Google’s AI Ad Tools Are Delivering Real Results. Here’s What Brands Need to Know.
Google's advertising business is growing, and AI is a significant reason why. At Shoptalk Spring, Courtney Rose, VP of Retail at Google Ads, shared early data from AI-powered campaigns and outlined how the company is rethinking how ads work in an era of conversational search. The numbers she cited are getting attention, and the strategic implications for brands advertising on Google are significant.
The 80% Revenue Lift That Has Marketers Paying Attention
The headline figure from Rose's remarks is an 80% increase in revenue reported by Canadian fashion retailer Aritzia after enabling AI Max, Google's AI-powered search advertising product. That result came from AI Max's ability to crawl the retailer's site, analyze its creative assets, and match its products to conversational search queries that traditional keyword targeting would have missed.
The mechanism matters as much as the number. AI Max does not require advertisers to manually select keywords. Instead, it reads what a brand is selling, identifies relevant intent signals from users, and makes the match automatically. Fifteen percent of searches on Google every day are new queries the platform has never seen before. AI Max addresses that problem by building intent matching from broader context rather than pre-set keyword lists.
That said, the 80% figure reflects one brand's starting point. A retailer that was already running a sophisticated, well-optimized account with strong feed quality and broad match coverage will likely see a smaller lift. The value of the data point is directional, not universal.
How Search Behavior Is Changing
Rose described a fundamental shift in how people are now searching. Queries in AI Mode and Gemini are two to three times longer than traditional searches, and they are increasingly conversational. Rather than typing “blue cashmere sweater,” shoppers are describing their situation, destination, outfit, and occasion in a single query.
This shift matters for advertisers because richer queries carry richer intent signals. A shopper describing a specific trip, weather condition, and styling preference is further along the purchase funnel than someone typing two words. AI-powered matching gives brands access to that intent in ways that manual keyword strategies cannot replicate.
Ads now appear in approximately 25.5% of AI Overview results, up from roughly 3% in January 2025. For brands running Performance Max or AI Max campaigns, placements in AI-driven results are already happening in many cases whether advertisers have specifically optimized for them or not.
New Formats Brands Should Know About
Beyond AI Max, Google is testing several new ad formats specifically designed for AI search environments.
Direct Offers
Direct Offers is an early-stage pilot that lets brands deliver personalized promotions to shoppers showing purchase intent signals within AI Mode. Google's Gemini models analyze conversational context and user behavior to determine when an offer is relevant. E.l.f. Beauty, Chewy, and L'Oréal are among the brands currently testing it. Rose noted it is still early and more results should be available in coming months. Importantly, offers do not have to be monetary. Brands have flexibility to define what an offer means for their specific customer.
Business Agent
Business Agent is a feature that lets retailers customize how product questions are answered in their own brand voice within AI search. Early adopters include Poshmark and Reebok. The tool gives brands a degree of control over how they are represented in AI-generated responses, which is increasingly relevant as more purchase research happens inside conversational interfaces.
Universal Commerce Protocol
Universal Commerce Protocol, developed with Shopify, allows US brands to enable purchases directly within AI conversations, removing the step of navigating to a separate product page or retailer site.
What Google Is Not Doing
Rose was direct about one thing: Google currently has no plans to put ads inside Gemini directly. The ad testing is happening within AI Mode, which is a distinct product. For brands trying to understand where their spend is actually going, that distinction is worth tracking.
Google also continues to position itself as a connector between retailers and shoppers rather than a marketplace. “We are not trying to be a retailer,” Rose said. The framing is deliberate at a moment when Amazon and OpenAI are both experimenting with their own shopping ad formats. Amazon's sponsored prompts inside Rufus are reportedly generating limited traffic compared to traditional Amazon ads. Perplexity introduced ads and began phasing them out within 18 months. Google's early AI ad results, by contrast, are showing genuine performance gains for participating brands.
What Brands Should Do Now
For ecommerce brands currently running Google Ads, the practical implication is straightforward. AI Max and Performance Max campaigns are already eligible for placement in AI search environments. Brands that have not reviewed their campaign settings recently may not know how much of their current spend is going to AI placements versus traditional search results. Checking placement reports is a reasonable first step.
For brands thinking about the longer term, the shift to conversational search means that product feed quality, site content, and creative asset diversity matter more than they did when keyword matching was the primary lever. Google's system now reads your site and creative assets to understand what you sell and how to represent you. Brands that invest in clear, well-structured content and strong creative libraries will give the system more to work with.
