If you own a plumbing company, a dental practice, or a law firm, you have probably wondered whether you could just run Google Ads yourself. Or whether the person you pay to run them is doing anything you could not do. Google just made that question a lot more interesting.
What Google announced
Google is adding AI and agentic experiences across Google Ads and Google Analytics. Agentic means the AI does not just show you data, it suggests actions and helps you take them. The features are built with Gemini, Google's AI model, and are currently in beta for English language accounts.
Here is what is rolling out. Google Analytics now shows AI Overviews at the top of the homepage that summarize what changed since you last logged in, and you can opt into notifications by phone or email. The Google Ads homepage has been revamped with AI-powered insights cards personalized to your business, plus a prompt box where you can type a question and get a custom insight back. New Dashboards in Google Ads, coming soon to Analytics, turn raw data into visual reports from simple text prompts, and every report generates a summary explaining the why behind the numbers.
There is also a benchmarking feature inside Ask Advisor, Google's in-product AI agent. It compares your campaign performance against anonymized averages from similar businesses, so you can see where you have room to grow.
This is genuinely useful, and I mean that
Let me give Google credit before I get to the caveat. For a busy owner, these tools solve a real problem. Most service business owners I talk to do not have time to dig through Analytics, and honestly most should not have to. A homepage summary that says what changed and what to do about it is a real improvement.
My take is that these features will raise the floor across the board. More owners will run decent campaigns without help. More junior marketers will look competent. The distance between doing nothing and doing something reasonable just got much shorter.
Good is the enemy of great
Here is the caveat. These tools will get almost anyone to a good campaign. They will not get you to a great one, and in lead generation the gap between good and great is where the money lives.
The reason is simple: Google's incentives are never fully aligned with yours. Google earns money when you spend money on clicks. You earn money when a lead picks up the phone, books the job, and pays the invoice. Those two things overlap a lot, but they are not the same thing, and Google's built-in advice lives inside that gap. In my experience managing paid campaigns for service businesses over the past decade, the platform's recommendations tend to point toward more spend and broader reach, whether or not that is what your pipeline needs.
An AI trained on Google's view of your account inherits Google's blind spots. It can see clicks and conversions as the platform defines them. It cannot see that half your form fills were tire kickers, or that the leads from one campaign booked at triple the rate of another, unless someone has done the hard work of feeding real revenue data back into the system.
What a great operator does differently
A great agency, or a great in-house marketer, knows when to take Google's advice and when to ignore it. That judgment comes from watching what happens after the click: which leads answer the phone, which ones show up, which ones become paying customers. Then it means wiring that information back into the account so the machine optimizes for revenue, and pushing back when the platform's suggestions would inflate spend without inflating booked jobs.
The new benchmarking feature is a good example. Comparing yourself against anonymized averages from similar businesses is helpful context. But the way I see it, average is exactly the wrong target. If your campaigns match the benchmark, you are matching businesses that mostly run mediocre campaigns. The goal is to beat that number, and Google's tools will not tell you how, because the how usually lives outside the platform: your offer, your landing page, your speed to answer the phone.
Why this is bad news for mediocre agencies
I predict this technology will squeeze agencies whose main value was pulling reports and applying Google's own recommendations. If an AI summary and a text-prompt dashboard can replicate your monthly deliverable, your client will figure that out fast.
At the same time, I expect it creates more room for exceptional operators. When everyone can reach good, great stands out more, and the work that produces great, real conversion tracking, judgment about when to disregard the platform, relentless focus on leads that turn into revenue, is exactly the work these tools do not automate. As a Google and Meta Partner for over 10 years, we welcome that sorting. It makes the conversation with owners simpler: if your agency's work looks like what the AI now does for free, ask harder questions.
Good vs great with Google AI
How to prepare your business
1. Log into Google Ads and Analytics this week and look at the new AI insights on your homepage.
2. Ask whoever runs your ads how they track which leads actually became paying customers, not just form fills.
3. Ask them to name one recent Google recommendation they rejected, and why.
If you want a second set of eyes on whether your campaigns are optimized for booked jobs rather than clicks, book a call with us.
