Search is changing - here’s how marketers can lead in the AI era
AI is supercharging Search, evolving it into a more conversational, contextual and intent-driven experience. This shift helps people solve problems, make decisions and take action more effectively than ever before.
It changes not only how people search but how brands must show up. Visibility now relies on being truly useful, context-aware and aligned with real-time intent. The upside? More chances to connect meaningfully across the entire customer journey.
And the pace is accelerating. Just last month, Google rolled out over 100 new products, features and updates. Staying ahead means staying agile. That’s why we’ve broken down the five key innovations reshaping Search and what they mean for your brand.
1. From queries to conversations: How AI Overviews and AI Mode are redefining discovery
From AI Overviews to agentic assistants, the way people discover and make decisions is fundamentally evolving. What does this mean for your brand and your bottom line?
Andreas Nicolaides, John Lewis
We know that our customers' experience is enhanced by John Lewis products showing up in the right places at the right time.
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+20%
+4%
Increase in John Lewis's average profit across Google Search
Increase in John Lewis's target return on Search ad spend
In the last year, AI Overviews have scaled up to 1.5 billion monthly users in 200 countries and territories. By surfacing AI-generated summaries of tailored, context-aware answers right at the top, Search is reshaping how people engage, making it simpler for users to find relevant answers and confidently take next steps. This is more than just a UI update: it represents a fundamental behavioural shift in how people find information.
Complementing AI Overviews is AI Mode, a more conversational, multimodal interface within Search (currently US-only). AI Mode offers an ongoing, interactive experience via voice, camera or touch. It’s built for deeper, more complex enquiries, making Search feel more like a dialogue than a destination.
These shifts are particularly evident in commerce. Google's latest shopping features – virtual try-ons and agentic checkout – powered by Google's real-time Shopping Graph, simulate the feel of in-store shopping, bringing visual, interactive retail experiences directly into Search. While these features are currently available only in the US through Search Labs, a program that lets people try early-stage Google Search experiences and provide feedback, they highlight the significant real-world potential of AI-driven commerce.
The integration of Search and Shopping ads directly into AI Overviews – with rollout across mobile and desktop in select countries – represents a paradigm shift in paid media. Guided by complex signals, these ads now appear in higher-intent moments, delivering not just visibility, but strategic value.
This enables smarter targeting in ways no human could manually predict, unlocking the power to reach your next best customer with the right message, at the right time, in the right place – automatically. It’s not just about visibility. It’s about accelerating the journey from curiosity to confident decision.
2. Rethinking Search ads: Winning visibility in the age of AI Overviews
This move from passive search to proactive assistance means your content must serve both people and the AI systems that guide them.
Strategic lens
Actions for marketers:
● Stop optimising for keywords alone. Start mapping real user questions and underlying needs.
● Focus on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content that genuinely addresses user needs and is structured for clarity, multimodal engagement and easy for AI to understand, cite and surface.
● Ensure your pages offer a great user experience and that your structured data is accurate, complete and fully aligned with visible content.
● Audit for AI-readiness. What are the 20 most valuable questions your customers ask? Are your answers structured, up-to-date and supported by rich visuals?
Read Google's official SEO guidance on how to succeed in AI-powered Search.
The rise of AI Overviews naturally prompts questions about how they influence traffic to websites. The landscape of user engagement is evolving, and it's essential for brands to adapt their strategies to these new behaviours.
Adapting to evolving engagement: Understanding AI Overviews and your traffic
AI Overviews create a new front door for discovery. The brands that benefit most are those offering substance, clarity and usefulness from the first glance, providing compelling reasons for users to click through for deeper engagement.
The opportunity
This evolution calls for updated success benchmarks. Instead of measuring by sheer traffic volume in isolation, look to indicators like time spent, depth of interaction and post-click behaviour. These signal not just visibility, but real impact and value.
Time to rethink metrics
AI Overviews introduce users to a broader mix of sources, often earlier in the decision process. Users may arrive at your site with clearer intent, engaging more deliberately and potentially further down the funnel, having already received initial answers or context.
Expanded discovery, evolved journeys
Move from placement-thinking to intent-thinking. Ask: how can your brand be the logical next step after an AI-generated answer?
Actions for marketers:
● Craft genuinely helpful, context-aware messaging.
● Design ad strategies around core topics that guide next steps.
● Use AI-powered campaigns and features like Performance Max and AI Max to dynamically respond to longer and more complex queries.
● Success in AI Search isn't measured solely in traffic volume. Focus on deeper signals like engaged time-on-site, lower bounce rates and conversion paths. These are stronger indicators of user satisfaction and intent.
Strategic lens
AI Max is a new set of campaign settings that bring the full power of Google’s AI targeting and creative to Search ads. When enabled, AI Max upgrades your campaign in three ways: it expands keyword targeting through Broad Match to extend reach, enables automatically created assets (ACA) to enhance creative and uses keywordless targeting to identify emerging, intent-rich queries. Rather than relying solely on static keywords, AI Max interprets real-time signals – including from AI Overviews – to match your ads with more relevant, higher-converting searches.
Early results are strong. Advertisers using AI Max in Search campaigns typically see 14% more conversions. L’Oréal, for example, doubled its conversion rate while reducing cost-per-conversion by 31%, thanks to AI Max’s ability to surface new, relevant queries. Volvo Cars offers another compelling example. The brand used Broad Match to uncover over a million high-intent queries, boosting leads by 47%. A three-month A/B test, comparing value-based bidding to its previous strategy, subsequently doubled its Search ROI. These results reinforce the core principle behind AI Max: performance gains come not just from automation, but from actively experimenting with bidding strategies, creative and signals to capture emerging intent.
As a full-funnel solution, AI Max is built to deliver incremental performance beyond what manual optimisation can achieve, especially when paired with full-funnel tools like Performance Max and Demand Gen.
These performance gains are amplified by the reasoning power of Gemini models, which understand the 'why' behind queries – not just the 'what'.
3. From keywords to signals: Unlocking growth with AI Max
As Search becomes more dynamic and AI-curated, performance marketing is evolving from manual control to intelligent orchestration. AI Max handles real-time complexity, but your role remains critical: set clear goals, monitor outcomes and guide the system. The strongest results come when AI scales and marketers steer.
Actions for marketers:
● Pair AI Max with Performance Max and Demand Gen for full-funnel coverage.
● Budget for experimentation. This isn’t a test, it’s a capability transformation.
● Monitor incremental performance, not just raw conversions.
Strategic lens
High-quality, relevant creative is one of the strongest drivers of performance. But as formats multiply and channels fragment, speed and scale matter more than ever.
To meet this challenge, Google is embedding its generative AI tools directly into Google Ads and Merchant Center. Powered by advanced models (Imagen for generating high-quality images, and Veo for creating video and audio from text prompts), these tools help teams quickly produce brand-safe, highly relevant, campaign-ready assets at scale.
4. Creating at scale: Generative AI for smarter, faster, safer ads
Winning brands won’t just produce more content. They’ll produce more relevant content, faster.
Actions for marketers:
● Start building AI-powered creative pipelines. Use these tools to prototype and localise quickly.
● Set early brand guardrails to avoid template fatigue. Focus creative teams on high-value storytelling.
Strategic lens
We’re entering a new phase of AI, one where it doesn’t just inform decisions, but helps people take action. With user permission, AI agents can now take on tasks such as comparing prices, booking reservations or filling out forms, reducing friction and accelerating action.
However, even as these tools become more capable, one thing remains constant: people still want to hear from people. Authenticity, brand voice and emotional connection will be what set brands apart as AI takes on more of the work. The human layer doesn’t disappear. It becomes the reason people stay.
For marketers, agentic systems open up a powerful new channel for discovery. Rather than waiting for a search query, AI agents can proactively surface personalised recommendations tailored to users’ context, preferences and intent. Think of them as intelligent guides: blending inspiration, curation and seamless action. Just as websites once became digital storefronts, AI agents are becoming the 'takeout and delivery' layer of the web, bringing your brand to people before they search.
What’s emerging now:
● Project Astra: A multimodal assistant already being integrated into Search, Gemini Live and prototype glasses.
● Project Mariner: A task-based agent that learns from user journeys to take action and guide decisions.
● Marketing Advisor: A Chrome-based assistant helping advertisers uncover and act on new opportunities.
5. What are Google's next frontiers in AI, and how will they change the game?
AI agents will soon be a major discovery channel. Your brand must be both findable and functional, with content and services optimised for agents.
Actions for marketers:
● Future-proof your data infrastructure. To be useful to AI agents, your product feeds, availability, pricing and business data must be real-time, structured and machine-readable.
● Rethink brand voice. As AI systems speak for you, consistency and emotional clarity are critical.
● Explore the potential of brand-owned agents that can guide, curate and act on behalf of your brand, using your content and data to serve users more effectively.
Strategic lens
AI discovery is evolving – you should too
Together, these innovations reflect how user behaviour has already changed and how Search is evolving in response. Longer, more conversational queries. Visual searches sparked by moments words can’t capture. Tools like AI Overviews and Lens weren’t the catalyst, they were the response. But as AI has become more capable, the experience has improved dramatically, creating a flywheel effect: better results, more use, deeper engagement.
Now, AI is accelerating these shifts, helping users move from asking questions to expecting intelligent answers, tailored to context and intent. The brands that lead in this new era won’t just be searchable, they’ll be indispensable. Optimise for both people and machines, and your brand won’t just keep up with the future of Search, it will help define it.
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