Google released a wave of AI-driven updates to Search, Shopping, and Ads last week ahead of its Marketing Live event on May 20, where the company is expected to announce even more. Recent updates include:
1) Google rolled out five changes to AI Mode and AI Overviews to make links more visible and clickable to users, including:
- Suggested angles at the end of AI responses linking to deeper articles
- “Subscribed” labels on links from a user's news subscriptions
- Firsthand perspectives pulled from Reddit and social media with creator names attached
- Inline links placed directly next to relevant text in AI responses
- Hover previews on desktop that show the website title before clicking
The changes are a direct response to publisher complaints about AI Overviews killing referral traffic, with some studies finding click-through rate declines of up to 61% on pages affected.
2) Google announced three updates to AI Max, its AI-powered Search ads product:
- AI Max for Shopping campaigns – lets Google generate ad copy from Merchant Center feed attributes and run ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode
- AI Brief – a new feature that lets advertisers describe campaign preferences in natural language (e.g., “include pricing” or “do not show ads for queries that include ‘inexpensive'”)
- Text disclaimers – up to 90 characters of required legal language that appear in ads without affecting ad strength scores
AI Max has been the fastest-growing AI-powered Search ads product since launching last year, with Search campaigns using Smart Bidding Exploration seeing an average of 27% more unique converting users.
3) Google Merchant Center quietly rolled out a beta “Use AI to add products” feature.
The tool lets advertisers populate product listings by running a one-time AI scan of their website, bypassing the need to prepare a structured product feed before launching Shopping campaigns. The feature removes a major and often costly technical barrier for small and mid-sized merchants who haven't built feed infrastructure, allowing them to onboard faster into Shopping ads, AI Mode shopping, and the Gemini shopping experience.
But, but, what about all that time and energy we spent cleaning up our product data feeds?!? Does that mean nothing to you Google?! 😂
4) Google announced three new AI-powered bidding and budgeting innovations:
- Journey-aware bidding – a beta feature for lead-gen campaigns that learns from both biddable and non-biddable conversion goals
- Smart Bidding Exploration expansion – coming to PMax and Shopping campaigns to capture more “long tail” queries
- Demand-led pacing – automatically follows consumer demand spikes in Search and Shopping budgets rather than spreading budget evenly across days
These updates build on Google's broader push to automate the manual work of bidding and budgeting, with advertisers trading targeting control for AI-driven optimization. Like most ad networks, Google is moving towards the “black box” mentality of “just give us your money and we'll handle the rest.”
