It’s been a big week for Google announcements, with their annual I/O and Marketing Live events taking place.
You may have seen headlines such as ‘Google Search as you know it is over’ and ‘the era of the ten blue links is officially over’. Regardless of the hyperbole, for many brands Google remains the primary source of traffic for their website and apps.
The announcements feel bold, mainly because they have to sound bold. Google has had a good year in the AI race, but it wasn’t so long ago they declared a 'Code Red' as a result of OpenAI’s aggressive growth. Their usage stats vs OpenAI, Claude, Perplexity and Bing are still significantly higher in reach. AI Overviews, loved by users and hated by marketers, has been core to this evolution.
'AI Overview queries are 3x longer than traditional search queries'
And whilst Meta has recently surpassed Google for global share of advertising revenue, Google is in a strong position to grow consumer relevance, monetise more of the customer journey, provide exceptional products and services, and rely less on traditional advertising revenue.
With Search, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, Gemini, Wallet and Google Workspace, they have incredible reach and depth across daily activities for billions of people. As much as Meta and TikTok are growing their share of ad budgets, YouTube (whilst not a social media platform in our POV) is maturing and continues to evolve for consumers and brands.
With all the announcements from this week, it’s useful to break them down into four areas:
- Hardware
- UX (user experience)
- Advertising (paid ads)
- SEO (not something that Google will often comment on)
Hardware highlights
Googlebook native laptops are designed around Gemini across all devices, and will soon enable a real-life testing environment for features, as has already been the case with their Pixel smartphones.OpenAI (with Jony Ive at the helm) are reportedly close to a hardware launch, but currently, Google is the only player in this space who are able to integrate proprietary AI with proprietary hardware.
UX highlights
The ‘intelligent’ search box is the biggest announcement of the week. This will feel like AI Overviews and encourage a more conversational and personalised search experience - something Google has been talking about for the last 15 years.
Gemini continues to create agentic experiences, and there will be a near future where Gemini will recommend, book and schedule events and purchases based on signals from the multiple touch points in your everyday life. The universal cart and shopping experiences have the potential to be huge for ecommerce brands. However, actual adoption may be slower as apparel brands address the thorny issue of returns - a growing opportunity for fraud, as well as lost revenue.
Paid highlights
AI Mode ads in search will appear contextually within AI interactions instead of only alongside keyword search results. The placement and style will likely get more clicks, and potentially more relevant ones. For marketers, it’s imperative that paid and organic search strategies are more integrated than ever. It will be very interesting to see the reporting features in Google Ads and how this supports SEO teams.
AI Max will continue to evolve, from a transparency and control perspective.
From a media planning perspective, Meridian, Google’s marketing mix modelling, is being integrated into GA360 and likely Google Ads. This will support greater investment into YouTube and particularly upper funnel activity within the Google ecosystem.
SEO highlights
Of course, SEO hasn’t been referenced directly by Google, but it seems inevitable that brands will continue to see fewer website visits from informational keywords. A longer tail of conversational queries present an opportunity to create on-site content with high authority and relevance. Reliance on lists of FAQs (as part of a broader schema markup approach) will become less effective, and Google will want to see these embedded in relevant content that is deemed more useful for the user.
Summary
Looking back on what I’d written at the beginning of this year, my main principles of how to plan your digital marketing for 2026 are still relevant. The biggest takeaway is that the Google ecosystem remains a core focus, and it deserves a significant amount of marketing attention from a paid, organic and brand perspective.
Measurement tools such as Infinity Call Tracking (predominantly for lead generation clients) and the use of first-party data in paid activity are now more important than ever.
Brand authority and trust signals from digital PR and linkbuilding activities are also now more important than ever.
There’s a lot going on in digital marketing in 2026. If you want to chat about it, feel free to book some time in my diary or call on 0161 402 3170.
