<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" fetchpriority="high" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>New findings show rankings remain stable while customer behavior changes, making profile quality and reviews critical for local visibility.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2025/07/google-maps-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In February, we wrote that local rankings were holding steady while calls and website clicks quietly <a href="https://searchengineland.com/local-rankings-fine-calls-vanishing-468321">disappeared</a>. By April, our data pointed to something much more dramatic, enough that we declared “local SEO” was dying on stage at BrightonSEO.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">We were wrong about the scale.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Q1 data was revised retrospectively. After testing the corrected numbers against a full second quarter, we found a clearer, more specific story than either version suggested.</p>



<h2 id="h-why-q1-looked-like-a-crisis" class="wp-block-heading">Why Q1 looked like a crisis</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Sterling Sky and Jepto&#8217;s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHsZY5RZJbs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">analysis of 179 Google Business Profiles</a> found that AI-powered local packs often show just two businesses instead of three, frequently without a click-to-call button, and surface only 32% as many unique businesses as the traditional Map Pack. Most rank trackers couldn&#8217;t see any of it. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Joy Hawkins, Claudia Tomina, and Matt McGee were independently reporting the same pattern: rankings held steady while performance declined.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Our initial reading of the Q1 data, presented at BrightonSEO in April, looked even more severe. Actions and impressions appeared to have fallen by roughly half across our U.S. portfolio. The drop was dramatic enough that we advised some agency customers to invest in paid search.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It didn&#8217;t hold up.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-corrected-q1-number-and-what-q2-adds" class="wp-block-heading">The corrected Q1 number, and what Q2 adds</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Rechecking Q1 revealed a much less dramatic picture. Year over year:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>U.S. website clicks and calls each fell 15.8%, while direction requests rose 31.3%. </li>



<li>Desktop Search impressions increased 12.3%.</li>



<li>Mobile Search impressions fell 20.6%.</li>



<li>Desktop Maps impressions declined 17.9%.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">We don&#8217;t put much weight on the mobile Maps figure alone. A small number of large advertisers can significantly shift that metric.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1200" height="1500" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/GMBapi-Q2-YoY-performance-GBP-profiles-tables.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486277" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/GMBapi-Q2-YoY-performance-GBP-profiles-tables.png 1200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/GMBapi-Q2-YoY-performance-GBP-profiles-tables-768x960.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025, corrected year-over-year Google Business Profile performance. (Source: GMBapi data)</em></figcaption></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Q2 data tests that corrected the baseline. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">U.S. calls and website clicks are still falling, down 11.9% and 12.5%, and direction requests are still growing, up 21.1%, all three decelerating against Q1&#8217;s sharper moves. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The standout change is desktop Maps: down 17.9% in Q1, up 3.2% in Q2, a genuine reversal, specific to the US. Mobile Maps impressions are up 30.4%, desktop search is up 13.9%, and mobile search is down 20.1%, enough on its own to erase the other gains.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1200" height="1500" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/GMBapi-Q2-YoY-performance-GBP-profiles-graphs.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486278" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/GMBapi-Q2-YoY-performance-GBP-profiles-graphs.png 1200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/GMBapi-Q2-YoY-performance-GBP-profiles-graphs-768x960.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1200px) 100vw, 1200px" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption"><em>Q2 2026 vs. Q2 2025, year-over-year Google Business Profile performance across the US, EU and UK. (Source: GMBapi data)</em></figcaption></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Our read is that U.S. customers are increasingly completing the entire journey within Google Maps rather than starting on a search results page. The reversal in desktop Maps impressions suggests that the shift is no longer limited to mobile.</p>



<h2 id="h-two-ranking-systems-and-reviews-as-the-connective-tissue" class="wp-block-heading">Two ranking systems and reviews as the connective tissue</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Traditional Maps rankings still rely on proximity, relevance, engagement, and prominence. The signals behind AI Mode and Gemini differ: web context, entity matching, brand authority, and review sentiment are layered on top of the Google Business Profile.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One system determines whether you appear on the map. The other determines whether Google&#8217;s AI trusts what it knows about your business enough to answer a customer&#8217;s question directly, without a click.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Reviews are becoming the raw material for that second system. Google now prompts reviewers with structured tags such as atmosphere, price, and cleanliness, rather than relying solely on free text, and also encourages customers to review businesses they&#8217;ve visited. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It&#8217;s building cleaner data so its AI can answer questions without sending users to a website first — a plausible explanation for direction requests rising while calls and website clicks decline.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">The EU and UK aren&#8217;t a slower version of the US</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The picture outside the U.S. is different. In the EU, desktop Maps impressions fell faster in Q2, dropping from -16.5% in Q1 to -34.7%, even as direction requests continued to grow, slowing from +21.7% to +13.1%.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The U.K.&#8217;s smaller dataset showed the opposite reversal. Mobile Maps impressions swung from +22.4% in Q1 to -70.8% in Q2, while direction requests and website clicks continued to rise.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Neither market appears to be simply trailing the U.S. They&#8217;re following different paths.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Rank tracking alone won&#8217;t tell you this</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://www.soci.ai/insights/lvi/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">SOCi&#8217;s 2026 Local Visibility Index</a> found AI platforms recommend far fewer locations than Google&#8217;s 3-pack: 1.2% on ChatGPT, 7.4% on Perplexity, and 35.9% on Google. A key reason is profile accuracy, which averages 68% on ChatGPT and Perplexity versus 100% on Gemini, which pulls directly from Google Maps data. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/ai-local-visibility-report-2026-468085">Search Engine Land covered the report in detail</a>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Reviews matter here, too. Locations recommended by ChatGPT average 4.3 stars, while those recommended by Perplexity average 4.2, suggesting review quality is becoming a gate for AI recommendations, not just a ranking signal.</p>



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">What this means for your reporting</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If your reporting still leads with call volume, you&#8217;re measuring only part of the customer journey. Direction requests deserve equal weight. Businesses with the most complete, accurate Google Business Profile data capture more of the remaining clicks, calls, and directions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For multi-location brands, agencies, and SMBs focused on the bottom of the funnel, local SEO has grown up. It&#8217;s starting to look a lot more like SEO.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>More detail on GMBapi&#8217;s Q2 Local SEO trend data is available <a href="https://gmbapi.com/news/local-seo-2026-ai-packs-vanishing-calls/">here</a>.</em>


In February, we wrote that local rankings were holding steady while calls and website clicks quietly disappeared. By April, our data pointed to something much more dramatic, enough that we declared “local SEO” was dying on stage at BrightonSEO.
We were wrong about the scale.
Q1 data was revised retrospectively. After testing the corrected numbers against a full second quarter, we found a clearer, more specific story than either version suggested.
Why Q1 looked like a crisis
Sterling Sky and Jepto’s analysis of 179 Google Business Profiles found that AI-powered local packs often show just two businesses instead of three, frequently without a click-to-call button, and surface only 32% as many unique businesses as the traditional Map Pack. Most rank trackers couldn’t see any of it. 
Joy Hawkins, Claudia Tomina, and Matt McGee were independently reporting the same pattern: rankings held steady while performance declined.
Our initial reading of the Q1 data, presented at BrightonSEO in April, looked even more severe. Actions and impressions appeared to have fallen by roughly half across our U.S. portfolio. The drop was dramatic enough that we advised some agency customers to invest in paid search.
It didn’t hold up.
The corrected Q1 number, and what Q2 adds
Rechecking Q1 revealed a much less dramatic picture. Year over year:
U.S. website clicks and calls each fell 15.8%, while direction requests rose 31.3%. 
Desktop Search impressions increased 12.3%.
Mobile Search impressions fell 20.6%.
Desktop Maps impressions declined 17.9%.
We don’t put much weight on the mobile Maps figure alone. A small number of large advertisers can significantly shift that metric.
Q1 2026 vs. Q1 2025, corrected year-over-year Google Business Profile performance. (Source: GMBapi data)



Q2 data tests that corrected the baseline. 
U.S. calls and website clicks are still falling, down 11.9% and 12.5%, and direction requests are still growing, up 21.1%, all three decelerating against Q1’s sharper moves. 
The standout change is desktop Maps: down 17.9% in Q1, up 3.2% in Q2, a genuine reversal, specific to the US. Mobile Maps impressions are up 30.4%, desktop search is up 13.9%, and mobile search is down 20.1%, enough on its own to erase the other gains.
Q2 2026 vs. Q2 2025, year-over-year Google Business Profile performance across the US, EU and UK. (Source: GMBapi data)



Our read is that U.S. customers are increasingly completing the entire journey within Google Maps rather than starting on a search results page. The reversal in desktop Maps impressions suggests that the shift is no longer limited to mobile.
Two ranking systems and reviews as the connective tissue
Traditional Maps rankings still rely on proximity, relevance, engagement, and prominence. The signals behind AI Mode and Gemini differ: web context, entity matching, brand authority, and review sentiment are layered on top of the Google Business Profile.
One system determines whether you appear on the map. The other determines whether Google’s AI trusts what it knows about your business enough to answer a customer’s question directly, without a click.
Reviews are becoming the raw material for that second system. Google now prompts reviewers with structured tags such as atmosphere, price, and cleanliness, rather than relying solely on free text, and also encourages customers to review businesses they’ve visited. 
It’s building cleaner data so its AI can answer questions without sending users to a website first — a plausible explanation for direction requests rising while calls and website clicks decline.
The EU and UK aren’t a slower version of the US
The picture outside the U.S. is different. In the EU, desktop Maps impressions fell faster in Q2, dropping from -16.5% in Q1 to -34.7%, even as direction requests continued to grow, slowing from +21.7% to +13.1%.
The U.K.’s smaller dataset showed the opposite reversal. Mobile Maps impressions swung from +22.4% in Q1 to -70.8% in Q2, while direction requests and website clicks continued to rise.
Neither market appears to be simply trailing the U.S. They’re following different paths.
Rank tracking alone won’t tell you this
SOCi’s 2026 Local Visibility Index found AI platforms recommend far fewer locations than Google’s 3-pack: 1.2% on ChatGPT, 7.4% on Perplexity, and 35.9% on Google. A key reason is profile accuracy, which averages 68% on ChatGPT and Perplexity versus 100% on Gemini, which pulls directly from Google Maps data. Search Engine Land covered the report in detail.
Reviews matter here, too. Locations recommended by ChatGPT average 4.3 stars, while those recommended by Perplexity average 4.2, suggesting review quality is becoming a gate for AI recommendations, not just a ranking signal.
What this means for your reporting
If your reporting still leads with call volume, you’re measuring only part of the customer journey. Direction requests deserve equal weight. Businesses with the most complete, accurate Google Business Profile data capture more of the remaining clicks, calls, and directions.
For multi-location brands, agencies, and SMBs focused on the bottom of the funnel, local SEO has grown up. It’s starting to look a lot more like SEO.
More detail on GMBapi’s Q2 Local SEO trend data is available here.

New findings show rankings remain stable while customer behavior changes, making profile quality and reviews critical for local visibility.

Calls and clicks keep falling as Google Maps becomes the destination

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>After a few months of slowing rolling out these features, everyone should soon have access to them.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-controls-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">After a few months of a <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-ai-performance-reports-rolling-out-to-more-users-480867">slow</a> rollout, Google is now rolling out the <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-search-console-ai-performance-reports-and-controls-to-block-your-content-in-ai-responses-479298">new AI performance reports and Search generative AI controls</a> within Search Console to all.  These features are now available to everyone with a Search Console account globally. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Global rollout. </strong>Google updated a few of its documents to note that this is now available globally.  The specific documents that were updated can be found over <a href="https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/new-controls-website-owners/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>, <a href="https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2026/06/gen-ai-performance-reports?hl=en" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a> and <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/16908024?hl=en&amp;sjid=6465996090185817348-NA" target="_blank" rel="noopener">here</a>. The documents added:</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;<strong>Note</strong>: As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out this control to all websites worldwide.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>AI performance report.&nbsp;</strong>The report shows you how well your content and websites are performing in AI responses, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Google Search. The reporting includes impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, but does not include click data.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Here is a screenshot of this report from Google:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image"><img decoding="async" width="2048" height="1571" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/06/generative-ai-features-performance-report.png" alt="Generative Ai Features Performance Report" class="wp-image-479323" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/06/generative-ai-features-performance-report.png 2048w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/06/generative-ai-features-performance-report-768x589.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/06/generative-ai-features-performance-report-1536x1178.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 2048px) 100vw, 2048px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>AI blocking controls.&nbsp;</strong>Google also said it is adding a “new toggle” within Google Search Console to allow sites to block their content from showing in AI search features such as AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover. Google wrote, “website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features.”</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google noted that “sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.” However, this control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features, so it should not negatively impact your site on core web search.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Here is a screenshot of this setting:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="1824" height="1326" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/gsc-ai-controls-setting.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486270" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/gsc-ai-controls-setting.png 1824w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/gsc-ai-controls-setting-768x558.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/gsc-ai-controls-setting-1536x1117.png 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1824px) 100vw, 1824px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care.&nbsp;</strong>Site owners and publishers have been asking for controls over whether and how their content is shown in Google’s AI features since Google launched these a couple of years ago. Well, Google has rolled out this feature to all of its users today. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">So if you have been waiting to dig into these AI reports or block Google from using your content in its AI search features, now you can.<a href="https://www.semrush.com/?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0101default&amp;utm_source=searchengineland.com&amp;utm_medium=overlay&amp;onboarding=off" target="_blank" rel="noopener"></a>


After a few months of a slow rollout, Google is now rolling out the new AI performance reports and Search generative AI controls within Search Console to all.  These features are now available to everyone with a Search Console account globally. 
Global rollout. Google updated a few of its documents to note that this is now available globally.  The specific documents that were updated can be found over here, here and here. The documents added:
“Note: As of August 31, 2026, we’ve rolled out this control to all websites worldwide.”
AI performance report. The report shows you how well your content and websites are performing in AI responses, AI Mode, and AI Overviews in Google Search. The reporting includes impressions, pages, countries, devices, and dates, but does not include click data. 
Here is a screenshot of this report from Google:




AI blocking controls. Google also said it is adding a “new toggle” within Google Search Console to allow sites to block their content from showing in AI search features such as AI Overviews, AI Mode or AI Overviews in Discover. Google wrote, “website owners can decide if they want their site to appear in and help ground responses in our generative AI Search features.”
Google noted that “sites that opt out will not receive traffic or impressions from our generative AI features.” However, this control will not be used as a ranking signal for search results outside of these generative AI Search features, so it should not negatively impact your site on core web search.
Here is a screenshot of this setting:




Why we care. Site owners and publishers have been asking for controls over whether and how their content is shown in Google’s AI features since Google launched these a couple of years ago. Well, Google has rolled out this feature to all of its users today. 
So if you have been waiting to dig into these AI reports or block Google from using your content in its AI search features, now you can.

After a few months of slowing rolling out these features, everyone should soon have access to them.

Google Search Console AI performance reports and Search generative AI control rolling out globally

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility-.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="5 steps to build Reddit authority for Google and ChatGPT visibility" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility-.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility--768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility--1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility--1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Reddit can reveal why people choose, reject, or question a brand. Turn those insights into better content for organic and AI search.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility-.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="5 steps to build Reddit authority for Google and ChatGPT visibility" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility-.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility--768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility--1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/5-steps-to-build-Reddit-authority-for-Google-and-ChatGPT-visibility--1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/reddit-seo-453406">Reddit</a> isn’t a shortcut to an AI citation. Posting promotional answers and waiting for Google or ChatGPT to notice them isn’t a community strategy. <a href="https://searchengineland.com/guide/brand-subreddit">Reddit communities</a> are quick to reject corporate messaging that contributes little of value.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Your brand needs the expertise, credibility, and consistency to add value to the conversation. This five-step framework shows how to build that authority.</p>



<h2 id="h-1-define-your-territory-of-authority" class="wp-block-heading">1. Define your territory of authority</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Start by identifying the subject on which your brand has a legitimate reason to be heard. Your territory of authority isn’t every topic related to your product. It sits at the intersection of:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>What your audience needs help understanding.</li>



<li>What your organization knows through direct experience.</li>



<li>What your products, services, or specialists can credibly address.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Turn this territory into a specific question.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For an education company, that question might be: “What should parents consider when choosing a supplementary learning program?”</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For a software provider, it could be: “How should small businesses compare customer relationship management platforms?”</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A defined question gives your team a filter. It shows you which discussions to enter, which resources to create, and where the brand doesn’t yet have enough expertise to contribute.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Your brand doesn’t need to join every relevant thread. It needs to contribute consistently where its expertise can genuinely help.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Community is a brand territory, not simply another performance media placement.</p>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/ai-seo/overview?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0101ai&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
  <div>
    
    <div>
      
      <div id="semrush-one-headline" class="headline-responsive">
        Be the brand <span>AI recommends</span>.
      </div>
      <p id="semrush-one-subhead">
        See where your brand appears in AI search, where competitors are winning, and what it takes to become the answer AI recommends.
      </p>
    </div>
    <div>
      <span id="semrush-one-cta">See your AI visibility</span>
    </div>
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<h2 id="h-2-establish-your-baseline" class="wp-block-heading">2. Establish your baseline</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Before publishing or replying, document how the brand is currently represented. Begin with four areas.</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li><strong>Google visibility:</strong> Search for priority topics, branded queries, and comparison terms. Identify the Reddit threads, forums, reviews, and third-party discussions appearing in the results.</li>



<li><strong>AI visibility:</strong> Test a fixed set of strategic prompts in ChatGPT and other relevant platforms. Record whether the brand appears, how it’s described, and which alternatives are recommended.</li>



<li><strong>Community perception:</strong> Review the questions, complaints, positive experiences, and misconceptions already associated with the brand or category.</li>



<li><strong>Owned content:</strong> Assess whether your website answers those real-world questions or relies mainly on polished product messaging.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A baseline helps you distinguish recognition from authority. A brand can have strong awareness without being clearly understood. People may know its name but remain unsure who it serves, when it’s the right choice, and how it differs from competing options.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Look beyond mention volume. Record sentiment, recurring questions, descriptions, cited sources, and the contexts in which the brand is recommended.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Without this starting point, it’s easy to confuse more activity with greater visibility.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/reddit-keyword-research-tool-485859">Reddit is the keyword research tool you’re probably not using</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-3-build-a-connected-authority-system" class="wp-block-heading">3. Build a connected authority system</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Reddit shouldn’t operate separately from your SEO, content, and AI visibility strategies. Each environment provides a different signal.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Keywords reveal what someone wants to solve. Community discussions add experience, context, and the criteria people use to make a decision. Owned content gives the brand room to provide complete, structured answers.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Use these signals together. A recurring question on Reddit may reveal a gap in your website. A common complaint may show that your product page is setting the wrong expectation. A highly engaged discussion may uncover the language customers use to describe a problem that your brand explains in technical terms.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Turn these findings into stronger guides, comparison pages, videos, FAQs, and support content.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The connection should also work in the other direction. Accurate owned resources give community teams reliable information to reference when answering complex questions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Think of the system this way: Search reveals intention. Community supplies context. Owned content provides depth. Monitoring shows whether authority is translating into visibility.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The goal isn’t to make every channel repeat the same message. It’s to make them reinforce the same area of expertise.</p>



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<h2 id="h-4-focus-on-the-right-communities" class="wp-block-heading">4. Focus on the right communities</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">More Reddit activity doesn’t automatically produce more authority.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don’t distribute your resources across every subreddit connected to your category. Prioritize the communities where your audience actively discusses its needs, evaluates alternatives, and shares real experiences.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Assess each potential community using the following questions:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Are the conversations relevant to our territory of authority?</li>



<li>Are people asking questions we can credibly answer?</li>



<li>Is the community active enough to support continued participation?</li>



<li>Do its rules permit representatives of companies to contribute?</li>



<li>Can we add value without turning every response into a promotion?</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Different Reddit spaces can play different roles. An official profile gives the brand a transparent identity. A branded subreddit can operate as a knowledge and support hub. Independent subreddits provide access to opinions, criteria, and concerns the company can’t control.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That lack of control is valuable. Independent discussions often reveal concerns that traditional customer research misses. They show why people dismiss certain options, which competitors enter the consideration set, and what evidence is needed to earn trust.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don’t enter those spaces to correct every negative opinion. Enter them to understand the discussion and contribute when your expertise is genuinely useful.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/build-organic-reddit-strategy-seo-impact-464698">How to build an organic Reddit strategy that drives SEO impact</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-5-engage-natively-and-monitor-the-complete-journey" class="wp-block-heading">5. Engage natively and monitor the complete journey</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Native Reddit participation begins with the user’s question, not the brand’s message.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Disclose your affiliation. Answer directly. Acknowledge limitations and trade-offs. Avoid corporate language. Link only when the resource adds meaningful information.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A strong response can mention that a product isn’t suitable for every situation. That honesty may feel uncomfortable, but it makes the rest of the answer more credible.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The same principle applies to criticism.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Negative conversations can uncover problems in messaging, customer support, or the product experience itself. Responding clearly won’t eliminate every objection, but it can demonstrate accountability and provide useful context for future readers.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Measure what happens within the community:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Are members returning to participate?</li>



<li>Are users responding to one another?</li>



<li>Are posts receiving meaningful engagement?</li>



<li>Is the brand being mentioned without prompting?</li>



<li>Are members correcting misconceptions or defending positive experiences?</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Then monitor the wider search journey.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Repeat your Google searches and AI prompts. Look for changes in visibility, descriptions, sources, and recommendation contexts. Review whether community discussions are appearing in search results and whether the brand’s owned content is answering the same questions more effectively.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don’t expect a linear relationship between one Reddit post and one ChatGPT citation. Community authority develops through consistency. Visibility is a consequence of a broader system of useful content, relevant participation, and clear brand expertise.</p>



<h2 id="h-how-the-framework-worked-for-kumon" class="wp-block-heading">How the framework worked for Kumon</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Kumon applied this approach to build stronger context for the brand across communities, Google, and AI-generated answers.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The project connected four areas:&nbsp;</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Mapping the questions that mattered to people researching courses and franchises.</li>



<li>Improving owned content.</li>



<li>Understanding relevant community conversations.</li>



<li>Monitoring visibility across search and strategic AI prompts.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It also developed the official u/KumonBrasil profile and r/KumonBrasil community as spaces for transparent answers and user participation.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">According to the case presentation, the first five months produced:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>1,400 members in r/KumonBrasil.</li>



<li>More than 2,000 responses from users.</li>



<li>More than 100,000 views on one piece of content, with 95% approval.</li>



<li>More than 400,000 combined views on the official profile.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Kumon’s visibility across 12 monitored ChatGPT prompts increased from 5% in the first month to 18.13% in the fifth month. The project also reported visibility in Google and AI Overviews, including a Reddit post appearing in a ChatGPT answer about people’s opinions of Kumon.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The lesson isn’t that publishing on Reddit automatically creates AI visibility. The results came from combining community participation, owned content, SEO, technical optimization, and continuous monitoring.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Reddit was one part of a connected authority system — not a hack around it.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><em>(</em><strong><em>Disclosure</em></strong><em>: I work for NP Digital Brazil, which conducted the work described in this case study.)</em>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/reddit-comment-frameworks-471044">10 Reddit comment frameworks that drive engagement without sounding like ads</a></em></strong>


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<h2 id="h-authority-comes-before-visibility" class="wp-block-heading">Authority comes before visibility</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Brands can’t completely control what people say about them on Reddit, Google, or ChatGPT. They can become more useful in the conversations shaping those answers.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Define the subject where your expertise is legitimate. Document how the brand is currently represented. Connect community insight with strong owned content. Focus on the spaces where your audience actually talks. Participate transparently and monitor the entire journey.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The objective isn’t to manufacture citations. It’s to build enough real authority that being discovered, discussed, and recommended becomes a natural consequence.</p>

Reddit isn’t a shortcut to an AI citation. Posting promotional answers and waiting for Google or ChatGPT to notice them isn’t a community strategy. Reddit communities are quick to reject corporate messaging that contributes little of value.
Your brand needs the expertise, credibility, and consistency to add value to the conversation. This five-step framework shows how to build that authority.
1. Define your territory of authority
Start by identifying the subject on which your brand has a legitimate reason to be heard. Your territory of authority isn’t every topic related to your product. It sits at the intersection of:
What your audience needs help understanding.
What your organization knows through direct experience.
What your products, services, or specialists can credibly address.
Turn this territory into a specific question.
For an education company, that question might be: “What should parents consider when choosing a supplementary learning program?”
For a software provider, it could be: “How should small businesses compare customer relationship management platforms?”
A defined question gives your team a filter. It shows you which discussions to enter, which resources to create, and where the brand doesn’t yet have enough expertise to contribute.
Your brand doesn’t need to join every relevant thread. It needs to contribute consistently where its expertise can genuinely help.
Community is a brand territory, not simply another performance media placement.
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2. Establish your baseline
Before publishing or replying, document how the brand is currently represented. Begin with four areas.
Google visibility: Search for priority topics, branded queries, and comparison terms. Identify the Reddit threads, forums, reviews, and third-party discussions appearing in the results.
AI visibility: Test a fixed set of strategic prompts in ChatGPT and other relevant platforms. Record whether the brand appears, how it’s described, and which alternatives are recommended.
Community perception: Review the questions, complaints, positive experiences, and misconceptions already associated with the brand or category.
Owned content: Assess whether your website answers those real-world questions or relies mainly on polished product messaging.
A baseline helps you distinguish recognition from authority. A brand can have strong awareness without being clearly understood. People may know its name but remain unsure who it serves, when it’s the right choice, and how it differs from competing options.
Look beyond mention volume. Record sentiment, recurring questions, descriptions, cited sources, and the contexts in which the brand is recommended.
Without this starting point, it’s easy to confuse more activity with greater visibility.
Dig deeper: Reddit is the keyword research tool you’re probably not using



3. Build a connected authority system
Reddit shouldn’t operate separately from your SEO, content, and AI visibility strategies. Each environment provides a different signal.
Keywords reveal what someone wants to solve. Community discussions add experience, context, and the criteria people use to make a decision. Owned content gives the brand room to provide complete, structured answers.
Use these signals together. A recurring question on Reddit may reveal a gap in your website. A common complaint may show that your product page is setting the wrong expectation. A highly engaged discussion may uncover the language customers use to describe a problem that your brand explains in technical terms.
Turn these findings into stronger guides, comparison pages, videos, FAQs, and support content.
The connection should also work in the other direction. Accurate owned resources give community teams reliable information to reference when answering complex questions.
Think of the system this way: Search reveals intention. Community supplies context. Owned content provides depth. Monitoring shows whether authority is translating into visibility.
The goal isn’t to make every channel repeat the same message. It’s to make them reinforce the same area of expertise.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
4. Focus on the right communities
More Reddit activity doesn’t automatically produce more authority.
Don’t distribute your resources across every subreddit connected to your category. Prioritize the communities where your audience actively discusses its needs, evaluates alternatives, and shares real experiences.
Assess each potential community using the following questions:
Are the conversations relevant to our territory of authority?
Are people asking questions we can credibly answer?
Is the community active enough to support continued participation?
Do its rules permit representatives of companies to contribute?
Can we add value without turning every response into a promotion?
Different Reddit spaces can play different roles. An official profile gives the brand a transparent identity. A branded subreddit can operate as a knowledge and support hub. Independent subreddits provide access to opinions, criteria, and concerns the company can’t control.
That lack of control is valuable. Independent discussions often reveal concerns that traditional customer research misses. They show why people dismiss certain options, which competitors enter the consideration set, and what evidence is needed to earn trust.
Don’t enter those spaces to correct every negative opinion. Enter them to understand the discussion and contribute when your expertise is genuinely useful.
Dig deeper: How to build an organic Reddit strategy that drives SEO impact



5. Engage natively and monitor the complete journey
Native Reddit participation begins with the user’s question, not the brand’s message.
Disclose your affiliation. Answer directly. Acknowledge limitations and trade-offs. Avoid corporate language. Link only when the resource adds meaningful information.
A strong response can mention that a product isn’t suitable for every situation. That honesty may feel uncomfortable, but it makes the rest of the answer more credible.
The same principle applies to criticism.
Negative conversations can uncover problems in messaging, customer support, or the product experience itself. Responding clearly won’t eliminate every objection, but it can demonstrate accountability and provide useful context for future readers.
Measure what happens within the community:
Are members returning to participate?
Are users responding to one another?
Are posts receiving meaningful engagement?
Is the brand being mentioned without prompting?
Are members correcting misconceptions or defending positive experiences?
Then monitor the wider search journey.
Repeat your Google searches and AI prompts. Look for changes in visibility, descriptions, sources, and recommendation contexts. Review whether community discussions are appearing in search results and whether the brand’s owned content is answering the same questions more effectively.
Don’t expect a linear relationship between one Reddit post and one ChatGPT citation. Community authority develops through consistency. Visibility is a consequence of a broader system of useful content, relevant participation, and clear brand expertise.
How the framework worked for Kumon
Kumon applied this approach to build stronger context for the brand across communities, Google, and AI-generated answers.
The project connected four areas: 
Mapping the questions that mattered to people researching courses and franchises.
Improving owned content.
Understanding relevant community conversations.
Monitoring visibility across search and strategic AI prompts.
It also developed the official u/KumonBrasil profile and r/KumonBrasil community as spaces for transparent answers and user participation.
According to the case presentation, the first five months produced:
1,400 members in r/KumonBrasil.
More than 2,000 responses from users.
More than 100,000 views on one piece of content, with 95% approval.
More than 400,000 combined views on the official profile.
Kumon’s visibility across 12 monitored ChatGPT prompts increased from 5% in the first month to 18.13% in the fifth month. The project also reported visibility in Google and AI Overviews, including a Reddit post appearing in a ChatGPT answer about people’s opinions of Kumon.
The lesson isn’t that publishing on Reddit automatically creates AI visibility. The results came from combining community participation, owned content, SEO, technical optimization, and continuous monitoring.
Reddit was one part of a connected authority system — not a hack around it.
(Disclosure: I work for NP Digital Brazil, which conducted the work described in this case study.)



Dig deeper: 10 Reddit comment frameworks that drive engagement without sounding like ads



  
customers won’t either.
      
See your AI visibility
    
Authority comes before visibility
Brands can’t completely control what people say about them on Reddit, Google, or ChatGPT. They can become more useful in the conversations shaping those answers.
Define the subject where your expertise is legitimate. Document how the brand is currently represented. Connect community insight with strong owned content. Focus on the spaces where your audience actually talks. Participate transparently and monitor the entire journey.
The objective isn’t to manufacture citations. It’s to build enough real authority that being discovered, discussed, and recommended becomes a natural consequence.

Reddit can reveal why people choose, reject, or question a brand. Turn those insights into better content for organic and AI search.

5 steps to building Reddit authority for Google and ChatGPT visibility

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-550x310.jpg 550w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>Microsoft says it has "redesigned the navigation and enhanced tables for a more intuitive, efficient experience."

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920-550x310.jpg 550w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/11/microsoft_advertising_1920.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Microsoft is rolling out a new design for the Microsoft Advertising platform that touts a &#8220;more intuitive and efficient experience.&#8221;  When you log in to your advertiser console in Microsoft Advertising you may see a new overlay announcing the new design update.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What Microsoft wrote. </strong>Microsoft wrote, &#8220;Explore redesigned navigation and enhanced tables for a more intuitive, efficient experience. Updated navigation in Microsoft Advertising improves clarity and consistency, while enhanced tables make for seamless data interaction.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;This preview may change before general availability. Your feedback helps us improve. Switch back to the classic experience anytime,&#8221; Microsoft added.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What is looks like. </strong>Hana Kobzová posted a screenshot of the overlay on <a href="https://ppcnewsfeed.com/ppc-news/2026-08/microsoft-unveils-redesigned-navigation-tables/">PPC News Feed</a>:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="776" height="720" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/microsoft-advertising-design-update-preview-WCga60Vl.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486267" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/microsoft-advertising-design-update-preview-WCga60Vl.png 776w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/microsoft-advertising-design-update-preview-WCga60Vl-768x713.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 776px) 100vw, 776px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">&#8220;The updated interface improves clarity and consistency while facilitating seamless data interaction. Users can continue to use the classic experience if desired,&#8221; Hana wrote.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care. </strong>While the new design won&#8217;t make a direct impact on any of your campaign performance data, the new updated design and interface may make it more efficient for you to work in. A more efficient interface can lead to saved time when building your campaigns. </p>


Microsoft is rolling out a new design for the Microsoft Advertising platform that touts a “more intuitive and efficient experience.”  When you log in to your advertiser console in Microsoft Advertising you may see a new overlay announcing the new design update.
What Microsoft wrote. Microsoft wrote, “Explore redesigned navigation and enhanced tables for a more intuitive, efficient experience. Updated navigation in Microsoft Advertising improves clarity and consistency, while enhanced tables make for seamless data interaction.”
“This preview may change before general availability. Your feedback helps us improve. Switch back to the classic experience anytime,” Microsoft added.
What is looks like. Hana Kobzová posted a screenshot of the overlay on PPC News Feed:




“The updated interface improves clarity and consistency while facilitating seamless data interaction. Users can continue to use the classic experience if desired,” Hana wrote.
Why we care. While the new design won’t make a direct impact on any of your campaign performance data, the new updated design and interface may make it more efficient for you to work in. A more efficient interface can lead to saved time when building your campaigns.

Microsoft says it has "redesigned the navigation and enhanced tables for a more intuitive, efficient experience."

Microsoft Advertising rolling out new design for advertiser console

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/How-to-map-AI-search-prompts-to-every-stage-of-the-sales-funnel.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="How to map AI search prompts to every stage of the sales funnel" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/How-to-map-AI-search-prompts-to-every-stage-of-the-sales-funnel.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/How-to-map-AI-search-prompts-to-every-stage-of-the-sales-funnel-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/How-to-map-AI-search-prompts-to-every-stage-of-the-sales-funnel-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/How-to-map-AI-search-prompts-to-every-stage-of-the-sales-funnel-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Your brand may win the shortlist and lose the buyer earlier. Map prompts to see where AI introduces, recommends, compares, or drops you.

Keyword research has always required you to think about intent.
Someone searching “what is CRM software” is in a very different place from someone searching “HubSpot vs. Salesforce.”
With AI search, those intent categories still matter. But the universe of queries within them has gotten much bigger.
“Best CRM software” might become “What CRM is best for a 50-person B2B sales team that uses HubSpot for marketing and needs better pipeline reporting?” Change the company size, tech stack, pain point, or priority, and you have another plausible prompt worth considering.
You need a way to decide which variations matter enough to measure. That’s where prompt mapping comes in.
What is prompt mapping?
Prompt mapping is the process of identifying the questions your audience is likely to ask AI platforms and organizing them by factors like topic, intent, persona, and stage of the buyer journey.
Think of it as an extension of keyword mapping for AI search.
Traditional keyword research might surface terms like “customer retention software,” “reduce customer churn,” and “best churn prediction tools.” Prompt mapping builds on those themes by accounting for the context buyers add around their problems, needs, and criteria:
Why is our SaaS churn increasing even though customer satisfaction scores are stable?
What are the best ways to reduce churn for a B2B SaaS company?
What tools can identify customers at risk of churning?
What are the best customer retention platforms for an enterprise SaaS company?
You can’t track every possible variation. Instead, your tracking set should capture how buyer questions and priorities change as they move toward a decision.
The sales funnel provides a useful framework for building that mix.
Why map prompts to the sales funnel?
An overall AI visibility score can hide where your brand is actually showing up.
Say you track 100 prompts and appear in 40% of the responses. Break that 40% down by funnel stage, and you might find that your brand appears in 70% of branded and comparison prompts, but just 10% of prompts around problem discovery and solution research.
That breakdown shows where your brand enters the conversation, where it stays visible, and where it drops out.
Tracking visibility by funnel stage can help answer questions like:
Does the brand appear while buyers are still defining their problem?
Is it associated with the relevant product or service category?
Does it make AI-generated shortlists?
Which competitors appear more frequently during evaluation?
What information surfaces when buyers investigate the brand directly?
Where does visibility drop as purchase intent increases?
Those differences give you a much more actionable view of AI visibility than an aggregate score alone.
AI recommends.
      
See your AI visibility
    
What AI visibility looks like at each stage of the funnel
Visibility means something different depending on where a prompt falls in the buyer journey.
As intent changes, so does what you should pay attention to in the response and how you interpret the results.
Here’s what to look for at each stage:
Awareness: Are you part of the problem space?
Awareness prompts tend to center on problems, symptoms, goals, and educational questions:
Why is our customer churn increasing?
What causes SaaS customers to cancel?
How can SaaS companies improve customer retention?
What are the biggest warning signs of customer churn?
How do companies identify customers at risk of leaving?
This is where you can see whether your brand enters the conversation early. You may be highly visible once buyers know what kind of solution they need, but barely surface while they’re still figuring out the problem.
Consideration: Are you associated with the solution?
As prompts move into consideration, they tend to introduce possible approaches, solution categories, capabilities, and use cases:
What are the best ways to reduce SaaS churn?
What tools help predict customer churn?
How does customer retention software work?
What should I look for in a churn prediction platform?
Can customer retention software identify at-risk accounts before they cancel?
Here, look at whether AI platforms connect your brand with the solutions and capabilities you want to be known for.
If you sell churn prediction software but rarely appear when buyers ask, for example, how to identify at-risk customers, that points to a gap in how strongly your brand is associated with that need.
Evaluation: Do you make the shortlist?
Evaluation prompts can show whether your visibility holds as buyers narrow their options and introduce more specific selection criteria:
What are the best customer retention platforms?
What is the best customer retention software for enterprise SaaS?
Which churn prediction tools integrate with Salesforce?
[Brand A] vs. [Brand B]
What are the best alternatives to [Competitor]?
Which customer retention platform is best for a 500-person SaaS company?
Pay attention to how visibility changes as the criteria get more specific.
Your brand might appear for “best customer retention software,” then disappear once they specify an industry, company size, integration, or use case. That can show where your visibility starts to fall off as the shortlist narrows.
Decision: How is your brand represented?
Decision-stage prompts tend to focus on a specific brand and the details buyers want to validate before moving forward:
Is [Brand] worth it?
How much does [Brand] cost?
What do customers say about [Brand]?
Is [Brand] good for enterprise companies?
How long does [Brand] take to implement?
Does [Brand] integrate with Salesforce?
What are the disadvantages of [Brand]?
Inclusion rate matters less here. If someone asks about your brand by name, focus on how the answer represents you.
Is pricing current? Are key capabilities accurate? What strengths, limitations, or objections surface? Which competitors appear alongside you?
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How to build your prompt map
You don’t need thousands of prompts to get started.
A smaller, deliberately constructed set is often more useful than a huge collection of loosely related questions.
1. Define the buying stages that apply to your business
Start with your actual sales process.
Awareness, consideration, evaluation, and decision provide a useful baseline, but your customers may follow a different path.
A complex B2B purchase might involve technical validation, security review, or internal stakeholder approval. An ecommerce journey could move from product discovery to comparison to reviews and purchase much faster.
The stages should reflect how your customers research and buy.
2. Identify the questions buyers ask at each stage
Avoid building the entire map in a marketing brainstorm.
Look at the places where customer questions already exist:
Sales calls.
Customer interviews.
Search query data.
On-site search.
Support tickets.
Sales enablement materials.
Reviews.
Reddit and industry forums.
Competitor content.
People Also Ask results.
Existing keyword research.
Sales teams can be especially useful here. The questions prospects repeatedly ask during discovery calls, demos, and procurement often make strong consideration and decision-stage prompts.
Organize those questions according to where they occur in the buying process.
3. Turn search themes into natural-language prompts
A traditional keyword list can provide useful raw material, but don’t simply convert every keyword into a question.
Take a term like “email security software.” That theme could lead to prompts like:
How can we stop employees from clicking phishing emails?
What email security tools work with Microsoft 365?
What should I look for in email security software for a healthcare company?
Which email security platforms are best for a company with 1,000 employees?
What are the best Proofpoint alternatives for preventing phishing attacks?
Notice how the prompts introduce different problems, requirements, audiences, and competitive considerations around the same general topic.
Use those variations to reflect how someone would realistically research the issue, rather than generating a long list of slightly different ways to phrase the same question.
4. Add variations that reflect your actual customers
Generic category prompts only tell you so much.
Buyers frequently add context about who they are, what they need, or the constraints they’re working within.
Depending on your business, useful variations might include:
Industry.
Company size.
Role or persona.
Geography.
Budget.
Use case.
Product requirement.
Integration.
Business model.
Pain point.
“Best CRM software” and “best CRM for a 20-person B2B sales team that uses Gmail” may produce very different recommendations.
Your prompt map should account for the contexts most likely to affect whether your company is a relevant answer.
5. Tag and organize your prompts
Once the list grows, categorization becomes essential. At minimum, tag each prompt by funnel stage and core topic.
Depending on your measurement goals, you may also want to track:
Intent.
Persona.
Product or service.
Industry.
Geography.
Competitor.
Branded vs. non-branded.
Use case.
These tags make it possible to analyze patterns later.
Instead of knowing that visibility fell five percentage points overall, you may discover that the decline is concentrated among non-branded evaluation prompts for a particular product category.
That’s a much more actionable finding.
6. Prioritize a core tracking set
You could generate hundreds of variations for almost any topic. Resist the temptation to track all of them.
Prioritize prompts based on factors like:
Relevance to the business.
Importance of the topic.
Likelihood that a real buyer would ask the question.
Commercial intent.
Strategic importance of the audience or use case.
The goal is to create a representative sample of the buying journey.
Once you’ve established that core set, run the same prompts consistently. AI-generated answers can vary from one response to another, so repeatable testing over time is more useful than constantly replacing prompts with new ones.
7. Use the map to identify content gaps
Once you start tracking these prompts, pay attention to where your brand drops out and what that tells you about your content.
If you’re missing from awareness prompts, you may need stronger content around the problems your audience is trying to solve. If you rarely appear during consideration, look at how clearly your content connects your brand to the relevant solution, capability, or use case.
When competitors consistently beat you out in evaluation prompts, dig into the content supporting comparisons, alternatives, features, integrations, and proof.
Decision-stage gaps require a closer look at the responses themselves. Are AI platforms surfacing outdated information? Missing an important capability? Leaning on third-party sources that don’t tell the full story?
Use those patterns to decide where new content is needed and where existing pages could use an update.
What a finished prompt map might look like
You don’t need a complicated system to organize the first version. A basic prompt map could look something like this:

Funnel stageBuyer intentPrompt typeExample
AwarenessUnderstand a problemProblemWhy are our building’s energy costs increasing?
AwarenessExplore an outcomeEducationalHow can businesses reduce commercial energy costs?
ConsiderationExplore solutionsCategoryIs commercial solar worth it for office buildings?
ConsiderationUnderstand requirementsSolutionWhat should I look for in a commercial solar system?
EvaluationBuild a shortlistRecommendationBest commercial solar companies for office buildings
EvaluationCompare optionsComparisonSolar panels vs. solar roof for commercial buildings
DecisionValidate a providerReputationWhat do customers say about [Solar Company]?
DecisionUnderstand costPricingHow much does [Solar Company] charge for installation?






From there, you can add the dimensions that matter to your organization.
A cybersecurity company might segment prompts by company size and threat type. A retailer might focus on product category, price range, and customer need. A B2B software company might add industry, integration, and persona.
The framework should reflect the decisions your customers actually make.
Common prompt mapping mistakes to avoid
Prompt mapping is still an emerging practice, and it’s easy to build a prompt set that looks comprehensive without producing particularly useful data.
Some common mistakes to watch for:
Tracking only category and branded prompts
“Best CRM software” and “[Brand] reviews” are worth tracking, but they only capture part of the journey.
If your prompt set starts once buyers know the solution category or your brand name, you’ll miss your visibility during problem discovery. Include earlier educational and problem-focused prompts, too.
Giving every prompt equal importance
Not every prompt carries the same weight.
If you track 50 broad awareness prompts and 10 high-intent evaluation prompts, combining them into one visibility rate can obscure what’s happening closer to purchase.
Segment results by funnel stage, topic, and intent. “We appear in 42% of prompts” tells you far less than knowing where that visibility is concentrated — and where it falls off.
Building prompts around how marketers talk
Your customers may describe a problem very differently from your marketing or product teams.
Use their language wherever possible. Sales calls, reviews, forums, search data, and customer research can surface phrasing you won’t get from an internal brainstorm.
Treating the prompt map as finished
Buyer behavior, products, competitors, and terminology change. Your prompt map should change with them.
Keep your core tracking set stable enough to measure trends, but periodically add emerging questions and use cases and retire prompts that no longer reflect how your audience searches.
customers won’t either.
      
See your AI visibility
    
Turn AI visibility into a view of the buyer journey
AI visibility metrics become much more useful when you know what the prompts being measured represent.
A single inclusion rate indicates how often your brand appeared across a set of questions. A funnel-based prompt map provides the context needed to understand where that visibility occurs.
You can see whether AI platforms introduce your brand while buyers define the problem, include it when they explore solutions, carry it into vendor comparisons, and represent it accurately when buyers get serious about making a choice.
That gives you a more useful way to evaluate AI search performance over time.
Start with the questions that move your customers from problem to purchase. Map them to the journey, track them consistently, and use the gaps to decide where your search and content strategy needs to go next.

Your brand may win the shortlist and lose the buyer earlier. Map prompts to see where AI introduces, recommends, compares, or drops you.

How to map AI search prompts to every stage of the sales funnel

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI-.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Building an AI agent for ad management- The hard part isn&#039;t the AI" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI-.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI--768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI--1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI--1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Confident mistakes, noisy alerts, and conversion lag reveal what it takes to build an AI agent you can trust with paid media.


<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI-.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Building an AI agent for ad management- The hard part isn&#039;t the AI" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI-.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI--768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI--1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Building-an-AI-agent-for-ad-management-The-hard-part-isnt-the-AI--1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/ai-agents-ppc-what-to-know-build-457318">AI agents</a> can analyze paid media accounts, spot problems, and investigate performance changes at a scale a human team couldn&#8217;t match. The harder question is whether you can trust their judgment.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Since late last year, I’ve been building an AI agent inside our agency to find out. It now works alongside our team every day, investigating performance changes, continuously checking accounts for issues, and picking up assigned tasks like a team member.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The first thing our AI analyst taught me was how convincing it could be while being completely wrong. It looked at last week’s numbers, declared performance had fallen off a cliff, and wrote a very believable explanation of why. The problem was that the conversions hadn&#8217;t arrived yet.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There’s plenty of advice on deciding whether to build an AI agent. This is what actually happens when you do.</p>



<h2 id="h-it-started-with-one-overnight-alert" class="wp-block-heading">It started with one overnight alert</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The version that exists today wasn&#8217;t the plan. Early last year, I started exploring how AI could alleviate some of the pain of proactively monitoring the accounts we looked after. We already had “dumb alerts” that spotted patterns and declines, but they were noisy and not very insightful.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">My first version, launched in early December, ran one overnight job. It looked at a campaign&#8217;s recent data and key metrics, flagged anything that looked wrong, and posted it to Slack before anyone logged in.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It was still noisy, but it spotted things our previous system never would have. We kept improving it, making its judgment smarter, its analysis more reliable, and its intelligence useful beyond alerts.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The test was simple: Would it make an existing process faster, or create a better client outcome through more frequent checks or changes that humans couldn&#8217;t realistically support?</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Over the months, it became an AI analyst with governed access to reporting data, ad platforms, conversion data, monitoring, and our task system. Other than the obvious, you&#8217;d be hard-pressed to know it wasn&#8217;t a remote employee. It&#8217;s even got a name: Terry.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Today, it can explain why a CPA moved last week, check whether an account has stopped serving this morning against the same hours last week, distinguish a genuinely weak week from conversion lag, and investigate alert tasks before returning findings and suggested actions.</p>


<a href="https://www.semrush.com/analytics/traffic/paid-search?utm_campaign=ic_sel_0101ppc&#038;utm_source=searchengineland.com&#038;utm_medium=overlay&#038;onboarding=off" target="_blank">
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        See exactly how <span>your competitors win</span>.
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<h2 id="h-the-ai-is-the-easy-part" class="wp-block-heading">The AI is the easy part</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The lesson I&#8217;d give anyone starting this is simple: The AI is the easy bit. The right models are remarkably capable. The real work is everything around them.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I tell my team to think of our AI analyst as a remote co-worker. It could be the most intelligent hire in the world, but if we give it bad data or incomplete information, its answers will only be as good as what we supplied.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If your conversion data is shallow, or your tracking flags a lead as valuable when it never becomes revenue, the AI will confidently analyze rubbish and give you convincing conclusions.&nbsp;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><a href="https://searchengineland.com/bad-data-bad-reports-poor-ad-delivery-481109">Bad data now means bad delivery</a> rather than bad reports. An AI analyst raises the stakes because bad data can produce a convincing explanation for why everything is fine, or why everything is falling apart when it isn&#8217;t.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The same applies to business context. Nuances about ad accounts, businesses, and sales pipelines often exist only in the heads of the people closest to them. The AI can&#8217;t know that sales are down because a business has a two-week sales lag. It&#8217;ll confidently tell you things have collapsed overnight. I learned that very quickly.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Then there are the things you&#8217;d expect a normal analyst to catch. If you&#8217;re running business insurance, for example, you&#8217;d expect your analyst to question a keyword promoting pet insurance. If you want the AI to catch it, you need to tell it what the business actually sells.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The point is simple: You can&#8217;t just strap an AI to some datasets. You need to give it access to the information your team uses to understand the business, whenever it needs it. You wouldn&#8217;t tell a new team member they&#8217;re not allowed to know anything about your business, would you?</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/why-ppc-ai-agents-fail-without-business-data-476961">Why PPC AI agents fail without business data</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-then-there-are-the-guardrails" class="wp-block-heading">Then there are the guardrails</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">We&#8217;ve all had the “yes, you&#8217;re right” moment with AI, when you&#8217;ve corrected it about something you knew it got wrong. Now imagine that judgment running thousands of times a day. You need guardrails to make its answers trustworthy:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>Access is governed. The system reads only what it&#8217;s approved to read and the approved fields. No raw personal data, no open-ended access.</li>



<li>Recent conversion data is masked by default because immature data produces confident wrong answers.</li>



<li>Higher-stakes judgments get a second, independent review before reaching a human.</li>



<li>Recommendations need evidence attached, not vibes.</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">None of that is glamorous, but it&#8217;s the difference between a tool the team trusts and one it ignores. In the most recent two weeks of our changelog, we shipped no new features, just reliability, cost, and correctness work. That&#8217;s the reality of building this.</p>



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<h2 id="h-what-went-wrong-along-the-way" class="wp-block-heading">What went wrong along the way</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I thought the API would bring the intelligence and I&#8217;d just handle the integrations. It turns out there&#8217;s plenty of plumbing around it, too.</p>



<h3 id="h-it-was-confidently-wrong-about-recent-performance" class="wp-block-heading">It was confidently wrong about recent performance</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Early on, the analyst would look at last week&#8217;s numbers and declare them weak because it had no concept of conversion lag. Believe me, it&#8217;s not a great feeling to be told you spent $5,000 yesterday and had no conversions when those conversions simply hadn&#8217;t been processed yet.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In financial services, a lead can take weeks to become revenue. Fixing this took months of safe conversion windows, estimated conversions with uncertainty ranges, and calculated maturity windows. Eventually, we added a rule that when the lag pattern isn&#8217;t stable enough to model, the system refuses to estimate rather than guess.</p>



<h3 id="h-it-nearly-talked-itself-out-of-a-job" class="wp-block-heading">It nearly talked itself out of a job</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The fastest way to kill an AI assistant is to let it be noisy. We removed duplicate alerts, weekend messages that could wait until Monday, and afternoon panics about campaigns that had simply hit their daily budget cap.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Most of the engineering effort in monitoring turned out to be teaching the system when to stay silent. Otherwise, the team stops listening.</p>



<h3 id="h-it-promised-things-it-couldn-t-do" class="wp-block-heading">It promised things it couldn&#8217;t do</h3>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Language models are eager to please. Ours would say it had updated a document or would send a file when it couldn&#8217;t do either. It would imply it remembered context it didn&#8217;t have or promise to check on something later when it couldn&#8217;t.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Those moments erode trust. We had to engineer honesty into the system with rules against promising actions it can&#8217;t perform and an open questions list that flags what it doesn&#8217;t know.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/agentic-ai-and-vibe-coding-the-next-evolution-of-ppc-management-467805">Agentic AI and vibe coding: The next evolution of PPC management</a></em></strong>



<h2 id="h-automation-has-to-earn-it" class="wp-block-heading">Automation has to earn it</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">This is where most of the industry conversation gets the order wrong. The exciting endpoint is an agent that changes bids, budgets, and keywords on its own. We&#8217;ve deliberately not built that yet. The last thing we want is an agent confidently reducing a budget on an account.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">We&#8217;re starting with read-only analysis. It can make recommendations when asked, but humans still implement them.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">A recent agency hire described using Terry as being like having a team of analysts working for him. He&#8217;s worked in paid media for more than a decade.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The next step is structured recommendations that are automatically generated, reviewed by a human, implemented through code, and tracked for outcomes. That will let us measure whether the system&#8217;s judgment is good enough to make changes and whether it can learn from them. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The models are intelligent, but they haven&#8217;t learned from the thousands of decisions you&#8217;ve made, successful or not. Some of the best paid media managers know their accounts in ways that go beyond what an API can provide.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Our rule from day one has been simple: Automation doesn&#8217;t arrive until the recommendation layer has proven itself. If you can&#8217;t measure whether recommendations were right in the first place, automation just does the wrong thing faster. The industry spent a decade learning that lesson with Smart Bidding and bad conversion data. There&#8217;s no reason to learn it again with agents.</p>


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<h2 id="h-where-i-think-this-is-going" class="wp-block-heading">Where I think this is going</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The version of Terry that exists in the future will propose exact changes with the evidence attached, escalate higher-risk changes to a human, automate lower-risk ones, monitor what happens next, and automatically roll back what doesn&#8217;t work, all within a well-defined strategy and budget limits we&#8217;ve set.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">I don&#8217;t see a future where AI will completely run an account end to end, but it will be a very capable operator working within rules we&#8217;ve written. Using a car analogy, we&#8217;re just trying to create adaptive cruise control with steering assist, not full self-driving yet.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The job of managing paid media, like most jobs AI touches, is changing from doing the analysis and taking action to directing and judging the systems that do them, and holding them accountable.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It frees up our time for the human elements of the job. Rushing to the end goal would cause far more pain than taking the time to get each stage right.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When Terry was new, it told me performance had fallen off a cliff, and it was wrong. Last week, it flagged a delivery problem before anyone had logged in for the day, and it was right. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The difference between those two mornings wasn&#8217;t a better model (although, honestly, it might have helped). It was the data we fixed, the alerts we deleted, the honesty we had to engineer into it, and the automation we refused to build.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong><em>Dig deeper: <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-ads-ai-agents-roadmap-484948">The 4-step roadmap to AI agents for Google Ads</a></em></strong>

AI agents can analyze paid media accounts, spot problems, and investigate performance changes at a scale a human team couldn’t match. The harder question is whether you can trust their judgment.
Since late last year, I’ve been building an AI agent inside our agency to find out. It now works alongside our team every day, investigating performance changes, continuously checking accounts for issues, and picking up assigned tasks like a team member.
The first thing our AI analyst taught me was how convincing it could be while being completely wrong. It looked at last week’s numbers, declared performance had fallen off a cliff, and wrote a very believable explanation of why. The problem was that the conversions hadn’t arrived yet.
There’s plenty of advice on deciding whether to build an AI agent. This is what actually happens when you do.
It started with one overnight alert
The version that exists today wasn’t the plan. Early last year, I started exploring how AI could alleviate some of the pain of proactively monitoring the accounts we looked after. We already had “dumb alerts” that spotted patterns and declines, but they were noisy and not very insightful.
My first version, launched in early December, ran one overnight job. It looked at a campaign’s recent data and key metrics, flagged anything that looked wrong, and posted it to Slack before anyone logged in.
It was still noisy, but it spotted things our previous system never would have. We kept improving it, making its judgment smarter, its analysis more reliable, and its intelligence useful beyond alerts. 
The test was simple: Would it make an existing process faster, or create a better client outcome through more frequent checks or changes that humans couldn’t realistically support?
Over the months, it became an AI analyst with governed access to reporting data, ad platforms, conversion data, monitoring, and our task system. Other than the obvious, you’d be hard-pressed to know it wasn’t a remote employee. It’s even got a name: Terry.
Today, it can explain why a CPA moved last week, check whether an account has stopped serving this morning against the same hours last week, distinguish a genuinely weak week from conversion lag, and investigate alert tasks before returning findings and suggested actions.
your competitors win.
      
Analyze your competitors
    
The AI is the easy part
The lesson I’d give anyone starting this is simple: The AI is the easy bit. The right models are remarkably capable. The real work is everything around them.
I tell my team to think of our AI analyst as a remote co-worker. It could be the most intelligent hire in the world, but if we give it bad data or incomplete information, its answers will only be as good as what we supplied.
If your conversion data is shallow, or your tracking flags a lead as valuable when it never becomes revenue, the AI will confidently analyze rubbish and give you convincing conclusions. 
Bad data now means bad delivery rather than bad reports. An AI analyst raises the stakes because bad data can produce a convincing explanation for why everything is fine, or why everything is falling apart when it isn’t.
The same applies to business context. Nuances about ad accounts, businesses, and sales pipelines often exist only in the heads of the people closest to them. The AI can’t know that sales are down because a business has a two-week sales lag. It’ll confidently tell you things have collapsed overnight. I learned that very quickly.
Then there are the things you’d expect a normal analyst to catch. If you’re running business insurance, for example, you’d expect your analyst to question a keyword promoting pet insurance. If you want the AI to catch it, you need to tell it what the business actually sells.
The point is simple: You can’t just strap an AI to some datasets. You need to give it access to the information your team uses to understand the business, whenever it needs it. You wouldn’t tell a new team member they’re not allowed to know anything about your business, would you?
Dig deeper: Why PPC AI agents fail without business data



Then there are the guardrails
We’ve all had the “yes, you’re right” moment with AI, when you’ve corrected it about something you knew it got wrong. Now imagine that judgment running thousands of times a day. You need guardrails to make its answers trustworthy:
Access is governed. The system reads only what it’s approved to read and the approved fields. No raw personal data, no open-ended access.
Recent conversion data is masked by default because immature data produces confident wrong answers.
Higher-stakes judgments get a second, independent review before reaching a human.
Recommendations need evidence attached, not vibes.
None of that is glamorous, but it’s the difference between a tool the team trusts and one it ignores. In the most recent two weeks of our changelog, we shipped no new features, just reliability, cost, and correctness work. That’s the reality of building this.
Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.
 
				
				
			
See terms.
		
What went wrong along the way
I thought the API would bring the intelligence and I’d just handle the integrations. It turns out there’s plenty of plumbing around it, too.
It was confidently wrong about recent performance
Early on, the analyst would look at last week’s numbers and declare them weak because it had no concept of conversion lag. Believe me, it’s not a great feeling to be told you spent $5,000 yesterday and had no conversions when those conversions simply hadn’t been processed yet.
In financial services, a lead can take weeks to become revenue. Fixing this took months of safe conversion windows, estimated conversions with uncertainty ranges, and calculated maturity windows. Eventually, we added a rule that when the lag pattern isn’t stable enough to model, the system refuses to estimate rather than guess.
It nearly talked itself out of a job
The fastest way to kill an AI assistant is to let it be noisy. We removed duplicate alerts, weekend messages that could wait until Monday, and afternoon panics about campaigns that had simply hit their daily budget cap.
Most of the engineering effort in monitoring turned out to be teaching the system when to stay silent. Otherwise, the team stops listening.
It promised things it couldn’t do
Language models are eager to please. Ours would say it had updated a document or would send a file when it couldn’t do either. It would imply it remembered context it didn’t have or promise to check on something later when it couldn’t.
Those moments erode trust. We had to engineer honesty into the system with rules against promising actions it can’t perform and an open questions list that flags what it doesn’t know.
Dig deeper: Agentic AI and vibe coding: The next evolution of PPC management



Automation has to earn it
This is where most of the industry conversation gets the order wrong. The exciting endpoint is an agent that changes bids, budgets, and keywords on its own. We’ve deliberately not built that yet. The last thing we want is an agent confidently reducing a budget on an account.
We’re starting with read-only analysis. It can make recommendations when asked, but humans still implement them.
A recent agency hire described using Terry as being like having a team of analysts working for him. He’s worked in paid media for more than a decade.
The next step is structured recommendations that are automatically generated, reviewed by a human, implemented through code, and tracked for outcomes. That will let us measure whether the system’s judgment is good enough to make changes and whether it can learn from them. 
The models are intelligent, but they haven’t learned from the thousands of decisions you’ve made, successful or not. Some of the best paid media managers know their accounts in ways that go beyond what an API can provide.
Our rule from day one has been simple: Automation doesn’t arrive until the recommendation layer has proven itself. If you can’t measure whether recommendations were right in the first place, automation just does the wrong thing faster. The industry spent a decade learning that lesson with Smart Bidding and bad conversion data. There’s no reason to learn it again with agents.
a customer you lose.
      
See who’s stealing your traffic
    
Where I think this is going
The version of Terry that exists in the future will propose exact changes with the evidence attached, escalate higher-risk changes to a human, automate lower-risk ones, monitor what happens next, and automatically roll back what doesn’t work, all within a well-defined strategy and budget limits we’ve set.
I don’t see a future where AI will completely run an account end to end, but it will be a very capable operator working within rules we’ve written. Using a car analogy, we’re just trying to create adaptive cruise control with steering assist, not full self-driving yet.
The job of managing paid media, like most jobs AI touches, is changing from doing the analysis and taking action to directing and judging the systems that do them, and holding them accountable.
It frees up our time for the human elements of the job. Rushing to the end goal would cause far more pain than taking the time to get each stage right.
When Terry was new, it told me performance had fallen off a cliff, and it was wrong. Last week, it flagged a delivery problem before anyone had logged in for the day, and it was right. 
The difference between those two mornings wasn’t a better model (although, honestly, it might have helped). It was the data we fixed, the alerts we deleted, the honesty we had to engineer into it, and the automation we refused to build.
Dig deeper: The 4-step roadmap to AI agents for Google Ads

Confident mistakes, noisy alerts, and conversion lag reveal what it takes to build an AI agent you can trust with paid media.

Building an AI agent for ad management: The hard part isn’t the AI

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>This behavior pushes down the core search results and gives you an AI Mode type of experience within the main Google Search interface.

<div><img width="1920" height="1097" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920.jpg 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920-768x439.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-expansion-logo-1920-1536x878.jpg 1536w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google has <a href="https://www.seroundtable.com/google-ai-overviews-push-ai-mode-responses-41974.html">confirmed</a> that for some queries AI Overviews may dynamically expand to its full state, replacing the AI Overview snippet with a full detailed response. This not only removes the &#8220;Show more&#8221; button in the AI Overview but it also pushes down the core search results that searchers were able to see without having to always scroll down the page. </p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Now the Google Search results look more like a full AI answer, more like how AI Mode works, versus how Google has typically shown AI responses within Search.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What it looks like. </strong>For some queries, Google will fully expand the AI Overview response, so the need to click on the &#8220;Show more&#8221; button will not be needed. Here is a GIF of it in action:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="800" height="651" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-overview-no-show-more-Clm4zUw7.gif" alt="" class="wp-image-486202" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-overview-no-show-more-Clm4zUw7.gif 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/google-ai-overview-no-show-more-Clm4zUw7-768x625.gif 768w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If users have already begun scrolling to view content below the AI Overview, Google cancels the expansion so that the user doesn&#8217;t lose their reading position.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What Google said. </strong>A Google spokesperson told us:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people.&#8221;</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">But as you can imagine, Google said this is a good thing. Google added:</p>



<ul class="wp-block-list">
<li>&#8220;Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration.”</li>
</ul>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>More details. </strong>Chris Long spotted this earlier and posted on X, he <a href="https://x.com/chris_nectiv/status/2092984357782794593">wrote</a>, &#8220;Holy moly SEOs: Google is now revealing the AI Mode prompt box BY DEFAULT for some queries.&#8221; &#8220;This is how Google continues to push AI Mode as the default search experience,&#8221; he added.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Here is his post:</p>



<figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-x wp-block-embed-x"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Holy moly SEOs: Google is now revealing the AI Mode prompt box BY DEFAULT for some queries. <br><br>This is how Google continues to push AI Mode as the default search experience. <a href="https://t.co/Ero2pj3BZf">pic.twitter.com/Ero2pj3BZf</a>&mdash; Chris Long (@chris_nectiv) <a href="https://x.com/chris_nectiv/status/2092984357782794593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">August 27, 2026</a></blockquote>
</div></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care. </strong>If you thought AI Overviews take away clicks, just wait for this to roll out to your queries. This should lead to even fewer and fewer clicks from Google Search.  Google earlier this week added <a href="https://searchengineland.com/google-adds-link-carousels-for-developing-topics-in-ai-mode-485884">link carousels for developing topics to AI Mode</a>, like it did for AI Overviews. But I doubt that will help all that much for most queries that show this fully expanded answer.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google did not comment on what percentage of queries this impacts and if it will continue to expand to more queries over time. But you&#8217;d have to imagine it will. We all expect AI Mode to take over Google Search at some point in time, and Google has been taking baby steps in that direction.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">


Google has confirmed that for some queries AI Overviews may dynamically expand to its full state, replacing the AI Overview snippet with a full detailed response. This not only removes the “Show more” button in the AI Overview but it also pushes down the core search results that searchers were able to see without having to always scroll down the page. 
Now the Google Search results look more like a full AI answer, more like how AI Mode works, versus how Google has typically shown AI responses within Search.
What it looks like. For some queries, Google will fully expand the AI Overview response, so the need to click on the “Show more” button will not be needed. Here is a GIF of it in action:




If users have already begun scrolling to view content below the AI Overview, Google cancels the expansion so that the user doesn’t lose their reading position.
What Google said. A Google spokesperson told us:
“For some queries, AI Overviews may dynamically expand for topics where our systems determine it’s most useful for people.”
But as you can imagine, Google said this is a good thing. Google added:
“Our research has shown that with this dynamic experience, users find Search more helpful and engage deeper in follow-up exploration.”
More details. Chris Long spotted this earlier and posted on X, he wrote, “Holy moly SEOs: Google is now revealing the AI Mode prompt box BY DEFAULT for some queries.” “This is how Google continues to push AI Mode as the default search experience,” he added.
Here is his post:


Holy moly SEOs: Google is now revealing the AI Mode prompt box BY DEFAULT for some queries. 
This is how Google continues to push AI Mode as the default search experience. pic.twitter.com/Ero2pj3BZf— Chris Long (@chris_nectiv) August 27, 2026




Why we care. If you thought AI Overviews take away clicks, just wait for this to roll out to your queries. This should lead to even fewer and fewer clicks from Google Search.  Google earlier this week added link carousels for developing topics to AI Mode, like it did for AI Overviews. But I doubt that will help all that much for most queries that show this fully expanded answer.
Google did not comment on what percentage of queries this impacts and if it will continue to expand to more queries over time. But you’d have to imagine it will. We all expect AI Mode to take over Google Search at some point in time, and Google has been taking baby steps in that direction.

This behavior pushes down the core search results and gives you an AI Mode type of experience within the main Google Search interface.

Google is dynamically expanding AI Overviews for some queries

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>Greg Finn reflects on 20 years of PPC, from exact match and Smart Bidding to automation, AI Mode and why authenticity will matter more than ever.

<div><img width="1920" height="1080" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover.png 1920w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/20-for-20-greg-finn-cover-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1920px) 100vw, 1920px" /></div>
<figure class="wp-block-embed aligncenter is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-block-embed-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z69gzZyOvRQ?feature=oembed" rel="noopener noreferrer">Watch this video on YouTube</a>
</div></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Cypress North co-founder Greg Finn has spent more than two decades watching search marketing evolve from a hands-on, highly granular discipline into an industry increasingly shaped by automation, AI and algorithms.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">In a conversation celebrating Search Engine Land’s 20th anniversary, Finn reflected on his early days in PPC and SEO, the rise of Google Ads automation, the importance of community, and why he believes the traditional Google search experience won’t survive the next five years.</p>



<h2 id="h-from-the-ppc-wild-west-to-a-career-in-search" class="wp-block-heading">From the PPC Wild West to a career in search</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn’s introduction to digital marketing came around 2004 and 2005 while working at a technology company.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Initially working in sales support, he began shadowing the company’s digital marketer and taking on additional work, learning platforms such as Overture and Yahoo before Google AdWords became dominant.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“I just found that I loved it and I was good at it,” Finn said.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">His experience wasn’t limited to paid search. Finn also worked heavily in SEO, including an in-house role where he was tasked with ranking for highly competitive terms such as “student loans.”</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That combination gave him a front-row seat to an era when marketers had substantially more granular control over both paid and organic search.</p>



<h2 id="h-ppc-used-to-reward-precision" class="wp-block-heading">PPC used to reward precision</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn believes PPC was easier for highly skilled practitioners in its early years because there was a much wider gap between advertisers who knew what they were doing and those who didn’t.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Advertisers could tightly control keywords, ads and landing pages. Exact match behaved much more like its name suggested, allowing marketers to construct extremely specific experiences around individual searches.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Teams could obsessively test everything from ad copy to tiny landing-page design changes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“If you were good, it was easier,” Finn said.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Today, automation has narrowed some of that expertise gap. Google can make less sophisticated advertisers more competitive, while products such as Performance Max and AI Max can also cause advertisers to compete in auctions they may not have deliberately selected.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-moment-ppc-proved-itself" class="wp-block-heading">The moment PPC proved itself</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One of Finn’s earliest “this actually works” moments came from helping a local costume shop in Rochester, New York.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The business had a single physical store, but paid search allowed it to compete for customers far beyond its local market.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Seeing how much revenue a small business could generate from digital advertising helped convince Finn of paid search’s potential.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“If you have somebody that&#8217;s good, you have somebody that cares about your money and is trying to do the best for you, it was awesome just to see,” he said.</p>



<h2 id="h-search-engine-land-became-part-of-the-education" class="wp-block-heading">Search Engine Land became part of the education</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn vividly remembers Search Engine Land launching.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">At the time, industry education was much harder to find. He listened to WebmasterRadio throughout the working day because he was essentially his own department and needed a way to learn from other search marketers.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">When Danny Sullivan announced he was leaving Search Engine Watch to launch Search Engine Land, Finn remembers it feeling like major industry news.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Search Engine Land, its Daily SearchCap and eventually SMX became important sources of both information and community.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That eventually came full circle. Finn went from consuming Search Engine Land’s coverage to contributing more than 200 articles himself.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-change-that-signaled-automation-was-taking-over" class="wp-block-heading">The change that signaled automation was taking over</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For Finn, one of PPC’s biggest turning points arrived in 2014 when Google required campaigns to use close variants for exact match.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">He covered the change for Search Engine Land at the time.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Until then, skilled advertisers could exercise extremely precise control over matching, negatives, ads and landing pages.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Once “exact” stopped necessarily meaning exact, Finn saw where Google Ads was heading.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“That was the beginning of automation,” he said.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Expanded text ads were another major milestone, but the changing definition of exact match represented something bigger: advertisers were beginning to surrender some of the control that had defined paid search.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">His takeaway from the years since is simple: marketers can object to automation, but eventually they have to learn how to succeed within it.</p>



<h2 id="h-broad-match-went-from-something-to-avoid-to-something-finn-uses-everywhere" class="wp-block-heading">Broad match went from something to avoid to something Finn uses everywhere</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Few examples illustrate PPC’s transformation better than broad match.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn once helped write a book effectively warning advertisers not to use it. Today, he uses broad match across his accounts.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The reason is that broad match itself has changed.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Modern matching can consider signals beyond the literal keyword, including previous searches and landing-page context. Combined with Smart Bidding, Finn believes advertisers should increasingly evaluate the outcome rather than obsess over whether every individual search term appears perfect.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“You&#8217;re not doing keywords, you&#8217;re doing intent,” he said.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">There are still obvious negatives advertisers should manage. But if a query looks unusual while the campaign is generating profitable results, marketers need to consider that Google may be using context they cannot see from that individual search alone.</p>



<h2 id="h-smart-bidding-may-be-ppc-s-biggest-innovation" class="wp-block-heading">Smart Bidding may be PPC’s biggest innovation</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Asked to identify the best PPC innovation of the past 20 years, Finn eventually landed on Smart Bidding.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Its value is partly the removal of tedious manual bid management.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Instead of repeatedly adjusting individual keywords, advertisers can communicate the business result they want — such as a target CPA or target ROAS — and allow the system to determine auction-level bids.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That doesn’t mean blindly trusting Google.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn remains conscious that advertisers and their competitors are effectively telling the same advertising platform what they are willing to pay. But when the underlying measurement is sound, he sees automated bidding as a major improvement over manually managing thousands of bids.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-old-google-felt-more-advertiser-first" class="wp-block-heading">The old Google felt more advertiser-first</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">One thing Finn misses from the early search era is Google&#8217;s relationship with advertisers.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google was the challenger. Teams were smaller, representatives were more consistent and advertisers could interact much more directly with the people building the platform.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">As Google matured into a massive public company, Finn believes that relationship inevitably became more corporate.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Changes ranging from advertiser fees to payment policies illustrate the tension between what&#8217;s best for advertisers and what&#8217;s best for Google&#8217;s business.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn understands why that happens — Google ultimately has shareholders to answer to — but the relationship feels very different from the early AdWords era.</p>



<h2 id="h-brand-bidding-remains-a-necessary-evil" class="wp-block-heading">Brand bidding remains a necessary evil</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn also misses the period when Google was much stricter about advertisers bidding on competitors&#8217; brand terms.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Today, competitive bidding — whether deliberate or emerging through automated campaign types — means many advertisers feel they need to spend money protecting searches for their own brands.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That&#8217;s something Finn fundamentally dislikes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">He cautioned against agencies celebrating huge amounts of revenue attributed to branded search without acknowledging that those customers were already looking for the company.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Yet the competitive environment means advertisers can&#8217;t simply pretend brand bidding doesn&#8217;t exist. They have to respond to the marketplace as it actually operates.</p>



<h2 id="h-mistakes-still-matter-in-an-automated-world" class="wp-block-heading">Mistakes still matter in an automated world</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn also recalled some painful PPC mistakes.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Early in his career, a campaign intended to spend roughly $30,000 in a month was accidentally configured around that figure as a daily budget.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Years later, an issue involving the transfer of Google campaign data into Microsoft Advertising resulted in ads and keywords from one client appearing in another client&#8217;s account. His agency reimbursed the affected client for the incorrect spend.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The experiences reinforced the importance of checking automated imports, account structures and campaign settings carefully.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Automation may remove manual work, but it doesn&#8217;t remove accountability.</p>



<h2 id="h-ppc-community-became-one-of-the-industry-s-biggest-strengths" class="wp-block-heading">PPC community became one of the industry&#8217;s biggest strengths</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The search community Finn remembers from early conferences looked very different.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">SEO practitioners seemed like the industry&#8217;s rock stars, while PPC sessions could feel comparatively corporate and buttoned-up.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That distinction has faded.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn believes the PPC community has become particularly strong at sharing information, discovering changes and helping less-visible practitioners gain recognition.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That&#8217;s also something he tries to do through Marketing O&#8217;Clock: highlight people doing strong work even when they aren&#8217;t established industry personalities.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For Finn, helping good practitioners and agencies succeed ultimately benefits the whole industry.</p>



<h2 id="h-ai-mode-is-the-future-whether-marketers-like-it-or-not" class="wp-block-heading">AI Mode is the future — whether marketers like it or not</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn has a stark prediction about the future of Google Search.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Marketers don&#8217;t get to decide whether AI search happens.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">“You don&#8217;t have any say. You can whine all you want. It&#8217;s the future for sure,” he said.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn sees AI Overviews as a transitional product and AI Mode as a much clearer indication of where Google is ultimately heading.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">His prediction: the familiar Google experience built around traditional blue links won&#8217;t exist in its current form five years from now.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That doesn&#8217;t mean links can disappear completely. Google and other AI platforms still depend on an ecosystem of publishers and websites producing information.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The challenge will be finding an economic model that keeps that ecosystem sustainable while search interfaces increasingly answer questions themselves.</p>



<h2 id="h-authenticity-becomes-more-valuable-as-ai-content-grows" class="wp-block-heading">Authenticity becomes more valuable as AI content grows</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If AI makes competent content cheap and ubiquitous, Finn believes human authenticity becomes a bigger differentiator.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">People can already recognize formulaic AI-generated LinkedIn posts and other content, he said. The question for marketers therefore isn&#8217;t whether AI can produce something “good.”</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">It&#8217;s how humans produce something great enough to stand out from an endless supply of good-enough machine-generated material.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That means having a recognizable voice, expressing genuine opinions and creating things audiences deliberately want to consume.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The same principle applies inside paid media. Complex businesses still require marketers to understand different conversion types, business economics, measurement and how all those signals should inform bidding.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">AI can accelerate execution. Finn doesn&#8217;t believe it replaces the thinking behind it.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-next-generation-should-stop-waiting-and-start-creating" class="wp-block-heading">The next generation should stop waiting and start creating</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Asked what advice he&#8217;d give his younger self, Finn&#8217;s answer was confidence — and action.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">If you want to write, start writing. If you want a podcast, make one. If you want to participate in the industry, reach out to people.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Don&#8217;t spend forever perfecting the logo or planning every possible outcome.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Some projects will fail, Finn said, but failure provides information that makes the next attempt better.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That philosophy mirrors his own route into Search Engine Land. When a colleague no longer had enough time for his column, Finn volunteered to take it over. That opportunity eventually became hundreds of contributions across Search Engine Land and its sister publications.</p>



<h2 id="h-building-people-is-the-career-achievement-that-matters-most" class="wp-block-heading">Building people is the career achievement that matters most</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Despite decades of campaigns, articles, speaking appearances and industry work, Finn said his proudest accomplishment is Cypress North and the people the agency has developed.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Operating in Western New York, where the digital marketing talent pool can be smaller than in major advertising hubs, the agency has invested heavily in finding people with potential and teaching them the craft.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Some joined without digital marketing experience and developed into skilled practitioners.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">For Finn, watching those people improve is ultimately more meaningful than any individual campaign result.</p>



<h2 id="h-the-bottom-line" class="wp-block-heading">The bottom line</h2>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">PPC has moved from an era where practitioners could obsess over individual keywords, bids and landing pages to one where algorithms increasingly make those decisions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Finn&#8217;s career has spanned that entire transition.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">His message isn&#8217;t to fight the direction platforms are moving. It&#8217;s to understand where human expertise still creates an advantage: business judgment, measurement, creativity, authenticity and knowing when automation is actually delivering the outcome that matters.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The tools have changed dramatically over 20 years. The responsibility to make them work for the business hasn&#8217;t.</p>


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Cypress North co-founder Greg Finn has spent more than two decades watching search marketing evolve from a hands-on, highly granular discipline into an industry increasingly shaped by automation, AI and algorithms.
In a conversation celebrating Search Engine Land’s 20th anniversary, Finn reflected on his early days in PPC and SEO, the rise of Google Ads automation, the importance of community, and why he believes the traditional Google search experience won’t survive the next five years.
From the PPC Wild West to a career in search
Finn’s introduction to digital marketing came around 2004 and 2005 while working at a technology company.
Initially working in sales support, he began shadowing the company’s digital marketer and taking on additional work, learning platforms such as Overture and Yahoo before Google AdWords became dominant.
“I just found that I loved it and I was good at it,” Finn said.
His experience wasn’t limited to paid search. Finn also worked heavily in SEO, including an in-house role where he was tasked with ranking for highly competitive terms such as “student loans.”
That combination gave him a front-row seat to an era when marketers had substantially more granular control over both paid and organic search.
PPC used to reward precision
Finn believes PPC was easier for highly skilled practitioners in its early years because there was a much wider gap between advertisers who knew what they were doing and those who didn’t.
Advertisers could tightly control keywords, ads and landing pages. Exact match behaved much more like its name suggested, allowing marketers to construct extremely specific experiences around individual searches.
Teams could obsessively test everything from ad copy to tiny landing-page design changes.
“If you were good, it was easier,” Finn said.
Today, automation has narrowed some of that expertise gap. Google can make less sophisticated advertisers more competitive, while products such as Performance Max and AI Max can also cause advertisers to compete in auctions they may not have deliberately selected.
The moment PPC proved itself
One of Finn’s earliest “this actually works” moments came from helping a local costume shop in Rochester, New York.
The business had a single physical store, but paid search allowed it to compete for customers far beyond its local market.
Seeing how much revenue a small business could generate from digital advertising helped convince Finn of paid search’s potential.
“If you have somebody that’s good, you have somebody that cares about your money and is trying to do the best for you, it was awesome just to see,” he said.
Search Engine Land became part of the education
Finn vividly remembers Search Engine Land launching.
At the time, industry education was much harder to find. He listened to WebmasterRadio throughout the working day because he was essentially his own department and needed a way to learn from other search marketers.
When Danny Sullivan announced he was leaving Search Engine Watch to launch Search Engine Land, Finn remembers it feeling like major industry news.
Search Engine Land, its Daily SearchCap and eventually SMX became important sources of both information and community.
That eventually came full circle. Finn went from consuming Search Engine Land’s coverage to contributing more than 200 articles himself.
The change that signaled automation was taking over
For Finn, one of PPC’s biggest turning points arrived in 2014 when Google required campaigns to use close variants for exact match.
He covered the change for Search Engine Land at the time.
Until then, skilled advertisers could exercise extremely precise control over matching, negatives, ads and landing pages.
Once “exact” stopped necessarily meaning exact, Finn saw where Google Ads was heading.
“That was the beginning of automation,” he said.
Expanded text ads were another major milestone, but the changing definition of exact match represented something bigger: advertisers were beginning to surrender some of the control that had defined paid search.
His takeaway from the years since is simple: marketers can object to automation, but eventually they have to learn how to succeed within it.
Broad match went from something to avoid to something Finn uses everywhere
Few examples illustrate PPC’s transformation better than broad match.
Finn once helped write a book effectively warning advertisers not to use it. Today, he uses broad match across his accounts.
The reason is that broad match itself has changed.
Modern matching can consider signals beyond the literal keyword, including previous searches and landing-page context. Combined with Smart Bidding, Finn believes advertisers should increasingly evaluate the outcome rather than obsess over whether every individual search term appears perfect.
“You’re not doing keywords, you’re doing intent,” he said.
There are still obvious negatives advertisers should manage. But if a query looks unusual while the campaign is generating profitable results, marketers need to consider that Google may be using context they cannot see from that individual search alone.
Smart Bidding may be PPC’s biggest innovation
Asked to identify the best PPC innovation of the past 20 years, Finn eventually landed on Smart Bidding.
Its value is partly the removal of tedious manual bid management.
Instead of repeatedly adjusting individual keywords, advertisers can communicate the business result they want — such as a target CPA or target ROAS — and allow the system to determine auction-level bids.
That doesn’t mean blindly trusting Google.
Finn remains conscious that advertisers and their competitors are effectively telling the same advertising platform what they are willing to pay. But when the underlying measurement is sound, he sees automated bidding as a major improvement over manually managing thousands of bids.
The old Google felt more advertiser-first
One thing Finn misses from the early search era is Google’s relationship with advertisers.
Google was the challenger. Teams were smaller, representatives were more consistent and advertisers could interact much more directly with the people building the platform.
As Google matured into a massive public company, Finn believes that relationship inevitably became more corporate.
Changes ranging from advertiser fees to payment policies illustrate the tension between what’s best for advertisers and what’s best for Google’s business.
Finn understands why that happens — Google ultimately has shareholders to answer to — but the relationship feels very different from the early AdWords era.
Brand bidding remains a necessary evil
Finn also misses the period when Google was much stricter about advertisers bidding on competitors’ brand terms.
Today, competitive bidding — whether deliberate or emerging through automated campaign types — means many advertisers feel they need to spend money protecting searches for their own brands.
That’s something Finn fundamentally dislikes.
He cautioned against agencies celebrating huge amounts of revenue attributed to branded search without acknowledging that those customers were already looking for the company.
Yet the competitive environment means advertisers can’t simply pretend brand bidding doesn’t exist. They have to respond to the marketplace as it actually operates.
Mistakes still matter in an automated world
Finn also recalled some painful PPC mistakes.
Early in his career, a campaign intended to spend roughly $30,000 in a month was accidentally configured around that figure as a daily budget.
Years later, an issue involving the transfer of Google campaign data into Microsoft Advertising resulted in ads and keywords from one client appearing in another client’s account. His agency reimbursed the affected client for the incorrect spend.
The experiences reinforced the importance of checking automated imports, account structures and campaign settings carefully.
Automation may remove manual work, but it doesn’t remove accountability.
PPC community became one of the industry’s biggest strengths
The search community Finn remembers from early conferences looked very different.
SEO practitioners seemed like the industry’s rock stars, while PPC sessions could feel comparatively corporate and buttoned-up.
That distinction has faded.
Finn believes the PPC community has become particularly strong at sharing information, discovering changes and helping less-visible practitioners gain recognition.
That’s also something he tries to do through Marketing O’Clock: highlight people doing strong work even when they aren’t established industry personalities.
For Finn, helping good practitioners and agencies succeed ultimately benefits the whole industry.
AI Mode is the future — whether marketers like it or not
Finn has a stark prediction about the future of Google Search.
Marketers don’t get to decide whether AI search happens.
“You don’t have any say. You can whine all you want. It’s the future for sure,” he said.
Finn sees AI Overviews as a transitional product and AI Mode as a much clearer indication of where Google is ultimately heading.
His prediction: the familiar Google experience built around traditional blue links won’t exist in its current form five years from now.
That doesn’t mean links can disappear completely. Google and other AI platforms still depend on an ecosystem of publishers and websites producing information.
The challenge will be finding an economic model that keeps that ecosystem sustainable while search interfaces increasingly answer questions themselves.
Authenticity becomes more valuable as AI content grows
If AI makes competent content cheap and ubiquitous, Finn believes human authenticity becomes a bigger differentiator.
People can already recognize formulaic AI-generated LinkedIn posts and other content, he said. The question for marketers therefore isn’t whether AI can produce something “good.”
It’s how humans produce something great enough to stand out from an endless supply of good-enough machine-generated material.
That means having a recognizable voice, expressing genuine opinions and creating things audiences deliberately want to consume.
The same principle applies inside paid media. Complex businesses still require marketers to understand different conversion types, business economics, measurement and how all those signals should inform bidding.
AI can accelerate execution. Finn doesn’t believe it replaces the thinking behind it.
The next generation should stop waiting and start creating
Asked what advice he’d give his younger self, Finn’s answer was confidence — and action.
If you want to write, start writing. If you want a podcast, make one. If you want to participate in the industry, reach out to people.
Don’t spend forever perfecting the logo or planning every possible outcome.
Some projects will fail, Finn said, but failure provides information that makes the next attempt better.
That philosophy mirrors his own route into Search Engine Land. When a colleague no longer had enough time for his column, Finn volunteered to take it over. That opportunity eventually became hundreds of contributions across Search Engine Land and its sister publications.
Building people is the career achievement that matters most
Despite decades of campaigns, articles, speaking appearances and industry work, Finn said his proudest accomplishment is Cypress North and the people the agency has developed.
Operating in Western New York, where the digital marketing talent pool can be smaller than in major advertising hubs, the agency has invested heavily in finding people with potential and teaching them the craft.
Some joined without digital marketing experience and developed into skilled practitioners.
For Finn, watching those people improve is ultimately more meaningful than any individual campaign result.
The bottom line
PPC has moved from an era where practitioners could obsess over individual keywords, bids and landing pages to one where algorithms increasingly make those decisions.
Finn’s career has spanned that entire transition.
His message isn’t to fight the direction platforms are moving. It’s to understand where human expertise still creates an advantage: business judgment, measurement, creativity, authenticity and knowing when automation is actually delivering the outcome that matters.
The tools have changed dramatically over 20 years. The responsibility to make them work for the business hasn’t.

Greg Finn reflects on 20 years of PPC, from exact match and Smart Bidding to automation, AI Mode and why authenticity will matter more than ever.

Greg Finn on 20 years of PPC: From exact match to AI Mode

<div><img width="800" height="450" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-800x450.jpg" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="Search marketing jobs" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-800x450.jpg 800w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-600x338.jpg 600w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-200x113.jpg 200w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-768x432.jpg 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-150x84.jpg 150w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing-550x310.jpg 550w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2021/10/hiring-in-search-marketing.jpg 1920w" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" /></div>Land your next job in SEO or PPC. These brands and agencies are hiring to fill open search marketing positions right now.

Looking to take the next step in your search marketing career? 
Below, you will find the latest SEO, PPC, and digital marketing jobs at brands and agencies. We also include positions from previous weeks that are still open.
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Newest SEO Jobs 
(Provided to Search Engine Land by SEOjobs.com) 



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Link Outreach and Directory Submissions
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SEO Automation
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Associate Director, SEO Specialists
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SEO Specialist
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Newest PPC and paid media jobs
(Provided to Search Engine Land by PPCjobs.com) 







Growth Marketing Coordinator
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Audience Growth Marketing Specialist
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Digital Marketing Strategist (Account Management, SEO, PPC, Social)
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Associate Director, Paid Social – US Remote
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Digital Marketing Strategist (Account Management, SEO, PPC, Social)
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Land your next job in SEO or PPC. These brands and agencies are hiring to fill open search marketing positions right now.

The latest jobs in search marketing

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>Google’s new YouTube creative guidance highlights the ad elements associated with stronger conversions and ROI.

<div><img width="1672" height="941" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube.png" class="attachment-large size-large wp-post-image" alt="" decoding="async" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube.png 1672w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube-768x432.png 768w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube-1536x864.png 1536w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/Youtube-1200x675.png 1200w" sizes="(max-width: 1672px) 100vw, 1672px" /></div>
<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google has published a new Creative guidance on YouTube help document, giving advertisers specific recommendations for designing ads that fit the platform — and sharing new data on the creative elements associated with higher conversions.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The guidance covers everything from using human voices and showing brands early in videos to removing fake buttons from images and making creative look more native to YouTube.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why it matters.</strong> Google is putting numbers behind the importance of creative quality. The new document cites Nielsen research finding that creative accounts for 49% of campaign ROI, while Ekimetrics research found that improving creative can more than double ROI on YouTube.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That makes creative optimization potentially as important as many of the targeting and bidding decisions advertisers spend their time adjusting.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>What the data says.</strong> Google shared three findings specifically for Demand Gen in-stream skippable ads, based on U.S. data from July 2026.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Including a human voice was associated with 12% higher conversions on average, adding supers or a text overlay with 3% higher conversions, and visualizing the brand within the first five seconds with <strong>4% higher conversions</strong>.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Human voices stand out.</strong> Of those findings, voice had the largest reported conversion lift.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google&#8217;s guidance suggests advertisers shouldn&#8217;t treat audio as an afterthought when producing YouTube creative. A human voice can be an important part of designing the ad for the environment in which it will actually be consumed.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Don&#8217;t fake the interface.</strong> For image creative, Google recommends removing embedded buttons, arrows and other elements that appear clickable but aren&#8217;t.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="869" height="770" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-buttons.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486181" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-buttons.png 869w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-buttons-768x681.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 869px) 100vw, 869px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">Google says these &#8220;baked-in&#8221; interface elements can compete with YouTube&#8217;s actual calls to action, adding cognitive load and potentially confusing users rather than directing them toward the advertiser&#8217;s site.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Make ads look like they belong.</strong> Google is also encouraging advertisers to design images that blend naturally into YouTube feeds.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="795" height="499" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-visuals.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486183" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-visuals.png 795w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-visuals-768x482.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 795px) 100vw, 795px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">That means using full-bleed, high-resolution photography or lifestyle imagery while avoiding oversized logos, empty solid areas and black bars that can make an ad look fragmented or unnatural within the platform.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Put people in the creative.</strong> Google says images showing a visible human presence consistently outperform other assets and recommends featuring faces or people interacting with products when appropriate for the campaign.</p>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img decoding="async" width="823" height="502" src="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-include-people.png" alt="" class="wp-image-486182" srcset="https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-include-people.png 823w, https://searchengineland.com/wp-content/seloads/2026/08/YT-include-people-768x468.png 768w" sizes="(max-width: 823px) 100vw, 823px" /></figure>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph">The broader message is that YouTube creative should lean into the human and visual nature of the platform rather than simply repurposing assets designed for other advertising environments.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Why we care.</strong> As Google increasingly automates bidding, targeting and campaign management, creative remains one of the biggest areas advertisers can directly influence. Google&#8217;s new guidance also provides some useful benchmarks for testing — particularly the 12% conversion difference associated with human voice — rather than simply telling advertisers to &#8220;make better creative.&#8221;</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>The bigger picture.</strong> Google&#8217;s recommendations reinforce that simply having enough assets isn&#8217;t the same as having assets designed for YouTube. Advertisers running Demand Gen and other YouTube campaigns may want to test not only different messages, but how those messages are presented — including voice, branding, text overlays, imagery and how naturally the ad fits into the YouTube experience.</p>



<p class="wp-block-paragraph"><strong>Bottom line.</strong> <a href="https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/18061165?hl=en">Google&#8217;s new help document</a> gives advertisers a clearer creative playbook for YouTube: use human voices, establish the brand early, consider text overlays, avoid fake UI elements and create imagery that feels native to the platform.</p>


Google has published a new Creative guidance on YouTube help document, giving advertisers specific recommendations for designing ads that fit the platform — and sharing new data on the creative elements associated with higher conversions.
The guidance covers everything from using human voices and showing brands early in videos to removing fake buttons from images and making creative look more native to YouTube.
Why it matters. Google is putting numbers behind the importance of creative quality. The new document cites Nielsen research finding that creative accounts for 49% of campaign ROI, while Ekimetrics research found that improving creative can more than double ROI on YouTube.
That makes creative optimization potentially as important as many of the targeting and bidding decisions advertisers spend their time adjusting.
What the data says. Google shared three findings specifically for Demand Gen in-stream skippable ads, based on U.S. data from July 2026.
Including a human voice was associated with 12% higher conversions on average, adding supers or a text overlay with 3% higher conversions, and visualizing the brand within the first five seconds with 4% higher conversions.
Human voices stand out. Of those findings, voice had the largest reported conversion lift.
Google’s guidance suggests advertisers shouldn’t treat audio as an afterthought when producing YouTube creative. A human voice can be an important part of designing the ad for the environment in which it will actually be consumed.
Don’t fake the interface. For image creative, Google recommends removing embedded buttons, arrows and other elements that appear clickable but aren’t.




Google says these “baked-in” interface elements can compete with YouTube’s actual calls to action, adding cognitive load and potentially confusing users rather than directing them toward the advertiser’s site.
Make ads look like they belong. Google is also encouraging advertisers to design images that blend naturally into YouTube feeds.




That means using full-bleed, high-resolution photography or lifestyle imagery while avoiding oversized logos, empty solid areas and black bars that can make an ad look fragmented or unnatural within the platform.
Put people in the creative. Google says images showing a visible human presence consistently outperform other assets and recommends featuring faces or people interacting with products when appropriate for the campaign.




The broader message is that YouTube creative should lean into the human and visual nature of the platform rather than simply repurposing assets designed for other advertising environments.
Why we care. As Google increasingly automates bidding, targeting and campaign management, creative remains one of the biggest areas advertisers can directly influence. Google’s new guidance also provides some useful benchmarks for testing — particularly the 12% conversion difference associated with human voice — rather than simply telling advertisers to “make better creative.”
The bigger picture. Google’s recommendations reinforce that simply having enough assets isn’t the same as having assets designed for YouTube. Advertisers running Demand Gen and other YouTube campaigns may want to test not only different messages, but how those messages are presented — including voice, branding, text overlays, imagery and how naturally the ad fits into the YouTube experience.
Bottom line. Google’s new help document gives advertisers a clearer creative playbook for YouTube: use human voices, establish the brand early, consider text overlays, avoid fake UI elements and create imagery that feels native to the platform.

Google’s new YouTube creative guidance highlights the ad elements associated with stronger conversions and ROI.

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