Creative Has Come Back Life on Google Ads
This is the part that most people haven’t fully internalized yet:
Creative has come back to Google Ads — in a big way.
For years, paid search was dominated by generic ad copy and quantitative optimization. As long as you had decent Quality Scores and tight bidding, the words themselves almost didn’t matter. Ads sounded the same across industries because they could.
That no longer works. In the new world of Google Ads, you need creative people again.
You need writers who understand:
how real humans phrase questions
how phrase matches actually map to intent
how subtle wording differences change meaning
You can’t just be keyword-based anymore.
The ad copy itself has to be far more specific, directly mirroring the question the user typed. Generic copy that dominated Google Ads for years is now a liability. If the AI Overview is answering the question precisely, your ad must feel even more precise to earn the click.
And the landing page matters even more. You can’t send users to broad, catch-all pages anymore. You need:
disciplined messaging
focused narratives
pages designed for a single question and use case
Every word has to earn its place. This is the real shift: tomorrow’s Google Ads operator can’t just be quantitative anymore.
They must be qualitative, content-driven, language-aware, intent-obsessed. Words matter again. That’s a trade smart advertisers will gladly make in order to stay at the top of their game.
Why Most Advertisers Will Struggle
A lot of advertisers won’t like this. Some will freeze. Some will cling to old playbooks. I’ve seen this movie before.
The best advertisers I’ve known over the past two decades weren’t the ones with perfect systems — they were the ones who adapted fastest when the algorithm changed.
The ones who didn’t? They quietly disappeared.
Why I’m Excited About 2026
What excites me about this moment is clarity.
In 2026, I want to sit with brands and say:
“Here’s how Google decides whether your ad appears above the AI Overview.
Here are the exact questions your customers ask.
Let’s build campaigns that answer those questions better than the AI does.”
Because when: the query, the ad copy, and the landing experience all line up perfectly, you don’t just survive AI Overviews. You win despite them.
AI didn’t kill Google Ads. It raised the bar. And the advertisers who understand that creative, language, and intent are now first-class citizens again will be the ones who dominate in 2026.
I fully plan on being one of them.