Protect PPC budgets as Google's AI Mode shifts queries up-funnel, with four account changes to test new inventory and prove whether discovery pays.

Google’s head of search data science told advertisers on Oct. 28 that people now come to Google earlier in their buying journeys, asking long, detailed questions that start a long way from a purchase. That same afternoon, Alphabet’s chief business officer told Wall Street that the AI Mode queries driving that shift make Google less money than traditional searches do.

Put those two statements side by side, and you have the planning problem facing every paid search manager heading into 2027. The queries are arriving at the top of the funnel, while most Google Ads accounts are still judged at the bottom.

This column pulls the advertiser lessons out of that conversation, checks its numbers against what Google has published elsewhere, and turns it into four changes you can make in your accounts before Black Friday.

On Google’s Ads Decoded podcast, Oct. 28, host Ginny Marvin opens by saying the show is “getting out of the advertising world and into the organic search world” for the day.

Her guest is Shivani Mohan , Google Vice President of Data Science and User Experience Research (UXR) for Search. Mohan’s UXR teams interview people one-on-one to learn why they phrase questions the way they do, and her data scientists study logs of what billions of users actually do. She started her career designing bicycles, where she says, “you get one shot to really nail the user understanding” (3:04) because a finished product can’t be iterated.

Source link