Google’s 2026 AI-Mode Trap: The Expensive Experiment That's Cannibalizing Your Profits and Sabotaging Your Keywords.

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The AI era of Google Ads has truly begun. Google recently released Google AI mode and the impact of this for us Google advertisers is going to be enormous. We’re going to have to change the way we do things to get great results. And in this video, I’m going to show you the new way to run Google ads. So, Google’s new AI mode is a very interesting development in the search landscape. It’s a very interesting development for Google as a company and obviously has a big impact on us as Google advertisers.

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So, it’s currently only available in the US as of the recording of this video, likely to be rolled out elsewhere very soon. And if you haven’t had a play around with AI mode, it’s much more similar to the experience you get with chat GBT where you can ask it questions and have more of a conversational search experience, research experience than you have been able to have with Google for a number of years. Right now, the fact that Google’s added this is is not a surprise. This is always coming. But

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what I think is really interesting is sort of speculating forward a little bit and thinking, will Google AI mode become the default search experience on Google for regular Google users? And I think it probably will. And that represents a really big shift in the user experience when it comes to search on Google because yes, Google has been modifying and updating the search experience for a number of years, but the core of it is very similar to what it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, right? There’s been changes,

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but but the core of it very similar. Switching over to something like AI mode and that becoming the default would represent a much more significant change. And that is quite likely, I think, because that’s the way we’ve seen over the last few years. search experience and how people research. They’ve been moving from Google to things like chat GPT to do more of their finding information and finding options. Well, Google’s going to obviously look to maintain that user base and have

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those experiences and those interactions take place on Google as opposed to people going elsewhere. If it does become the default, by the way, then uh I don’t think that’s very good news for chatbt and other LLMs. I think this is something they should be worried about. I’ve said for a long time that I think Google’s likely to win this race when it comes to owning that AI based search experience and research process, but obviously we will see. And even without AI mode, we are seeing AI integration

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into regular Google searches more and more. So I’m sure you’ve noticed this that when you go into Google now and you search for something, you are likely to get AI based results at the top. People are taking that information and going about their day. They’re getting the information that they want. Yes, there may well be links through to certain websites, but it is a different thing to what it used to be when you would search in Google and you are looking specifically for links to click on to

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then find the information or find the product or service that you want. Those sorts of things, right? And if you think about how you interact as a user with an LLM like chat GBT or Google’s AI mode or even regular Google search, incorporating more and more AI into there, it’s quite different to how you would have searched on Google for something 1015 years ago. Like I just described, you’re having more of a a conversational experience, more of a back and forth. Your searches, if we can

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even really refer to them as searches, they’re kind of a different thing, are much more longtail. you provide a lot more information. You want to provide as much information as possible so you get the best results and information back that’s most applicable to your situation. You’re not, as I said, just uh specifically looking for links. So, how does this impact Google Ads and us Google advertisers? Well, if the searches are much more conversational, provide a lot more information, there’s

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a lot more back and forth and refining, our targeting is going to have to be a lot less keyword focused, and Google is making really big strides in that direction. Check out my recent video on AI Max for more information on that, which is literally a a searchbased Google Ads product that doesn’t require any keyword input whatsoever. And that’s obviously where Google wants to to take things. And I think that’s a large reason for that is this change in search behavior going more because people are

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searching for such longer things and they’re going back and forth and it’s really hard to sort of say someone searching for that keyword is after this, put an ad in front of them. So, we’re going to have to switch more to sort of intentbased targeting. Google working out what it is that they’re looking for as opposed to they search for this specific keyword that therefore we can infer that they are looking for this. Now, for us advertisers, that means we’re going to have to trust

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Google more and more with the targeting. There’s a lot of reluctance for people to do so, particularly those that have been advertising on Google for many years, decades, even in some cases, right? Because they’ve established a way of doing things and they don’t want to shift over. But that is absolutely going to become necessary. Otherwise, you’re going to get left behind for by people that do embrace the new ways of doing things. So, in a second, I’m going to talk about the adaptations that us

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advertisers need to make, what we need to stop doing, and what we need to do more of. But first, I want to let you know about our done for you Google Ads services. So, my company can create, manage, and optimize your Google Ads campaigns for you. We can worry about all the new AI developments and the changing user behavior on Google and how we might want to tweak things to get you the best results so that you don’t have to worry about it yourself. We’ll almost certainly be able to help you get much

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better results while doing so. If that sounds interesting, there is a link in the video description. You can go through, click on that, come through to a page on our website and book in a free no obligation call with one of my team members to find out more about how we might be able to help. Hopefully, we get a chance to work together. So, how do we need to adapt as Google advertisers? Let’s start with the things that we need to move away from that we need to do less of as advertisers. So, we need to

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do less creating highly detailed campaigns with tons, maybe even thousands of different keywords, constantly going into the ad campaign, tweaking those keywords, trying to work out which produces the best poss results. The stuff that used to take up so much of a Google advertiser’s time, we need to start doing less and less of that. Along those same lines, avoid tons of ad groups with very detailed segmented intent around your different products and services. The ultimate example of that being SCAGs, right?

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Single keyword ad groups that used to be very popular. They’ve become less and less popular for a while now as Google Ads platform has gotten smarter, but this very much is an old school way of doing things and not going to give you the best results going forward. Manual bidding, something you really want to try and move away from. Manual bidding, going in and adjusting those bids. Again, the sort of thing that we would have spent a lot of time on as Google advertisers many years ago trying to

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slightly increase. Okay, this is working better. Let’s get more traffic from this keyword and doing all this sort of things. We want to be switching over to to smart bidding options and letting Google ads work out how to get us what we want. Obviously, we need to tell them have accurate data. I’ll talk more about that in a second. Detailed manual targeting, less of an importance needs to be placed on that. So depending on what campaign type you’re using, let’s say it’s not keyword focused and you’re

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targeting different audiences often with a lot of similarities, a lot of overlap and you’re sort of okay, let’s test this one versus this one and see which performs best and then optimize accordingly. Again, a very old school way of doing things. We can trust Google to do a lot of that for us now. And basically what this so to sort of sum up all the things we need to move away from as Google advertisers, it’s trying to control everything. It’s trying to have the specific control over I want to know

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who my ads are put in front of that they meet this this this and this criteria and we just sort of have to accept at this point that Google is smarter than us at this stuff. Now, there’s stuff that Google isn’t better than us Google advertisers at, and those are really important, and that’s area for differentiation and competitive advantage, and I’ll get to those, but we just have to accept Google’s better us than a lot of these things, a lot of this detailed stuff, a lot of keywords,

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a lot of audiences. So, we have to start trusting them with those things and stop trying to take control. We’re getting in the way and making our results worse than they need to be. And then there are a number of things that we need to move towards and start doing more of and start putting more of an emphasis on because they are more important with the new Google ads landscape. So firstly setting up your campaigns to optimize for what you really want. Instead of trying to control all the various

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details, you need to say to Google this is what I really want. Make it really clear by the way and then let Google go out and do that for you. So for starters, you want to be using a smart bidding strategy. So, you want to be optimizing for conversions or conversions value. You can also go a step further, and I’d recommend this for most Google advertisers and put extra emphasis on things that are more important to your business within the optimization process. So, you’ll see that within the bidding strategy

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options, you can emphasize new customer acquisition. So, you can say to Google, look, this is what a conversion is worth to my business, but I’m happy for you to pay more to acquire a new customer because I know I need new customers. I can’t just keep putting ads in front of the existing customers again and again and again. Otherwise, eventually I’ll run out. I need fresh prospects coming into that. You can set up your Google ad campaigns to optimize for that and give Google all the info you need. I cover

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all the details on that and go through all the bidding strategy options and show you which ones to use and how to emphasize new customer acquisition, for example, in a recent video. You can find that on my channel. So, so go ahead and check that out. And then I think us Google advertisers, we need to get out of the weeds more. all that detail stuff that we spent a lot of time on previously and take a higher level view and look at our marketing and the business’s marketing whether you’re

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doing this as clients or your own business in general. Right? So instead of obsessing over the detail, think more about your brand and the positioning of your brand. Think about collaborations with influencers and creators and how that changes the perception of your brand, of your business, of where you’re positioned in the market. Do you want to be seen as more luxury, more premium? Well, how do we go about doing that? How do we include everything? Make sure that everything included in our marketing

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materials, including our website, is positioned how we want it to be positioned. Are we seen how we want to be seen? Because we know that Google’s AI is going to take that information from our website. And that’s going to be fed into how our ads are run and who our ads are put in front of and all these really important pieces of information. So think about the overall marketing package, how your brand, your products or services are presented because you know the AI is going to to really feed

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on that, right? That could include things like your company’s origin story. Why do you make the products or services you do? Who are you looking to serve? What do you care about as a business? Positioning. I’ve already already talked about and then making sure that everything is aligned. So your socials all have that stuff in place, your website has that stuff in place, your customer interactions all are aligned and congruent. I still see a lot of businesses where they will go ahead and

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improve one element of their sort of online marketing world, but it’s very much out of touch. Like the information on their socials contradicts the information on their website. It’s totally different brand feel. You think if you got all this aligned, you worked with some influencers and creators to give you the right brand feel. I mean, a classic example of this, think about luxury watch companies, like who do they partner with to make sure that their watches and their brand and their products have the right positioning?

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They partner with elite sportsmen and not just elite sportsman, people have that like, you know, if I think of like men’s watches, men’s luxury watches is going to be Roger Federer. It’s going to be David Beckham. It’s it’s not just elite sportsman. It’s people that have that like suave sort of so cool and easy and that like luxury feel. They’re the right people. Think about that for your products and services. There’ll be other examples. You don’t have to work with

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people that are going to cost anywhere near as much as that, but that can really help as a higher level view. And then you can allow the platforms to do their thing like Google ads in the detail. The other thing that’s going to become really really important for Google advertisers going forward and this is going to provide massive competitive advantage is thinking about the data inputs. So Google’s AI is going to be doing more and more of the heavy lifting for us Google advertisers. But

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the results that you get out of it will be determined by the quality of the data inputs that go into it in the first place. Right? So set up serverside tracking. Don’t just rely on sort of basic tracking that we’ve been using forever. I mean, you could you could we’ve been able to use serverside tracking for a while now, but if you’re just using on sort of browser based data, you’re missing out. So get both of those set up. Import offline sales data where possible and where necessary if

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that applies to your business. Make sure your CRM is integrated and keep the data in there up to date. So if you’re generating leads, for example, you want to make sure that your team, because this often doesn’t happen, I’ve seen this many happens. Correctly categorizes what those leads go on to be. Okay, this is a poor quality lead. Yes, we made contact or no, we didn’t make contact. Yes, we actually converted them into a customer. And then one step further, yes, we converted them into customer,

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they’re low value. Yes, we converted them into customer, they’re high value. And then you want all that data to be fed back into your Google ad account. And you want to you want Google to be able to see not just, okay, we generated leads, great, but we generated leads. These are the ones that converted and of the ones that converted, these are the ones that are really high value. I’d quite like you to optimize please Google and get me more of these highv value customers. You can see how much of an

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advantage that would be when Google’s got lots of data on not only who becomes a lead, but then also which of those leads convert and then which of those conversions are high value and optimizing for those people is a huge difference to a competitor of yours that’s just optimizing for leads. An absolutely enormous difference. Yes, you might pay more in terms of cost per lead, but you’ll end up with way more highv value converted customers, which is going to make the return on ad spend

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you get from your Google ads that much higher and and is really really key. And you can use that to impact Google ads optimization. So, just like I said, you can put extra emphasis on acquiring new customers within your ad campaigns within the uh bidding strategy section. You can also put even extra emphasis on not only acquiring new customers, but doing so of high value customers. So look, Google, I’m willing to pay this much more to acquire a new customer, and I’m willing to pay even more to acquire

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a new highvalue customer. Please prioritize that for me. Go ahead and do that. These are the things that are going to be really important for Google advertisers to do and work on the data inputs, making sure everything’s up to date. And that feedback loop of data, yes, this is exactly what I want. Please get me more of this very specifically is going to make a really big difference. And the best way to quickly and easily improve your results accuracy and data quality is to use Hyros. Hyros is

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fantastic tracking and attribution software and can really help you improve your Google ad results. It’s a software that all the big players in the industry use, including myself. I use it to track results for my own ads across multiple platforms, including Google Ads and all my organic results as well, which is super helpful. So, someone, for example, comes through and books a call for our done for you services, I can see exactly where that person came from. This is particularly important if you’re running

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ads across multiple channels or generating customers organically as well. Without accurate data, you are flying blind and knowledge is power. So, let me show you how important this is. So, I’m here in my Hyros dashboard. We’re going to take a look at the data and the results that Hyros has been able to track and compare those to what I’m seeing within my Google ad account for the same campaign. So, this is a Google ad campaign that we’ve been running. We’re only looking at data for a few

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days here, but it really demonstrates what’s going on. So you can see Hyros has registered six leads generated a cost per lead just over £15 75 clicks it’s just a branded search campaign hence why the CTR is is 30%. So, not a huge amount going on, but representative, right? So, that’s the data we can see within high-res. If I jump over to my Google ad account, we look at the exact same campaign, same time frame. You know, we’ve got May 21st to uh to 27th. You can see a lot of the

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data matches up, right? We’ve got 75 clicks, 30% CTR just like before. But if we scroll over, you can see that Google has only registered three conversions as opposed to the six. So, it’s registered half the number of conversions. And I can tell you looking at the backend data that the six from Hyros is the accurate number. And that’s why this is so important because we might look at the Google Ads data and come to the wrong conclusion, think this isn’t profitable, turn stuff off when we shouldn’t, but we

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can verify it with the high-risisk data and make much better, more informed decisions and end up with better overall ad results because of it. So, if you want to improve the performance of your Google ad campaigns and be able to see exactly where your leads and sales are coming from, go ahead and sign up to Hyros. There is a link in the video description. Now, I want to quickly focus in on that data feedback loop that I just mentioned and just explain what I think this means for Google advertisers

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going forwards and what I think is likely to happen. I think as Google advertisers, we need to look at our Google Ads account as a compounding vehicle. And most of you, I’m sure, will be familiar with you put some money in the stock market, it compounds at 8% a year for 40, 50 years, and you’re astounded by how much that’s then worth after a very extended period of time because of the power of of compound interest, right? I think the same process is already happening and going to happen even more so with a Google ad

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campaign, right? So, if you think if you think about the various steps, right? So the more highquality conversions that are generated through your Google ad account and the more obviously Google can see that data and the more you tell it to optimize for more of those highquality conversions, the better Google understands who those people are, the better Google is able to find them, the better Google is able to get more of them. And then that process just goes round again and again and again. And as

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it gets better, it gets more of them. As it gets better, it gets more of them. It gets more efficient at acquiring those people. Now there is enormous upside to this. If you think about like I already mentioned the whole compound interest setup where you you start with a relatively small amount of money and compound compound compound compound is worth a huge amount over an extended period of time. The same happens with Google ads. You could start off with mediocre even poor results and compound

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compound the the process and the optimization end up with significantly better results. But the really exciting part about this with Google ads is that the feedback loop is so much faster than say annual or even monthly interest in a savings account or you know stock investment something like that right it is so much quicker than that. So instead of something compounding at 7 or 8% a year Google ad campaign might be getting that much better every week. And if you mess around with a compound calculator,

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you can literally go online and do this. Obviously, just compound calculator, free online tools. And put in something like a a 10% improvement every week and you will see that the improvement in results go from could be something really quite poor to something utterly ludicrous relatively quickly. Now, there will be diminishing returns and there’s only so much you can scale a campaign because there’s only so many people that are interested in your products or services. So, like there are caveats.

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You’re not just going to exponentially get better Google ad results. I do think that if we look if if us Google advertisers look at our Google ad account that way as a compounding vehicle, it puts extra emphasis on taking action now and getting it right, getting that data input correct, making sure Google’s optimizing for the right thing. And if you can do that and if you can really get a head start over your competition by doing things properly because the vast majority of comp competitors I can tell you now I see so

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many Google ad accounts they are not doing these things properly that is going to be such a huge competitive advantage and it’s going to be much harder for them to catch up with you. Just like if you mess around with compound calculators when it comes to interest, the person that starts investing 10 years earlier than someone else, it’s really hard for the person that starts 10 years later to ever catch up, even if they end up investing a lot more money because of that time and the compounding that’s already taken place.

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And I think the same is going to happen with our Google ad accounts and Google ad campaigns. Even if a competitor is willing to pay more to acquire a customer, if your Google ad account has been generating really high quality conversions and learning and getting better at it and continuing to do so for months, even years before they start, that is going to be such a huge competitive advantage. And as AI gets smarter and more powerful, I expect this to become more and more important, right? So I think thinking about it that

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way, realizing that you have to trust the platform, but you’re not sort of trusting it blindly. You’re not just going, “Right, it’s all up to you and you go ahead and get me the results.” No, you have a real role to play in the data input, in the brand positioning, in who you collaborate with, in still the ad creative that’s produced depending on what type of Google ad campaign you are you are running and where your ads are being put in the quality of your website, your landing pages where Google

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draws it its information, the whole like marketing package combined with the data. Those are two things, right? It’s the whole marketing package and feel, creators, collaborations, website, socials in combined with data inputs, optimizing for the right thing. Those are the two core pillars that are going to become the thing that Google advertisers need to focus on. If you can focus on those and get those right, you are training the system. You’re not handing over everything to Google. You

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are saying, “Right, I’m not going to control this anymore. You can do that, but I’m going to train you to do it how I want you to do it in a way that’s going to produce the best possible results for my business. Now, in this video, we talked quite a lot about getting Google to optimize for the right thing. You do that with the bidding strategy and the nuances around the new options that we have when it comes to bidding, being able to emphasize new customer acquisition, emphasize high

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value customer acquisition. But I demonstrate all that and go through the detail in this video here. And if you’re not really familiar with this stuff and really know it, this is one of the most important, probably the most important Google ad setting there is now when it comes to your Google ad campaigns. Definitely go ahead and give this a