Monetization of AI: My Unfiltered Thoughts on Google Marketing Live 2026

Look, I know I’ve talked about AI and blogging a million times at this point, but as I sat there at Google Marketing Live, I realized I’d be crazy to let an industry event pass by without getting my hands dirty and making my voice heard.

Which is why I wrote these posts on GML so far:

I Was in the Room at Google Marketing Live 2026. Here's What It Actually Means

Google’s New Business Agent for Leads: Why Lead Gen Finally Got Its AI Moment

In the past, I would have immediately dumped content like this onto LinkedIn for the quick dopamine hit of a great conversation in the comments. But as time has moved on, that’s no longer my strategy. In fact, I have leaned 100% into old-school blogging for two major reasons:

• AIO (AI Optimization): I genuinely believe that writing good, helpful content and directly answering people’s questions will land my thoughts exactly where they need to go in an AI-driven search world.

• Mental Clarity: I believe that SEO, and simply the practice of long-form writing, is good for the brain and our thinking process. It’s a small slice of ourselves we get to keep when there are distractions at every single turn trying to get us to stop thinking.

That said, coming out of GML this year, there’s no denying it: AI is completely disrupting our world, and the platforms are absolutely going to monetize it. It is on the roadmap, and it is happening right now.

But while the stage presentations painted a picture of a fully automated future, my mind kept drifting back to my everyday life.

The truth is, my mom friends aren’t nearly as tech-obsessed as my Google Ads peers, and that behavioral gap is exactly where the real marketing magic is going to happen. The world is changing, people are searching differently, and underneath all the conference hype lies a truly massive opportunity for ads if we know where to look.

The "Chronically Online" Disconnect (Our Mom Friends Aren't Prompting)

When you sit in the audience at GML and watch Google demo a user uploading a video, dictating a voice note, or typing a highly sophisticated, multi-turn prompt into AI Mode, it sounds revolutionary. But back in the real world, there is a massive adoption asymmetry.

My mom friends, who obviously represent the actual target demographic for millions of everyday businesses are not sitting at home treating Google like a coding terminal. They aren't thinking, "Let me open an LLM to engineer a prompt for an opinion." They just type what’s on their mind. It is a direct, uncomplicated, and honestly a much healthier way to interact with the internet than how someone like me uses AI and the internet.

When my everyday friends do use AI, it’s accidental or casual, like getting a quick idea for a dance costume or a song. They aren’t necessarily comfortable snapping photos of objects in public or talking to their phone in the grocery store aisle to use multimodal search features. They search like normal humans.

Those of us who work in PPC are "chronically online" and forget that the average consumer doesn't share our tech obsession. If we optimize our ads only for the hyper-sophisticated prompter, we are going to completely miss the everyday buyer. The everyday users are probably still using keywords.

The Big Question Mark: Auction Transparency and the Black Box

Google’s big pitch at GML this year is all about meeting the customer at the exact right place and the exact right time using automated systems (they didn’t say right place, right time but it is just that). On paper, it sounds flawless. But as a PPC practitioner, I have immediate, real-world concerns.

Take Google's rollout of Demand-Led Budget Pacing. This isn't just a conceptual idea; it’s an actual feature where AI automatically adjusts and shifts your campaign spend timing based on real-time consumer demand signals. On paper, it captures spikes. In reality, it leaves the advertiser entirely in the dark. How is the AI pacing that spend? What does the auction actually look like behind the scenes?

If a client opens up their budget to these automated, conversational AI placements, what does the auction actually look like? When an AI dynamically generates a response or places a "Highlighted Answer" into a conversation, how is that spend being paced?

Right now, the reporting is a complete black box.

Another highly respected PPC voice recently wrote a fantastic piece questioning whether keywords are dead after GML, noting how vital specific, exact-match keywords are for small-to-medium businesses with tight budgets.

I couldn't agree more.

If you take a limited budget and throw it into a massive, automated AI bucket, you risk letting vague, top-of-funnel conversational queries swallow your cash.

We don't fully know how these ads will look to us on the back end, how data will be reported, or if we will even have the granularity to see why a budget was spent.

Worse yet, Google is aggressively monetizing the discovery layer before a user even decides to buy. With features like Direct Offers, brands can now push promotions, dynamic product bundles, and discounts directly into those conversational AI threads during the exploration phase.

What I Am Telling My Clients: Build Your Brand's Moral Compass

If you are an advertiser trying to figure out what to do tomorrow morning after all the GML hype, my biggest advice is to take a giant step back and define your own AI Policy.

Don't just blindly opt into every automated check-box Google throws at you. Sit down and decide: What do you actually want AI doing for your brand, and what do you not want it doing?

Google is giving us more tools to try and control things, but the reality is that the broader and more automated the AI universe gets, the higher the risk for brand dilution, weird ad placements, or outright negativity.

Just like a real human, your business needs to know who it is, what it stands for, and what it won't tolerate.

Thankfully, Google is giving us a few ways to steer the ship. Features like AI Brief allow you to guide automated campaigns (like AI Max for Search) using your own words, giving you a mechanism to set brand guardrails. On the ecommerce side, the introduction of Conversational Attributes in Merchant Center lets you map detailed product data (like Q&A, compatibility, and popularity rank) into the feed so your products surface correctly when people ask nuanced, long-tail questions in AI Mode.

These features are the tactical implementation of the moral compass you need to build. Just like a real human, your business needs to know who it is, what it stands for, and what it won't tolerate.

Having a strict moral compass and a defined set of brand guardrails is the only way to survive the automation wave without losing your shirt or your reputation.