Google Marketing Live 2026 Recap: 7 Announcements That Will Change How You Run Google Ads

Google just told the world you can't choose keywords anymore - here's what that actually means for your ad account in 2026 and beyond. 

In this episode of the Google Ads Unleashed Podcast, host Jeremy cuts through the noise from Google Marketing Live 2026, breaking down seven key announcements including AI Max for Shopping, Asset Studio's AI-generated creatives, universal cart infrastructure, demand gen attribution upgrades, and the shift of ads into Gemini's conversational AI search. 

Learn what's genuinely worth acting on now, what can wait, and why Google's aggressive push into upper-funnel and push marketing is a direct response to Meta threatening to overtake its advertising revenue. If you want to understand where Google Ads is heading and what to prioritise in your account before these changes land, this episode is for you.

Get your free 30 minute strategy session with Jeremy here: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/

Scale your store with 1:1 coaching: https://www.younganddigital.marketing/1-2-1-coaching

Transcript

You cannot choose keywords anymore. This is basically what VidRavasan summarized it as at the recent Google Marketing Live and what it means for you and what it means for the coming year 2026 2027. 7 is what I'm going to tell you all about in today's episode. Welcome back to Google Ads Unleash, guys. Hope everyone is doing fabulously this Monday morning. Um, the last two episodes were pre-recorded because I was away on business travels, but I'm back in the UK. And of course, uh, like everyone, I watched the recap of the GML 2026. Normally, I've sort of in the past years started to avoid this to be perfectly honest. honest with you because it's a lot of sort of wishy-washy which is why um instead of sitting through basically or hours of of content, it's much easier that you just listen to a pod that summarizes it in 5 to 10 minutes for you what it was all about. I watched the recap because so you don't have to, but yet again, I was not really completely blown away because a lot of the information in uh wasn't really completely new and a lot of the features kind of already exist or we already knew about. So, this is not really something that um was particularly of use. That being said, there were a few really interesting things in there and I want to talk through all of them today and give you a little bit my take on it. So, the first thing that Google presented was the AI brief which they called their most important announcement. to a certain degree you can already do that when you write ads or within Pmax campaigns you can sort of give brand guidelines and then it'll suggest um headlines and descriptions and so on but basically going forward Google is describing that people should be put input in their brand audiences guard rails and conversational language so for instance to voice documents and then it's the system interprets it to um sort of generate um a sort of ad ads for you. Um it also rolls out then targeting and creative messaging with one single input and uh what is promised is that advertisers don't have to worry about control u and um yeah don't have to worry about sort of creating campaigns anymore. Well, I see this very uh critically because as anyone who uses AI uh you probably have realized that it's all about input. Input equals output. And I think Um there's going to be a couple of issues here. First of all, people who don't really know how to use AI properly and there's going to be a couple of years until everyone understands how the system works. They are going to use it and they're going to get terrible output. Also, I think this is going to um sort of create something which uh is a lot of people have already described is sort of the AI downward spiral because if everyone is using it then basically AI is sort of relying on other AI content on on the web and it just creates this downward spiral of AI sort of uh um rubbish which basically is going to flood the entire ecosystem. And I'm not really a a big fan of it. I think what should happen and what you should be doing is you should still be super super specific about your inputs. Use potentially other AIs as well to refine uh your your systems, but more importantly, you should be a marketer and use your brain. I think the thinking is not going to go away. Potentially, we're going to be forced down this rabbit hole and it might become the only way to create ads in the future, but I don't really sort of subscribe yet to this feature. I never use it in my ads now. I don't think it's as important as Google has made it out. I'm not really convinced. I think sort of some of the other things such as the involvement of of uh um image creation and so on. That's going to be a lot lot more fun. But I don't want to like sort of spend all my time on this. Sorry, I'm a little bit under the weather. So if you if you hate, but I didn't want to let you guys down. So, uh cracking on. Uh the next thing was AI Maxer Shopping. So basically, it's going to involve a one-click setting that lets standard shopping campaigns respond to the expanded search universe, specifically conversational longtail queries that a product feed alone can't match anymore. I think this is a really positive and beneficial step because that's where the future is going to go. And if there's a feature that um can be even toggled on and off that could dive into this sort of stuff, happy days. I think this is really cool and should be tested and I think that's going to be really really beneficial. The bigger question, however, is uh what's the overlap with Pmax? Because PMAX is meant to do this kind of bit a little bit. So, are both campaign types now handling conversational queries? Google didn't give any guidance on that for uh unless I completely missed it. So, I think it's a really uh an interesting and significant unlock for normal shopping campaigns. And I think shopping campaigns are not going to go away. They're going to get get an upgrade that in my opinion that's a a very very positive move. Um but there is not really a practical framework that they've yet released with that. um like they've done with um their suggestions like with the power pack and and so on. So, we're going to have to wait for that, but I think that's a really cool feature that we will see and that we'll have to dive into. Then, I thought um uh update number three, which was really interesting, was acid studio. So, AI generated creatives, uh AI generated videos and um and one-click AB testing. I thought that was really cool, a really cool update and u something that we saw coming anyway. Um for instance when I was on uh the podcast with Thomas Echel here he predicted that this is going to happen and it is now happening. So Google has upgraded asset studio with multimodal Gemini powered uh creative generation and uh this is going to be really cool. This will be probably added in summer. It'll start and then further down the line it's going to um have updates such as AI generated imagery, um, workflows for video creation, creative recommendations, and so on. So, basically, there's no excuse anymore for marketers not to be using demand gen, something that Google is um, leaning into more and more. And that summarizes what I was saying at the beginning. Key keywords would mentioned once in GML, right? So, um, Google is moving away from this kind of concept slowly but surely and has realized that overall it needs to lean a lot more into the um into upperfunnel marketing and into generative AI. Uh the reason I think Google is making this step as well because it's feeling the burn from search because of course other AI engines are taking away market share bit by bit uh from their perplexity chat GBT claude etc etc and meta is catching up fast uh and this I think this year expected to overtake Google in its total advertising revenue and I think it's because Meta has understood a couple of years ago that basically uh push marketing is limitless and is the future and has more uh capability and Google has been sleeping on this a little bit in the last 10 years and only really since the 201920 has started to push the YouTube agenda. Now demand gen more and more in many accounts demand genen has actually overtaken search spend. So it's something that we're seeing as well. But um yeah, this is what they are doing to support that sort of development and try to up their revenue in that area. Then uh number four which I found interesting was the universal cart and commerce infrastructure story which they talked about. So the universal cart will be something that uh basically Google will be able to have um sort of an application that lives within the Google Google sort of cosmos so that you can shop across search the Gemini app across YouTube Gmail and have this all basically within one product. Why that is important is the checkout is going to move away from your website to the Google uh infrastructure. So this is a move that you probably will have to make. Probably Google itself will become another channel that you just add to your portfolio rather than just you know you're not going to place checkout. That's never going to go away because people will want to uh purchase directly from from you and repeat customers and so on. But it's going to be a fundamental change to the customer journey potentially and it's going to be just another channel like Amazon, like another marketplace across the entire Google infrastructure. So I thought that was a really cool update that's going to uh be like massive for the future. Then um the next one which I found uh interesting is that uh new formats will be um will be emerging for AI search that include ads in inside AI mode that read as part of the convo. Um so direct office may surface directly within the conversation when you use Gemini. Um and what is going to be interesting is that uh this is basically going to make uh keywords completely meaningless. So how that is actually going to look like I don't quite know yet, but um it's something that we will have to adapt to. Then something that we already know is that um uh DSA is going to be upgraded to AIAX. We're already doing this in in a lot of accounts and it's going to uh be upgraded in September 2026. So, if you're still running DSA and it's working good, keep it running. I don't think you don't have to lean into it super super quick just yet. You still have a bit of time. But it might be time to run some AB tests now versus AI max or to uh see if uh you want to switch over completely already. Um so uh it also sort of highlights how much of the content on site is going to be important and that you need to be putting in place uh in order for um that to um yeah unfold its full power because ARAX of course relies a lot like DSA on the content on the quality of the content of the landing page. Um then um I think another sort of um interesting insight was uh which what what they call the unified intelligence layer and this is kind of the uh what one of the last points that I want to talk about and it's basically an unified AI agent built on Gemini that'll bring together Google ads analytics merchant center and Google's other data tools to pull insights across several platforms. So, uh it's basically like a tool that will understand uh what is happening across different Google platforms a bit better to give you more um sort of uh how should I say oversight, how the tools how you can like combine insights across several tools and what you need to fix um quicker, which is pretty cool. And then lastly, something I'm very excited about is campaign type attribution. I've done tons and tons of podcast us about how to optimize demand gen, how to build demand gen, how to um what kind of data points to use to interpret demand gen results etc. But demand genen is finally getting a clean and separate attribution window uh attribution view sorry and um it'll also uh get some uplift experimentation which is that which will then be more widely available um and again this sort of supports the narrative that I've been saying different attribution to be able to understand the imp impact of demand better. Hopefully, it's actually good, right? Because uh it could be just crossover reporting again. So, I'm a little bit wary of that. Um but it's just basically solidifying the argument for demand genen. Uh because if you can through an uplift experiment see its impact on branded search or its impact on overall search or its impact on revenue, then of course you can actually uh sort of make the argument of spending more on that format. Um it'll also have a feature called qualified future conversions which will show conversion potential from brand awareness activity using early intent signals uh such as branded searches and there will be no tagging for that necessary. So that's really really cool and one of the core features and I think in summary whilst a couple of features were already sort of known like uh AI uh generated uh uh assets and AI generated creative um DSA is going to be AI Max everything was AI AI AI right which is not surprising but a lot of it was push marketing and move to demand gen because I think Google is feeling the burn a little bit with uh its its search revenue being relatively relatively flat right um uh still growing but not as strong as they've been growing in the last sort of 15 years I suppose um and this is sort of seeing Meta uh push harder harder. Um um and they're seeing that it might overtake them in advertising revenue. So, of course, they want a piece of that uh cake and I predict a mighty uh uh uh return a sucker punch from Google because I think they're going to absolutely nail this. Um it's really interesting and you got to stay up to date. So, if you want to stay up to date, subscribe to the pod. I'd love to talk to you. I'd love to talk to you if you're a D2C brand. If you uh spots have opened in the agency for June and July. So reach out if you are interested. We have a bit of one-to-one training capacity as well. So please uh get in touch if um you want to sort of be coached through those quite fundamental changes in the coming months. Other than that, if you have any questions, just reach out Jeremyanddigital.marketing. Head to the website youngdigital.marketing. You can actually book a meeting with me there or you can send me a message Jeremy on Google Ads on LinkedIn. in. And as always, thank you very much for listening. Like and subscribe, and I'll see you in the next episode.