🪄 Google goes Keywordless

Today’s Insights

🧠 Keywordless search ads. 📹 Zuck controversial prediction. 📊 PMax adds detailed reporting. 🛍️ Shopping ads test layout. 📈 Ad revenues keep rising

Welcome back,

Google is making keywords sound like flip phones with the launch of ‘AI Max’. They’re fading in importance as Google leans into an AI-powered makeover of search advertising. Instead of relying on what people type, Google is running ads based on what it predicts they will want.

Feature

Google is rolling out ‘AI Max for Search campaigns’

AI Max is a new feature advertisers can activate in existing Google Search Ad Campaigns - not a new campaign type itself.

What does it do?

AI Max takes your current Search Ad campaign and can:

1. Expand your current keywords beyond traditional matching

2. Create ad copy dynamically using your website content

3. Intelligently select the most relevant landing page for each query

Why it matters

Google doesn't want to be restricted by the keywords advertisers select. It wants free rein to be able to go even broader than broad match.

With AI Max, Google can leverage what it knows and remembers about a user from conversational AI sessions (Gemini) and its array of other products.

"We're entering an era of memory-driven search powered by large language models (LLMs)," said Frederick Vallaeys, CEO of Optmyzr. "Search engines no longer rely solely on what was typed—they interpret what was meant."

Big picture for advertising

For advertisers, this marks another step away from precision control and toward AI-powered targeting. Advertisers should get better results—maybe. But expect less visibility into what’s actually driving them.

Google & Meta

📹 Zuckerberg: Meta will eventually handle all creative

Quote: “We’re going to get to a point where you’re a business, you come to us, you tell us what your objective is, you connect to your bank account, you don’t need any creative, you don’t need any targeting demographic, you don’t need any measurement, except to be able to read the results that we spit out,” claims Zuck. “I think that’s going to be huge, I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising.”

📊 Google is rolling out channel-level reporting in Performance Max campaigns

Advertisers can now access more detailed performance breakdowns by channel, format, and asset in Performance Max. Google is also rolling out “full search terms reporting”.

🧪 Google tests image-pack style layout for Shopping ads on desktop

The test format displays product images in rows below the traditional Shopping ad unit.

Earnings Update

During the first quarter of 2025, digital ad spending increased across the major ad platforms.

Google led with $70 billion in ad revenue (up 8.5% year-over-year), while Meta saw a 16% increase to $42 billion, as ad impressions and pricing increased. Meta also launched ads on Threads at the start of this quarter.

Amazon's ad business grew 18% to $14 billion, outpacing its retail segment, as Microsoft's search and news ads rose 21%. Meanwhile, Reddit achieved 61% growth to $359 million.

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