AI Search
for the Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit, May 6-8 in Palm Springs.
The agentic era of the internet is well and truly underway, with the accompanying quest on how to monetize it, i.e., the AI ad wars, occurring simultaneously.
OpenAI’s advertising pilots in ChatGPT have garnered much of the recent headlines, although the biggest company in adland — that’s still Google, BTW — is likewise evolving its offering.
Google is widening the scope of its AI Max ad product, extending it beyond search into shopping and travel, while introducing new controls designed to make automation more steerable for advertisers.
The updates, unveiled this week — and just a day after its parent company Alphabet posted Q1 revenues of $110 billion, up 22% annually — point to a familiar trajectory: more AI-led execution, with marketers now operating by feeding inputs into a platform, rather than manually operating it.
Here’s what you need to know.
Google is pushing AI Max deeper into its core ad stack with three main updates:
AI Max is effectively moving away from traditional campaign inputs, such as keywords and landing pages, replacing them with intent modeling.
As Brendon Kraham, vp of search & commerce global ads solutions, the system is designed to handle “longer, more sophisticated” natural-language queries that are increasingly difficult to map manually.
That reflects a broader shift: search is no longer a keyword-matching exercise, but a probabilistic interpretation of user intent.
And with the latest AI Max update, Google hopes to operationalize that by expanding what executives there call the “aperture” — surfacing ads across a wider set of queries while optimizing toward higher-value outcomes, such as lifetime value rather than simply optimizing campaigns for clicks.
For advertisers, this moves campaign management upstream, meaning their role shifts from configuring campaign execution, i.e., determining keywords, and calculating bidding and placements strategies. Now, the AI Max platform asks them to define higher-level inputs, such as objectives, data signals, creative guardrails, and audience intent, which the AI system then translates into real-time buying decisions.
Google is careful to frame AI Max as optional, with Kraham positioning it as a “steering” tool rather than a replacement for manual controls, with executives there eager to highlight the choices campaign staff still have at their disposal.
However, the direction of travel is clear. AI Brief, in particular, hints at a redefinition of the advertiser workflow. What was once a labor-intensive process of building keyword lists, exclusions, and other controls is now a prompt-based system where marketers describe intent and set guardrails. That starts to look less like media buying and more like prompt engineering.
Simultaneously, Google is trying to address long-standing advertiser concerns around control and transparency. Features like messaging guidelines, matching constraints, and disclaimers are designed to reassure brands — especially those in regulated industries — that automation won’t override compliance requirements.
AI Max sits alongside existing products like Performance Max, but the distinction is increasingly about degrees of control rather than fundamentally different capabilities.
Performance Max remains the fully automated, cross-channel option. AI Max, by contrast, is positioned as a middle ground: the same underlying AI, but applied within more constrained environments like search or shopping.
That reflects a key tension in Google’s ad strategy: pushing automation as far as possible, while offering enough flexibility to allay ad campaign managers’ potential concerns over disintermediation.
It reflects a gradual shift in how advertising is executed, with Google executives underscoring the challenges of aligning campaigns with changes in consumer habits.
Speaking with Digiday separately, Elias Malm, founder of AI marketing startup Epiminds, and a former Google executive, said he expects this trend to continue, with the introduction of new formats, such as “responsive search ads.”
He added, “Instead of just having a fixed ad, you provide text assets, and it builds it together for optimal performance.”
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