On October 12, Google began building parts of its ads from advertiser websites, starting with automated promotions pulled from site pages. Alongside AI Max features that match searches to landing pages and write ad text from them, the website now shapes who sees an ad, what it says and where the click lands.

Google’s September auto-upgrade moved campaign-level broad match and Automatically Created Assets campaigns onto AI Max. If your CPA went up, here is how to tell whether the upgrade caused it, what to check first, and when to keep, fix or turn it off.

WSI - October 4, 2026 Summary Buyers contact sellers about 61% of the way through their journey, and most have settled on a favorite by then, so much of the decision happens before the click or call that an ad report counts. In a survey of 1,202 US business decision-makers, 83% researched on their own before speaking to sales, and peer recommendations earned more trust (73%) than vendor websites (55%) or search engines (54%). Only about 17% of the sources cited in Google's AI

WSI - September 21, 2026 Summary: A Semrush survey of 2,338 U.S. adults, reported by MarTech on September 18, found that 57.5% of AI users have decided against a purchase based on chatbot information. About the same share have bought something a chatbot recommended. A separate survey of 1,035 U.S. consumers by Envision Horizons, reported by eMarketer in July, found 50.9% of AI shoppers have decided not to buy because an AI assistant raised concerns. Mixed or negative reviews

WSI - August 17, 2026 Summary Google has set firm migration dates for the legacy Search campaign features it's replacing with AI Max. Campaign-level Broad Match and Automatically Created Assets auto-migrate starting September 1, 2026, with new legacy configurations already blocked since August 3. Dynamic Search Ads get a longer runway, migrating automatically in February 2027 after in-account notices starting this September. Google Ads API versions released after September 1

WSI - August 13, 2026 What's Different Starting August 17 and 24 Summary: Two Google Ads and Merchant Center changes are landing back to back this month. Starting August 24, Google is changing how Merchant Center classifies and reports traffic, retroactive to July 1. YouTube affiliate clicks move out of the organic count into their own category, organic YouTube measurement gets redefined to match YouTube's standards, and product-level reporting expands to include Performance

I had a client meeting today. Good client, long relationship, smart operator. We covered a lot of ground, but one thread kept surfacing: shrinking conversion rates, why they're happening industry-wide, and what actually needs to change. The answer connects what's happening inside Google's auction to what Google is building outside of it. And it's worth putting on paper. Google Says Search Traffic Is Declining. Are You Paying Attention to What That Signals? Google search refer

I write a lot about PPC. Brand and performance convergence, AI measurement gaps, Performance Max controls, first-party data strategy and if you have been reading this blog for a while, you have seen me cover that ground in depth. I am not going to repeat any of it here. What I have not written about yet are the specific tactical moves that came out of a recent deep-dive conversation between the ads liaisons at both Google and Microsoft. These are the details that tend to get

Why That Matters So Much for Your Budget For two years, Performance Max has been Google's favorite way to eat advertising budgets while keeping advertisers in the dark about where their money actually went. The pitch was simple; hand over your creative assets, set a budget, and let Google's AI do the rest. The reality was messier. Advertisers lost control of where ads ran, which search queries triggered them, and whether the system was cannibalizing existing high-performing c

What It Actually Means for Your Marketing Budget Advertising has arrived in AI search. Google expanded ads in AI Overviews to 12 countries in December 2025. OpenAI is building ad prototypes for ChatGPT. Perplexity launched ads a year ago, then pumped the brakes when they couldn't prove ROI. If you're running paid search campaigns or relying on organic traffic for revenue, this isn't theoretical anymore. It's reshaping how your prospects find you—and what it costs to reach the

Why Your Google Ads Person Needs to Stop Acting Like It's 2015 Here's something I keep seeing with mid-market companies: you're paying someone to manage your Google Ads, but they're still using tactics from a decade ago. And when they try to run Performance Max campaigns? It's a disaster. Not because Performance Max doesn't work. It does, when handled correctly. But because they're bringing the wrong mindset to the table. Let me be clear upfront: Performance Max isn't always

It’s no secret that nowadays, the digital marketing landscape is constantly changing and what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow....