Ads in Google AI Mode are coming to the UK

What Google has announced

The announcement on the Google blog lists Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore. The UK is in the next group, with no exact date yet. In the US Google has gone a step further and now shows ads in follow-up questions inside the same AI Mode conversation.

Existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible automatically, with no separate campaign or budget, says Google Ads Help. Exact and phrase match keywords only qualify when the query itself shows commercial intent. Broad match, AI Max, Shopping and Performance Max can also be matched to the context of the AI answer, and that is a much wider net.

There will be no separate report

Results from AI Mode are folded into your normal campaign figures and into the search terms report. Google says so itself. You will not get a line showing what came from an AI answer and what came from an ordinary results page.

I spent three years in Google Ads technical support, so I know what happens when an advertiser asks about a placement nobody has a report for. Support agents are judged on CSAT, the short survey you fill in after the conversation, and a bad score really hurts the agent. On brand-new features there is often no official answer at all. The agent still needs you to leave happy, so you get something that sounds clever. Take what support says about AI Mode reporting with a pinch of salt and look at your own data.

Why automatic placements worry me

Before AI Mode there was AdWords Express, a simplified product where Google chose almost everything for you. Any placement Google picks on its own has the same weak spot. The system latches onto one signal in the audience and starts chasing it, whether or not that signal brings sales.

This is how it looks in practice. Take a store selling 3D printers and other high-tech kit, robots included. Kids love robots. A kid searches, clicks, reads and leaves an email to download a PDF guide, just to read it. For the algorithm that is a conversion. It remembers who converts and keeps sending the ads to more children, and not one of them is going to buy a printer for a workshop.

To be fair, Express sometimes delivered brilliant results. That is the trap. It is like rolling a d20 in Dungeons and Dragons. Roll a natural 20 and everything goes your way. Below ten, it goes badly, and anything above ten is pure chance. Only here every roll costs money, and it eats a lot of it.

Should you switch to broad match for AI Mode?

Google's own advice is broad match or AI Max with search term matching. My view is that you should not go there at all. If you do, treat it like marriage. Either you are in properly and pay attention every week, to search terms, negative keywords and lead quality, or you do not get married. Half in is the worst option, because broad match left alone spends money on whatever it finds.

We build campaigns by hand, with exact and phrase match on commercial queries. That way you know where you did well and where you got it wrong. With automation, nobody knows.

What will a click in AI Mode cost?

It depends on the industry far more than on the placement, and the gap between niches is huge, as our Google Ads cost breakdown shows. From experience, automatic placements usually have a lower cost per click. They also make less sense. It is a lottery that may pay out and may not.

What to check in a UK account before launch

Nobody in the UK has run AI Mode ads yet, us included. These are the checks we are doing in our own accounts now, so the switch does not come as a surprise.

• Which campaigns use broad match, AI Max or Performance Max. These are the ones Google will match to AI answers.
• Whether your conversions are real leads and sales, not PDF downloads and page views. Otherwise, the system learns from the wrong people. We cover this in our guide to conversion tracking.
• Search terms every week after launch. A jump in long, question-like queries is the first sign of AI Mode traffic.
• Negative keywords for informational searches, such as "how to", "what is" and "free".
• Lead quality by source in your CRM, not only the cost per conversion.