How Do You Run Google Ads When AI Mode Is Changing How People Search?

AI Mode is not a future feature to plan for. It is live, it is reshaping what the search results page looks like, and it is already changing which queries send paid traffic. Here is a practical framework for adjusting your Google Ads strategy around it.

Google’s AI Mode, powered by Gemini and rolling out more broadly through 2026, changes what users see when they search. Instead of a traditional list of ten blue links with paid ads at the top, AI Mode generates a conversational, synthesised response to the search query, followed by supporting sources and, increasingly, paid placements integrated within or adjacent to the AI answer.

For Google Ads advertisers, the question is not whether AI Mode affects your campaigns. It does. The question is how it affects different campaign types and query categories differently, and what adjustments to make to protect and grow paid performance in a search environment that is genuinely changing shape.

What AI Mode Means for Paid Search

AI Mode is most active on informational and research-oriented queries, the kind of searches where a user is trying to understand something rather than immediately buy something. “How do I lower my Google Ads CPC” or “what is the best CRM for a small team” are the kinds of queries that AI Mode handles most aggressively, surfacing a generated response rather than traditional search results.

For paid search advertisers, this is largely positive news for direct response campaigns. Commercial intent queries, the ones where someone is searching “buy running shoes size 10” or “London accountant for small business,” continue to trigger traditional search result pages with prominent paid ad placements. Google has strong commercial incentive to keep high-intent transactional queries in a format where paid ads appear prominently, and the data through August 2026 suggests that is holding.

Where AI Mode creates a complication is in the upper funnel. Brands that were relying on paid search to capture research-phase traffic, people in the consideration stage who were clicking through to comparison pages or educational content, will see that traffic shift as AI Mode handles more of those queries with a generated answer. The click does not always happen when the AI Mode response satisfies the query.

Which Campaigns Are Affected

Broad match keyword campaigns are the most exposed to AI Mode changes because they capture a wide range of query intent, including informational queries that are now increasingly handled by AI Mode. If your broad match campaign was serving ads on research queries because those queries overlapped with your keyword targets, you may see impression and click volume decline on those query types as AI Mode absorbs them.

Exact match and phrase match campaigns targeting high-commercial-intent keywords are less affected. These campaigns are designed to capture users with specific purchase intent, and those query types are where traditional paid ads remain dominant. If your campaign structure relies heavily on exact match on transactional keywords, your AI Mode exposure is relatively low.

Performance Max campaigns have a more complex relationship with AI Mode. Google is actively integrating AI Overviews and AI Mode placements with Performance Max delivery, and the Gemini-powered creative generation in Performance Max is designed to produce ad content that surfaces well in AI-adjacent placements. Brands running well-structured Performance Max campaigns may actually benefit from this integration over time, though it requires giving Google’s automation more control over placement and creative than many advertisers are comfortable with.

How Search Behaviour Is Shifting

The most significant behavioural shift AI Mode is driving is in how users move through the research phase before a purchase. Previously, a buyer in the consideration stage would run multiple searches, click through to several websites, compare options, and eventually convert on the site that best answered their needs. AI Mode compresses much of that process. The synthesised answer surfaces comparisons, recommendations, and supporting information in a single response, reducing the number of clicks the user needs to make.

This means the purchase journey for many product categories is getting shorter. Users arrive at a point of purchase intent faster because AI Mode has already answered the comparison and research questions they would have clicked through sites to answer themselves. For paid search advertisers, this is not uniformly bad. A user who has already been guided through research by AI Mode and arrives at a commercial query with strong purchase intent is a higher-quality visitor than someone in the early research phase. Your conversion rate on those high-intent visits may increase even as total click volume on research queries declines.

Landing page quality is becoming more important as a result. The users who do click through from AI Mode adjacent placements have already received a synthesised overview of options. If your landing page simply repeats generic information they have already seen, it will not convert. Pages that surface specific pricing, immediate offers, strong trust signals, and frictionless next steps outperform informational landing pages in this environment.

What Still Works in Google Ads

High-commercial-intent exact and phrase match keyword campaigns remain highly effective. The evidence through August 2026 is that Google is protecting paid ad placement on transactional queries, and these campaigns are continuing to perform well for brands with a clear direct response objective.

Shopping campaigns, including both Standard Shopping and Performance Max Shopping, are relatively insulated from AI Mode disruption because product listing ads occupy a distinct visual format at the top of search results and are increasingly being integrated into AI Overview product carousels. A well-structured Google Shopping campaign with a clean, data-rich product feed is one of the safer paid search investments in an AI Mode environment.

Brand campaigns targeting your own brand terms and near-brand keywords are essentially unaffected by AI Mode. Users searching for your brand by name are expressing direct intent, and those queries trigger traditional ad placements reliably. Protecting your brand terms in paid search remains as important as ever, particularly as competitor brand bidding continues to be a live issue.

How to Adapt Your Strategy

The first adaptation is to audit your search term reports for your broad match and phrase match campaigns and identify what proportion of your paid clicks are coming from informational versus commercial intent queries. If a significant volume of your paid traffic is currently landing on research-stage queries, build a plan for that volume declining as AI Mode handles more of those queries organically. Do not wait for it to happen without a plan.

Second, invest in landing pages that are built to convert AI Mode traffic. Users arriving from AI Mode adjacent placements have already done their research. Your landing pages should lead with specific offers, pricing, and conversion actions rather than educational content. A page that immediately answers “here is what you get, here is what it costs, here is how to get started” will outperform a page that starts with background on the category or your brand story.

Third, if you are not already running responsive search ads with high-quality, specific ad copy, prioritise that now. Google is increasingly using RSA assets to generate summaries and supplementary text within AI Mode adjacent placements. The quality of your RSA assets directly affects how well your ads are represented in these placements. Vague, generic ad copy is passed over in favour of specific, benefit-led copy that answers the query precisely.

Our Google Ads management team at Incisive Growth is restructuring client campaigns around these AI Mode realities, focusing spend on the query types where paid ads maintain strong placement and conversion rates.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Panicking About Impression Volume

If your search impression share drops in certain campaign types over the second half of 2026, do not automatically interpret this as a campaign problem. If the impressions you are losing are on research-phase queries that AI Mode is now handling, and your conversion rate on remaining clicks is stable or improving, you may be losing low-intent traffic without losing revenue. Evaluate performance on conversions and ROAS, not impressions.

Abandoning Broad Match Entirely

Broad match still serves a purpose in discovering high-intent query variants you would not have found with exact match alone. The answer to AI Mode is not to switch entirely to exact match, which limits Google’s ability to find converting queries in adjacent territory. It is to monitor your search term reports more carefully and add negative keywords aggressively to exclude informational queries that are unlikely to convert.

Ignoring Landing Page Quality

AI Mode is raising the bar for what a landing page needs to do. Users who click through from AI Mode adjacent environments have already seen a synthesised answer. If your landing page is not meaningfully more useful, more specific, or more conversion-optimised than what they just read in the AI response, bounce rates will climb and conversion rates will fall. Landing page investment is not optional in this environment.

What This Means Going Forward

AI Mode is not a temporary feature. Google has committed its search infrastructure to this direction, and the integration between AI responses and paid placements will deepen through 2026 and into 2027. Brands that adapt their Google Ads strategy now, focusing spend on high-intent transactional queries, building AI Mode-ready landing pages, and structuring campaigns to work with Google’s automation rather than against it, will hold their performance through the transition.

The brands that will struggle are the ones that continue to run the same broad match, informational-query-heavy campaigns they ran in 2022 and expect the same results in a search environment that has fundamentally changed shape. The paid search channel is not disappearing. It is concentrating. The clicks that remain are higher in purchase intent than before, and the advertisers who capture those clicks efficiently will find that their cost per acquisition is stable or improving even as total click volume shifts.

At Incisive Growth, we help brands restructure their Google Ads strategy around where the platform is actually heading, not where it was three years ago. If you have not audited your campaign structure through the lens of AI Mode search behaviour yet, that is the right place to start.

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