Google announced a range of ad updates on the second day of its 2026 I/O conference. News included sharing more specific data regarding brand presence in artificial intelligence-generated results, giving integrated data insights based on internal and external tools, and highlighting answers within its AI elements.
First, Google announced that it will now share more insight into how brand mentions are showing up in its AI responses. This should better enable marketers to tap into the rising use of AI tools within the shopping process.
As explained by Google: “The new AI performance insights tool in Merchant Center gives you a clear view into how your brand is performing on AI surfaces by comparing your share of voice against similar brands.”
These new insights cover not only the products people are searching for within its AI tools, but also the specific aspects they’re researching and asking about. This should enable marketers to optimize their product listings for AI discovery.
This could be a valuable consideration. More people are turning to AI tools to help guide their shopping process, and understanding the specifics of those queries could help brands optimize for this process.
Google said it will launch these new insights in the coming months to marketers in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the U.S.
Google also provided more integrated data insights by bringing its Meridian insights into Google Analytics 360.
Meridian is Google’s open-source data tool, which is designed to assist with marketing mix modeling by providing access to a range of expanded estimation data that external developers can then use to build better measurement approaches.
The integration of Meridian data with Analytics 360 will essentially bring together more data insights to power marketing decisions, while also enabling marketers to implement predictive scenarios in order to guide smarter investments.
Another integration will see Google feed more data into its AI agent tools, by combining insights from Google Ads, Analytics and the Google Marketing Platform.
With this integrated approach, which Google is calling Ask Advisor, Google’s AI tools will be able to offer proactive, data-backed recommendations that could lead to further optimization across campaigns and placements.
As explained by Google: “Ask Advisor orchestrates a team of expert agents across Google products, serving as your always-on collaborator and problem solver throughout your campaign journey. For example, you can say ‘find new customers for my hair care products,’ and Ask Advisor will automatically pull product details from Merchant Center to set up your new campaign in Google Ads — taking you from idea to launch in just a few clicks.”
Google is also testing two new ad types in its AI responses. Conversational Discovery ads will provide sponsored results within specific queries, and Highlighted Answers will display relevant ads within the key response overview in AI replies.
In addition, Google announced AI-powered Shopping ads, which will display relevant product promotions and generate an explainer based on the specifics of a user’s query.
Google also expanded its test of Direct Offers, which will bundle brand deals into packages for AI queries. The company is also expanding its Business Agent for Leads, which enables potential customers to utilize a Gemini-powered AI agent inside an ad.
Finally, the company is adding new Demand Gen features to YouTube promotions, which should make it easier to build high-impact assets that scale across YouTube and other Google platforms more efficiently.
“With just a few prompts, build more relevant and performant YouTube ads with Multimodal video creation in Asset Studio. Plus, advertisers can easily boost authentic creator partnership videos directly within the asset picker during Demand Gen campaign setup,” Google said.
This range of updates primarily focuses on bringing more AI elements into the Google and YouTube ads process in an effort to facilitate better targeting.
