For Advertisers, Google’s Sweeping AI Push Creates Both Challenges and Opportunities

Once upon a time, the internet felt a lot bigger. Obsessives maintained blogs about their unique interests; hobbyists shared expertise on niche web forums; publications prioritized depth over clickbait; and businesses were incentivized to both inform and engage through their official websites.

It was in this version of the internet that Google became essential, serving as the main directory that steered users through an endless library of information. You wanted to build a birdhouse, learn about ancient history, join a cause, find a product? A simple Google search would quickly and accurately route you to the right place.

All that has changed. Old business models in the publishing industry failed; video replaced text as the dominant medium for commentary and guidance; and social media obliterated niche forum and blog ecosystems before vacuuming up their remnants.

Google is responsible for a lot of this change—it maintains those SEO standards and it owns YouTube, after all. But now, in the age of AI, Google is seeking to redefine its role by rewriting the rules of online search. In this blog, we’ll discuss the search giant’s AI vision and consider what it all means for the advertisers that rely on it.

Google’s AI Ambitions

Over the past few years, Google’s search engine results page (SERP) had already received an overhaul. What was once a clean list of blue links and text excerpts is now a crowded multimedia experience that incorporates video results, images, and paid shopping placements. Advertisers have been adapting accordingly by prioritizing video content and investing in Google Ads campaigns that enable those Shopping placements.

The most disruptive addition, however, are the AI Overviews that first appeared in 2024 and now populate at the top of the SERP for a majority of searches. Those were a sign of things to come: Google isn’t using AI to add new features to search, it’s using AI to redefine what search is.

Rather than helping users find information, Google increasingly wants them to consume information directly within Google’s own ecosystem. AI Overviews summarize answers before users click on any websites, inviting them into the AI Mode tab—which initiates a full-blown conversation with Google’s LLM, Gemini. 

These agentic conversations are meant to research topics, compare options, and even complete tasks (like purchases) on a user’s behalf. Google, founded 28 years ago, described this as “the biggest upgrade to Search in more than 25 years.”

From Google’s perspective, the strategy makes perfect sense. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI-powered tools have trained users to expect answers rather than lists of links. If Google wants to remain the starting point for every digital journey, it has to compete on those terms. The company is betting that users would rather have an AI assistant than a directory.

But for businesses, publishers, and advertisers, it raises a more complicated question: what happens when the internet’s most important traffic source decides it would rather be the destination instead?

New Challenges For Businesses—and Google Itself?

For decades, Google sat in the middle of a mutually-beneficial loop: websites created content, Google sent users to that content. Google’s excellence at matching queries with destinations incentivized individuals and businesses to compete to create the most relevant pages. 

This new model is different. Google still depends on information produced by publishers, businesses, forums, and websites across the internet, but it is increasingly presenting that information itself rather than sending users elsewhere—so-called “zero-click searches.” 

These zero-click searches are already crushing web traffic. According to some analyses, as many as two-thirds of Google searches no longer result in a click. 

While some perceive this as a doomsday scenario for organic traffic, it’s important to note that it’s depressing paid search results as well. An early-2025 study by Seer Interactive found both were trending down for queries that prompted an AI Overview, and the impact has only grown since then. 

For businesses, this creates an issue. If you previously sold your services by answering queries related to them—through dedicated landing pages or informational blog posts (like this one)—you’re likely missing out on a lot of eyeballs. 

But it’s also a bit puzzling for Google itself. The entire library of information fueling its AI responses only grew so robust because Google’s old model incentivized humans to create it. If users no longer interact with websites, what incentive does anyone have to update them? Will Gemini and all the other chatbots be perpetually answering questions based on dated material? 

Google’s answer to these quandaries, it seems, is to create even more AI integrations and paid advertising opportunities while encouraging advertisers to buy in.

The Opportunities Being Created

Google’s approach seems to be to break the model it created in order to build a new model in its place. Enter the “Agentic Commerce” concept it rolled out early in 2026.

In the Agentic Commerce model, users will spend less time browsing websites, comparing products, and conducting research on their own. Instead, Gemini and other AI-powered experiences will increasingly perform those tasks for them. Google’s answer to breaking the old organic search model is to introduce a series of new features that make businesses and users even more dependent on…Google.

One of the earliest examples is Direct Offers, a pilot program that brings paid placements directly into AI Mode conversations. Rather than displaying an ad before a user begins their research journey, Google can now display products and promotions while a user is conducting a relevant conversation with Gemini. These ads don’t influence Gemini’s responses, but rather present as banners alongside the chat window.

Direct Offers are only one piece of a much larger vision. More broadly, Google is building the infrastructure for an internet where AI systems become intermediaries between consumers and businesses, including the ability to buy products from a retailer’s site without ever actually visiting the site. Product feeds, reviews, Merchant Center data, pricing information, inventory availability, and business profiles are all becoming critically important because they feed these new ad styles and agentic integrations. Businesses may soon find themselves optimizing not just for human shoppers, but for AI agents acting on behalf of those shoppers.

Google’s advertising products are evolving in a similar direction. AI Max, announced at Google Marketing Live 2025, is designed to help advertisers appear for relevant searches they may not have explicitly targeted through traditional keyword strategies. By using information from existing ads, landing pages, and other business assets, Google can identify additional opportunities where an advertiser’s offering may be relevant. As search becomes more conversational and AI depresses site traffic, AI Max can restore some of that by casting a wider, smarter net.

That shift is creating new opportunities on the organic side as well. Users are spending more time interacting with AI-powered searches and other LLMs like ChatGPT, forcing businesses to embrace Generative Engine Optimization (GEO). If AI is increasingly responsible for answering questions, businesses need to understand how to become part of those answers. While GEO remains an emerging discipline, the underlying principles closely mirror good SEO practices.

Embrace Google’s New AI Features

You’re not going to beat the AI revolution, so might as well join it. The brands that master Google’s latest tools first will be the ones poised to remain competitive in a new online market.

Whether it’s AI Overviews, AI Mode, Direct Offers, agentic commerce initiatives, AI Max, or future products that haven’t been announced yet, Google is clearly moving toward a more AI-driven experience. Businesses can spend their time lamenting those changes, or they can focus on understanding how to capitalize on them.

That means experimenting with newer campaign types, maintaining accurate product and business data, and paying close attention to how Google’s AI systems are surfacing products, services, and offers. Even if you’re not spending heavily on Google Ads, it’s worth cleaving out a certain percentage of budget every month for testing different tools and approaches—it’s the best way to find out if you’re missing opportunities. Not every new Google product will be a perfect fit for every brand, but most will be worth testing to determine efficacy and capabilities. 

It also means recognizing that consumer behavior is changing alongside technology. Users are increasingly asking questions differently, researching differently, and making purchasing decisions differently than they did even a few years ago. Businesses that continue treating Google Ads exactly as they did five years ago may find themselves increasingly out of step with how customers actually search.

Maintain a Diversified Marketing Mix

Search still plays a critical role in your ecosystem because it captures intent when consumers are ready to learn more or take action. The mistake is treating it as the entire ecosystem. As Google undergoes this dramatic transformation, it’s important to maintain a healthy blend of options for generating and capturing demand.

The strongest marketing programs use different channels to accomplish different objectives. Paid social can introduce products and services to audiences who weren’t actively looking for them. Email marketing helps nurture prospects and maintain relationships with existing customers. Programmatic ad formats (like display, podcast, and streaming video ads) can extend your reach across the broader web and help you stay visible throughout longer buying journeys.

A diversified marketing mix creates multiple paths to discovery and multiple opportunities to influence purchasing decisions. That not only reduces dependence on any single platform, but also creates a more resilient brand that can continue generating demand even when one channel experiences/creates significant disruption.

Adapt Your Definition of Search Visibility

For years, digital marketers used traffic as a proxy for visibility. Increasingly, those are becoming separate concepts. A business may be featured prominently within an AI Overview, recommended by Gemini, or surfaced through an AI-powered shopping experience without generating a traditional website visit.

That shift is one reason GEO has emerged as a growing discipline. As AI systems take on a larger role in answering questions and recommending products, businesses need to consider how those systems understand their products, services, and expertise. Fortunately, many of the fundamentals remain familiar. Structured content, authoritative information, clear expertise, and comprehensive answers to customer questions all improve the likelihood that AI systems can accurately interpret and surface your business.

Traffic will remain an important metric, but businesses should increasingly think about visibility more broadly. The goal is no longer just earning a click—it’s ensuring your brand appears wherever customers are making decisions.

Make Every Visit Count

If AI-powered experiences continue reducing click volume, conversion efficiency becomes even more important.

That makes user experience (UX) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) more important than ever. IIf fewer potential customers are making it through to your website, each one matters even more. Users should always be met with a clear path forward: Confusing navigation, slow-loading pages, unclear messaging, and cumbersome conversion processes all create opportunities to lose visitors that may be harder to replace than they once were.

Businesses should regularly evaluate whether their websites make it easy for users to find information, understand what makes the company different, and take the next step. Small improvements to landing pages, forms, calls-to-action, and overall site usability can have a meaningful impact on lead generation and revenue. As AI continues reshaping how people discover information online, your website focus may need to shift from attracting more traffic to converting more of it.