May 15th-May 21st // Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes

We unpack his 2026 State of Martech report, dig into all of his fascinating AI market research and revelations, and even attempt to pronounce the pupal stage of a butterfly. Which is Scott’s metaphor for where we are in our AI transformation journey as an industry.

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Google Search as you know it is over
Source: TechCrunch
May 19th, 2026 

Summary: At Google I/O, Google announced a sweeping overhaul of Google Search, built around AI. The new "intelligent search box" expands to handle longer, conversational queries, while AI Overviews now let users ask follow-up questions that flow directly into AI Mode. New "information agents" can be spun up to monitor the web 24/7 and alert users about relevant updates, such as price increases to an airline route you’ve been tracking or concert ticket availability. Mini-apps can be created to solve a user’s need, such as fitness tracking based on specific goals. The blue links haven't disappeared, but the UI now steers users toward asking follow-up questions rather than scrolling down for results. AI Overviews now reach 2.5B monthly users; AI Mode has crossed 1B monthly users in a year. The new search box rolls out this week; the generative UI arrives this summer, free for all users.

Opinion: Google is retraining users to engage and spend time, instead of searching and immediately leaving. That accelerates the decline of the open web and the growth of Google’s ad business. Of course, Google will have to nail the AI consumer experience and the ads. For marketers, it’s a catch-22. A great AI search experience with thoughtfully placed and impactful ads could make life much easier for them. It would also mean they become even more beholden to Google. 

Meet Ask Advisor, Google's new cross-platform AI marketing agent

What It Does: Also this week, Google hosted its Marketing Live event, unveiling several products, including Ask Advisor, a single AI agent that sits across Google Ads, Google Analytics, and Google Marketing Platform. Ask it to find new customers for a product line, and it will pull from the Merchant Center and set up a campaign in Google Ads automatically. It can also surface performance insights across platforms and recommend next steps. Rolling out later this year, Ask Advisor is currently in beta.

Quick Take: This is Google's answer to the AI agent chaos problem across platforms. A single agent that understands your goals and works across products is useful, especially for smaller teams without dedicated specialists on each platform. The risk is that the more Google automates and connects its platforms, the stickier and more opaque their whole stack gets.

Google launches new AI-powered ad formats 

What It Does: Google also introduced several new ad formats for AI Mode in Search. Conversational Discovery ads generate creative in real-time tailored to a user's specific query. Highlighted Answers let relevant ads appear inside AI-generated recommendation lists. A new Business Agent for Leads puts a brand chatbot directly inside an ad unit so users can get their questions answered without clicking through to a landing page. Google also expanded its Direct Offers program, letting brands upload multiple promotion types and have Gemini construct a tailored deal for each search, with native checkout for eligible merchants.

Quick Take: As Google migrates traditional search to AI-driven search, it needs to move fast to test and land on the right ad products. These formats are more rich and interactive than standard search ads, which makes sense, as Google attempts to make search a more full-funnel experience

Google expands its universal shopping cart to major retailers

What it does: Google's Universal Commerce Protocol now powers Universal Cart, a cross-retailer shopping cart that works across Search, Gemini, and YouTube. Shoppers can check out with Google Pay or transfer their cart to the retailer's site. Nike, Sephora, Target, Ulta Beauty, Walmart, Wayfair, and select Shopify merchants are among the first retailers on board. 

Quick Take: The more checkout that happens inside Google, the more Google owns the commerce relationship and the data that comes with it. Retailers get convenience and reach; they also get a little more dependent on Google to close the sale. Watch out, Amazon.

Evertune's new Visibility Boost targets your ChatGPT blind spots

What It Does: Evertune's new ad agent identifies where a brand isn't showing up in ChatGPT responses, then builds paid ad campaigns for ChatGPT to close those visibility gaps. With the launch, the platform now lets brands manage paid and organic AI visibility in one place.

Quick Take: GEO platforms typically stop at telling you where you're invisible. Turning those visibility gaps directly into paid media strategies for AI could be extremely valuable.

The Setup: Omio is a travel booking platform where users can search and book trains, buses, flights, and ferries across more than 45 countries. After successfully growing its customer base in Spain, the company wanted to expand into new European markets quickly without sacrificing profitability. But running paid ads across regions with different languages, behaviors, and competitive dynamics is expensive and hard to do manually.

The AI Solution: Omio partnered with Appier to put AI in charge of finding and converting new customers across markets. Instead of relying on slow, manual testing, Appier's system tracked which ads were actually driving sign-ups in each market and shifted budget in real time. Placements that worked were scaled up automatically; ones that weren't converting profitably were cut. On the creative side, Omio tested localized ads in multiple languages and found that ads in local languages outperformed ads in English in several markets. Those insights fed into a final phase of interactive ad formats to drive conversions.

The Results:

• Grew from one market to 21 within a year

• Met CPA and ROAS targets consistently throughout the expansion

• Eliminated wasted spend through automated placement and traffic controls

Why This Matters: Internationalization is a great use case for AI, especially EMEA expansion, where there are so many languages, audiences, and countries packed into such a small area. You can ”nail it and scale it," except the "scale it" part is a LOT of work if you’re doing it manually across multiple regions. 

Your Action: Pull your paid ad performance, broken out by country and language. Identify the markets where you're running English creative but English isn't the primary language. Take your best-performing ad in that market and create a localized version by pasting your existing ad copy into an AI tool like Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to translate and adapt it for the target market. Run a small test of both versions simultaneously and compare click-through and conversion rates after two to three weeks. If the localized version wins by a significant margin, make localization a standard part of your campaign setup in that market. And use AI to localize!

​​Publicis is spending $2.2B on LiveRamp because data is the real AI moat - Holding company Publicis says anyone can license an AI model, but proprietary data is what makes agents useful. LiveRamp's data collaboration infrastructure is how Publicis plans to build that advantage for its clients.

ChatGPT quietly started linking directly to brand homepages - On May 7th, OpenAI began embedding brand URLs inline in answers, according to Profound, and referral traffic to brand sites nearly doubled overnight. 

Chatbot ad IDs share data with Google, Microsoft, and other analytics providers - A UC Davis study found that 17 of 20 chatbots send data to third-party analytics services and 12 send data to advertising services, with some even transmitting full user prompts in plain text.

Netflix appears to be building an AI animation studio - The company quietly launched an internal studio called INKubator in March, with plans to use generative AI to produce short-form animated content.

Mind-blowing growth is about to propel Anthropic into its first profitable quarter - Revenue is projected to hit $10.9B in Q2, more than doubling from $4.8B in Q1, driven largely by enterprise demand for its coding tools.

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