Google Marketing Live 2026: What it means for your Google Ads campaigns.

Everything Google announced at GML 2026 is a response to a shift that’s already happened. Here’s where search actually stands:

• AI Mode surpassed 1 billion monthly users in its first year.
• AI Overviews now reach 2.5 billion monthly active users.
• Searches in AI Mode run three times longer on average than traditional queries.
• Total search query volume hit an all-time high last quarter.

AI isn’t reducing search demand – it’s expanding it. People are searching more because search can now handle the complex, exploratory questions that keyword-based search couldn’t. 75% of users say they feel more confident making decisions with AI Overviews – which tells you something important: AI-assisted search isn’t just a different format, it’s producing a different kind of user.

For advertisers, that means the queries coming into your campaigns are getting longer and more nuanced. Standard keyword matching is capturing less of that intent than it used to.

That’s the engine behind GML 2026. The announcements – AI Max, AI Brief, the new ad formats – are Google’s response to a search landscape that’s already shifted. Here’s what was introduced.

Google unveiled four new ad formats built specifically for AI Mode. These are worth knowing about, even if they’re not immediately relevant to every account.

• Conversational Discovery Ads – appear within AI Mode responses, woven into the AI’s answer rather than placed alongside it.
• Highlighted Answers – placed within AI-generated recommendation lists at the point a user is being guided towards a decision.
• AI-powered Shopping ads – Gemini writes dynamic product summaries tailored to each query, not static ads.
• Business Agent for Leads – lets prospects ask questions directly inside the ad, pulling answers from your website. Currently testing for automotive, education, and real estate.

These formats are in testing in the US. To run any of them, advertisers need to be on AI Max (see section below) or Performance Max with text customisation enabled. For most accounts, that’s not a reason to restructure campaigns right now – but it’s worth understanding what’s coming.

AI Max matches intent, not keywords. That means it captures long-tail, conversational queries that standard keyword campaigns miss – because those queries don’t contain the exact terms you’ve bid on.

AI Max was initially introduced in 2025, and Google reports strong performance figures from early adopters. As with all figures cited directly by Google, treat these as directional rather than guaranteed benchmarks for your own account:

• 27% more conversions vs standard campaigns.
• Lufthansa Group: 24% increase in ROAS after adopting AI Max.
• IKEA: 65% lift in non-branded clicks and 28% increase in incremental ROAS.
• Across AI Max and PMax advertisers broadly: 15% more conversions at a similar ROAS.

As AI Max turns 1, it was unveiled at this year’s Google Marketing Live that it has also expanded to Shopping campaigns as a one-click toggle, and is coming to Travel. For Shopping specifically, it allows campaigns to respond to natural language queries that standard feed-matching would miss – a shopper asking ‘what are the best high-quality clothes for lounging?’ rather than searching for a specific product name.

When to test it:

You need 50+ conversions monthly and a stable performance baseline to measure against. Without it, you can’t tell if AI Max is driving real gains or just reshuffling existing traffic.

For smaller accounts performing well with tight budgets, there’s no urgency. It’s a tool for the right conditions, not a mandatory upgrade. Before you test, establish four weeks of clean data. That baseline matters.

The honest take:

AI Max is a strong option for accounts looking for incremental reach beyond what keyword matching captures. It’s not a replacement for campaigns that are already working.

The most interesting announcement at GML 2026, and the one with the broadest long-term implications, was AI Brief.

The recurring concern with AI-driven campaigns has always been control – specifically, the worry that handing creative generation to AI means losing the brand guardrails that matter. AI Brief addresses this directly.

Instead of settings and toggles, you write a plain-language brief. Think of it as the brief you’d give a new copywriter: here’s our brand, here’s what we say, here’s what we don’t, here’s who we’re talking to. Gemini then uses that context to govern how your ads are generated. Full details on AI Brief are on Google’s Ads & Commerce blog.

Three inputs:

• Messaging Guidelines – what your ads should and shouldn’t say. e.g. ‘Always lead with free delivery.’ ‘Never mention competitor pricing.’ This is brand governance in plain language.
• Matching Guidelines – which searches to prioritise or avoid. e.g. ‘Target searches related to professional training, not hobbyist queries.’ These are intent-level targeting without keyword lists.
• Audience Guidelines – who to reach and how to speak to them. e.g. ‘For health-conscious shoppers, lead with clean ingredients.’ this is persona-led messaging built into the brief itself.

Before you commit, AI Brief shows asset previews and sample searches so you can iterate. If you already have text guidelines set up in your campaigns, they’ll migrate automatically into Messaging Guidelines when you adopt it.

AI Brief is rolling out in English for AI Max for Search campaigns in the coming months, then Performance Max and AI Max for Shopping. It doesn’t require any structural campaign changes to adopt – which makes it one of the lower-friction improvements from GML worth getting on the list.

AI Brief is the first product that creates a direct relationship between how well you can articulate your brand and the performance you get from your campaigns. Brief writing is about to become a genuinely valuable skill in paid search.

Google has confirmed that Dynamic Search Ads will be automatically upgraded to AI Max in September 2026. This has generated quite a bit of noise in the paid search community, so it’s worth being clear about what it actually means.

DSA works by crawling your website and dynamically generating headlines and destination URLs based on page content. It’s been a reliable tool for capturing long-tail queries without manual keyword management – particularly useful for large catalogues or sites with frequently changing inventory.

AI Max replaces that crawl-based matching with intent-based, conversational matching. The reach is broader and the coverage of nuanced queries is better. But there are some real transition considerations worth knowing about.

Practitioners flagged on GML day itself that AI Max can sometimes route product queries to generic landing pages rather than the specific product page – the one thing DSA reliably handled well. Google’s Final URL Expansion is designed to address this, but it’s worth testing rather than assuming.

The practical takeaway depends on your situation:

• If you’re running DSA campaigns and they’re performing well – there’s no need to panic or restructure ahead of September. Google will handle the migration. Being aware of it is enough for now.
• If you manage larger accounts or have more control over how campaigns are structured – it’s worth beginning to test AI Max on DSA campaigns before September so you understand how it behaves in your specific account before the change is automatic.
• Either way, reviewing how Final URL Expansion handles landing page routing for your key product queries is a sensible step whenever you do make the move.

The September date is confirmed and worth noting in the diary. Whether it requires action from you right now depends on the scale and complexity of your account.

Ask Advisor was announced at GML as a unification of Google’s separate in-product AI assistants – pulling Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Marketing Platform, and Merchant Center into a single conversational interface built on Gemini. It retains context as you move between tasks, so insights from one platform carry into actions in another.

In practice: you can ask ‘find new customers for my hair care products’ and Ask Advisor will pull product details from Merchant Center, draft the campaign in Google Ads, and surface performance context from Analytics – in one thread.

Ask Advisor is in beta for English-language accounts globally. What matters is what it signals: as more of the execution layer gets handled by AI, strategic inputs become the real differentiator. Knowing what brief to write, which guardrails to set, where the data is misleading and where it’s telling you something genuinely useful – that’s where the value sits, and it’s not something a conversational interface replaces.

GML 2026 didn’t require everyone to overhaul their Google Ads setup. But it did clarify where things are heading, and a few changes are genuinely worth getting on the radar:

• AI Brief – low friction to adopt, and the brand control it offers makes AI-driven campaigns significantly more manageable. Worth implementing when it rolls out to your account type.
• AI Max – a strong option for accounts with the volume and budget to test properly. If current campaigns are performing well on a tighter budget, there’s no pressure to move now.
• DSA migration – September 2026 is confirmed. For most accounts, awareness is enough for now. For larger, more complex accounts, early testing is worthwhile.
• Ask Advisor – keep an eye on it as it matures out of beta. The cross-platform intelligence it promises is genuinely useful when it works well.

The underlying direction from Google is consistent: more of the execution layer is being handled by AI, and the advertiser’s role is shifting towards providing better inputs – clearer briefs, stronger data, sharper audience definition. That’s true regardless of account size or budget.

Francesca Hume

Francesca makes brands easier to find and harder to ignore. She keeps search and paid channels tuned to client goals, turning visibility into pipeline and pipeline into revenue.