from LLMs

Jeremy: Asking

Emily: Paid marketing questions and the answer is not necessarily wrong, but it’s not the full context and that’s the problem.

Jeremy: And I think that’s why I hope that they will always give the ability to link out to the site or even … I kind of hope that the standard search experience lives for a long time because otherwise you’re going to be used something else to audit that. I still, just because we’re marketers, sometimes you have a distrust for bad marketing. I’ll get a result from ChatGPT or a result from Gemini or whatever or AI mode and I’ll have them audit each other. And then sometimes I’ll still, if it’s important enough, I’ll still do an old school search just to see because you don’t know how much editing is happening on these LLMs and you don’t know if it’s, like you said, if it’s not accurate or if it’s biased in some way. Yeah, full

Emily: Context. Or hallucination is

Jeremy: What

Emily: People … And that’s very accurate to what it does, but it will get better and be more interesting. But yeah, definitely the way of the future here.

Jeremy: Yeah. So Google made a strong case for DemandGen as the performance layer for YouTube and other visual surfaces. Google said advertisers who had a demand gen to search or Performance Max saw stronger performance, including higher ROAS and sales effectiveness. Google also announced several demand gen updates. I think we announced this previously, but they’re being expanded to Google Maps. Product feeds are expanding to more surfaces, including tablets, which that kind of threw me off because I feel like it’s always been tablets, but I did find that. Product feeds are also coming to pause ads starting on mobile, which Emily and I had a discussion about this. That’s literally like if you’re watching YouTube and you hit pause and there’s ads that show up, which I find sometimes super annoying because I’ll want to pause something like this- To see it. This is a bad example, but I’ll be looking at somebody’s golf swing and I’ll pause it to be like, oh, where are their arms?

And then ads show up and I’m like, “Oh, I can’t even get what I wanted.” But I get it. It’s so smart. I think Amazon did this a long time ago. I was like, “What a great untapped placement for the big guys there.” You

Emily: Want to win.

Jeremy: Whoever thought of that got a raise or like, “Hey, how about we put ads when you pause?” So genius. And it can even be ads related to the show.

Emily: On cable or TV now when during a timeout, they’ll-

Jeremy: So smart.

Emily: … make the screen smaller, you’ll see the timeout,

Jeremy: But you’re

Emily: Also getting a Papa John’s ad.

Jeremy: But you don’t have a commercial. I’m like, “I know that’s genius.”

Emily: Yeah, you’re not breaking the person’s

Jeremy: Attention because

Emily: They can still see.

Jeremy: Because if that full commercial comes on, I’m walking away. I’m going to get a drink and I might miss a minute of the game or something. Google also is making it easier to discover and boost creator assets that feature a brand advertisers in the YouTube affiliate program will be able to boost affiliate partnership videos into DemandGen. Google said adding creator assets in general to demand gen campaigns have increased conversion lift on average. That makes sense. We’re using the kind of UGC affiliate style ads on basically … I mean, YouTube a little bit, but every other platform we always ask for that type of creative. So it makes sense that it works on Google and that Google’s pushing it and that Google wants us to stay in kind of that YouTube, Google atmosphere. Google also added new measurement tools to help advertisers better understand DemandGen’s role in performance.

These were crazy. These were unexpected. I think it’s so cool. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to bid on them or what. Campaign type attribution, which isolates conversions demand gen contributed to so advertisers can compare it more clearly against channels like paid social. They took a lot of shots at Meta, not directly, but almost. Uplift experiments helps measure how DemandGen complements PMAX, which is kind of always a question. It’s like, why would I run it? That’s kind of a part of PMAX in a lot of ways. Expanding third party integrations so connects YouTube exposure to broader business outcomes across the media mix. So demand gen is really becoming more important to Google’s full funnel story. Google clearly wants advertisers to stop thinking about YouTube just as awareness and start treating it as a performance channel with visual intent signals. So a lot of these updates I think are pretty good I think.

I was getting excited here because I actually thought it was one of the other updates that I have later on, which is kind of the predicted values. So I got excited for nothing there, but demand gen updates are great. They push it hard. Google knows that YouTube is their big play against Meta, so they’re going to push it there.

Emily: Yeah. No comment from me here. I mean, we’ll see. We’re going to try it out and test it and see what measurement tools actually become available and what that looks like, what their limitations are and go from there.

Jeremy: And if we could just see some sort of attribution. We all sort of know that YouTube works. It’s sometimes hard to prove it and DemandGen is now they’re kind of new YouTube for action. So the fact that we can see, if we can see DemandGen, which it still has that display element as well, but I’ve always loved how those ads looked. They just always haven’t shown us great results. Yeah,

Emily: It’s hard to show the ROI. When you’re running, you can’t run a conversion-based campaign or you’re going to see low conversions and then compared to your search, you’re going to have to get the question, “Well, why wouldn’t we just put more money into search?” And then when you run more impression based YouTube campaigns, it’s obviously been hard to prove back the ROI. I mean, it’s just like that content- So if we can see that- We even have that issue with Meta as well or any channel. We don’t have the whole story.

Jeremy: And I just want to see that campaign type attribution. Yes. If I can see- Isolates DemandGen, what DemandGen contributed to, that’s great instead of- At least something- Trust me, bro metrics or something. Yeah,

Emily: Because that’s what it feels like right now

Jeremy: With a lot of those. A little bit, yeah. Cool. Asset Studio adds more AI video creation and one click AB testing, Google announced more AI creative capabilities inside of Asset Studio. So it integrated Gemini, VO, NanoBanana right in there, which we’ve kind of talked about this a while. With Gemini Omni coming this summer, the video creation workflow lets advertisers choose a narrative, create a storyboard, preview scenes, adjust the flow and create video assets faster. Google also announced the one click AB testing, letting advertisers select some assets, create a test, and automatically compare new creative against current top performers. So that feels like they’re going to be like, “Hey, try this AI creative versus your human made creative.” So this is great or this is a great idea to be able to test this. I’ve never loved the AI kind of video. Maybe some people can sneak certain scenes in there and do things with it, but images are believable and videos just not it.

Emily: With the exception of I have seen it get pretty good with moving image graphic.

Jeremy: Oh, absolutely.

Emily: That good. But yeah, you’re right. But people talking- Using stock photo or stock video type, it’s just not there yet. It feels very fake.

Jeremy: And I put this point in more creative isn’t better creative necessarily.

Emily: 100%.

Jeremy: But for people that can’t or brands that can’t get these assets, just the ability to have an asset versus no asset is still usually better unless you feel like it’s off brand or something. It

Emily: Gets

Jeremy: You into the game.

Emily: It’s not going to have you hit the home run, but at least you got a position on the field.

Jeremy: Yeah. Or can you make this ad field more like a Black Friday ad using some existing sort of videos inspiration? Even

Emily: Updating. I’ve seen, “Hey, we ran this last year. Can you update this to be for this year?” Absolutely. Simple things like that it is pretty good at, which is nice, especially if you can’t find the file or I’ve seen that work.

Jeremy: All right. Google pushes measurement towards first party data, modeled causality and predictive value. Google Frame measurement as the competitive edge that powers AI. The company emphasized three areas. So first party data, we already knew that was important, but

If you have good first party data, you do have an advantage there. Causality, including attributed branded searches, that’s now available in Google Ads. Predictive value, this is the one where I got excited about earlier because I thought this was the update, including qualified future conversions, which connects leading signals such as follow-up branded searches, video views and site visits to expected downstream conversion value for up to six months in advance and then a unified view with Meridian coming to GA360 essentially. So that qualified future conversions. So I had to do more research on that because I was really trying to understand what it was. So basically it’s an AI powered metric for showing how demand creation campaigns may drive conversions later, including those conversions outside the normal attribution windows. It connects earlier intent signals to future maybe branded searches. So they have a couple of them in there.

They have qualified future conversions or cost of qualified future conversions. I haven’t seen them in the account, but they showed screenshots of it and then qualified future conversion rate. So I think that’s a huge change, especially if we can do any sort of bidding related to it. But we talked about proving the impact of maybe something that’s seemingly more upper funnel.

Emily: Upper funnel or I think brands that have customers that are in a longer buying cycle. Absolutely. 100%. That’s a great point. That’s kind immediately what comes to mind, which then again, I think it’s another case for Google starting to give lead generation advertisers some levers that they came out with. I think this obviously both impacts e-comm and lead gen,

Jeremy: But

Emily: Typically I see the longer … I do more lead gen advertising, so I see more longer buying cycles

Jeremy: With lead generate. Yeah, that’d be huge at that. Imagine- This would be

Emily: Huge. It would give you a little bit more because right now there’s- We’re working

Jeremy: With that average conversion level.

Emily: It is really hard to, especially if you have buying cycles of nine plus months,

Jeremy: Sometimes

Emily: Years-

Jeremy: YouTube is never going to show that. You have to wait. You would literally have to launch, run the ads and then wait the nine months. And I think this says up to six months. So imagine how nice that’ll be-

Emily: Just something.

Jeremy: If it’s just looking at all the signals and it’s connecting like, Hey, based on what we’ve seen in the past, we think you’re going to get this many conversions by leaving this campaign on. Again, it’s predictive metrics. It’s scary, but- It’s so scary, especially when- It’s something to look at, because now it’s blind. Obviously you can do holdout tests and stuff like that to prove it, but I think again, they’re pushing YouTube and demand gen in general.

Emily: I’m just interested how accurate it’s going to be because right now- I think we’ll

Jeremy: Find out.

Emily: When you do your forecasting and you use Google and they’re like, okay, if you raise your costs up to 200, if you go from $5 a day to $200 a day …

Jeremy: I’m laughing because I just saw your reply when I posted this. It says, “Sounds made

Emily: Up.”

Jeremy: It is made

Emily: Up. It is. And right now where we’re at with the forecasting, I don’t fully trust that tool. It really scares me. I don’t like telling clients like, “Hey, I have to give that information if they ask for it with a huge, heavy, heavy grain of salt.” And that’s how I would take this. I don’t know if I would bid off of it. I don’t know if I would make decisions

Jeremy: Or whatever. I don’t even know if you can bid off of it,

Emily: But it would be another signal.

Jeremy: It’s something. We had nothing before.

Emily: It gives you something.

Jeremy: At least it’s based off the logic of Google has seen that people that are watching these videos are eventually converting. It’s outside your attribution window. So maybe what’s the easiest way to kill an account? You just put everything in the brand search because it looks like it works. Well, if Google can say that these videos are the reason brand search is working, it’s going to prove the value.

Emily: Totally. It’s definitely needed on their part.

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s huge. All right. Then the last update we have here is Ask Advisor becomes Google’s cross product AI assistance. So they introduced Ask Advisor, it’s in Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center, Google Marketing Platform, and it says other advertising tools. Google positioned it as a way to ask questions, service insights, troubleshoot and take next steps without needing to dig through multiple tools. If this works how I think they’re saying it’s going to work, I don’t know if you’re going to have a different hot take. This could be really cool. This could be really cool if you’re like, “Hey, if it could do something in Google Ads, if I’m like, hey, how has overall revenue been since we started ads?” And it can go into GA4 and take some of that data and say, “Oh, organic’s way up direct is what … ” If it can connect some of the dots that I would do through downloading sheets and pivot tables and trying to connect everything, this could be amazing.

I don’t think it probably is going to be like that right away, but how cool is that if you have a tool like Manis, Facebook acquired Manis or whatever, Mannis is really cool because it could see all of my history on Facebook, it could see everything I’ve ever done. Granted, I ran out of credits before I could really get a good response, but the beginning of the response, I was like, “Oh, this clearly can see everything I’ve done in this account.”That’s really good if Google can connect products.

Emily: Yes. I will say one, my hot take mainly is I hate the name Ask Advisor.

Jeremy: Okay. I saw your eyes light up like you’re ready to

Emily: Hate on it. Well, yeah, because I don’t know, I don’t like that name. RIP Ask Jeeves, but get a better name. So that’s a hot take, but I actually, so this feature is in the platforms now

Jeremy: And I have- I just don’t know if it’s connected to G4 and all that yet. But

Emily: You can use it to look at Google Ads.

Jeremy: And I do use it. I have

Emily: Been using it, especially if I see something a little off sometimes my first … I’m like, “Okay, let me start here. What does Ask Advisor think why this happened?” And I’m not going to lie, it has been helpful, at least pointing me in the right direction. It’s not going to make the analysis, it’s not going to see the full picture yet. I still have to get to that point, but it at least points me to a direction whether it was

Jeremy: A key- Where can investigate, because before we spend time investing- Before I

Emily: Was spending time investigating,

Jeremy: Now I

Emily: Can get to the source of the

Jeremy: Issue

Emily: Right away, even down to the campaign, and then it’ll break down the campaign.

Jeremy: It’s clearly reading the internet and Gemini power too, because I’ll ask, I don’t know when I did this, but I was like, has the search volume gone up or down for this? Right. That might be something maybe you do in Google Trends. I know there’s insights and stuff in there now, but it could be- It telling you

Emily: Direct.

Jeremy: But it would take me 15 minutes to do that.

Emily: Or it’ll say, “Yeah, the cost per click on this has increased.”

Jeremy: Have more competitors come into the market.

Emily: Exactly and looking at that. So it does-

Jeremy: Yes, increase your budgets 1000%.

Emily: Yeah. So I think it’s a helpful ad, hate the name, but helpful

Jeremy: Tool. It’s usable. It’s

Emily: Usable

Jeremy: Right

Emily: Now. Yeah. Like you said, I think we have some third party tools that will do a little bit more right now

Jeremy: Because

Emily: It is connected to more data points and I’ll use that too just to get me to point in the right direction. But it’s definitely not a fire your paid media

Jeremy: Manager.

Emily: I can use Ask Assistant to get-

Jeremy: Oh no, not at all.

Emily: None of these tools are that we’ve talked about today, just to reiterate on that, but

Jeremy: It

Emily: Does help.

Jeremy: It actually is going to help whoever’s working in your account-

Emily: Be more efficient.

Jeremy: Yes, exactly.

Emily: Yes.

Jeremy: And even give better insight. Have more

Emily: Time to give insights

Jeremy: Because

Emily: They got halfway to at least figuring out the problem right

Jeremy: Away. Yes.

Emily: All right. Here’s our final takeaway. Mays updates all point in the same directions. Platforms want campaigns to be more automated, more conversational, more commerce connected and more measurement modeled. That does not mean marketers should reject the tools. Many of them are useful AI mod ads, demand gen creator boosting, GA4’s AI asistant channels and better lead quality feedback all have real potential, but the job is not to accept the platform narrative at face value. The job is to test the tools, protect the data, validate the quality of what comes in and keep the business outcome above the platform metric.

Jeremy: I agree. Thanks for listening to our Google Marketing Live summary. There’s a lot there. We covered almost I think all the important parts of it. This is a

Emily: Longer podcast, but I think

Jeremy: Needed.

Emily: Like we said, this was the biggest update we’ve seen come through.

Jeremy: There’s one thing that we mentioned that we didn’t put in here and we hinted at it and I think we thought we were going to get to it, but we actually didn’t prioritize it. It’s just there was some talk about how Google had quietly changed how search terms are reported for some AI queries. If you want to know more about that, just hit us up or just honestly check out the actual blog post.

Emily: Yeah. The actual blog post has so much more.

Jeremy: Yeah, I agree. And if you want us to rant more, still hit us up because there’s a lot we didn’t talk about too. All right, cool. Thanks everybody. Bye.