Amid search wars, Google touts YouTube, display inventory to advertisers
By Kimeko McCoy • November 14, 2025 •
Ivy Liu
This holiday season, awareness and brand dollars are likely at the top of Google’s wishlist — at least that’s what it seems based on Google’s communication with ad partners as of late. For the past six months, the tech behemoth has increasingly recommended spend on non-search, upper funnel channels like YouTube, display and discovery ads, according to seven agency execs Digiday spoke with for this story.
The recommendation stems from two fronts: marketers are increasingly recognizing the importance of awareness media to drum up shopper interest. But Google is also eyeing changes on the horizon as more shoppers start their product searches on AI-powered chatbots like Google Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot.
“As consumer behavior continues to evolve and people ask new types of questions, search and discover information in new ways, our AI-powered campaigns, including Demand Gen, are helping advertisers capture these new opportunities,” said a Google spokesperson.
Ultimately, Google seems “mostly unbothered by it since impressions are up,” said Michael Robbins, associate director of paid search at Exverus. More people are using AI chatbots, but Google remains the go-to search engine over AI tools — for now, at least. According to eMarketer, nearly 58% of people prefer Google search over AI tools like ChatGPT. Per agency execs, the changes to the search landscape are inevitable.
“They’re trying to get ahead of it by offering that their AI ad units will show up in their AI experiences,” said the CEO of a performance marketing shop, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They’re forcing people to adopt AI Max, PMax, Demand Gen as a way to [say], ‘If you want to show up, you’ve got to be running AI ad units.’”
Inside Google’s conversations
Google is having more active conversations with advertisers, recommending shopper capabilities with YouTube Shorts, display and discovery ads, per the seven agency execs.
For the last few months, Google’s been telling agencies, like performance marketing shop Markacy, about Platform Comparable Attribution “as a different attribution method designed to make Demand Gen look better relative to Meta campaigns and similar pushes,” said Tucker Matheson, co-CEO and co-founder at Markacy.
The tech titan is also pushing shopper marketing, aiming to narrow the gap between discovery and purchase with influencer environment integrations and retailer capabilities, including ad integrations with Google Maps and shopper capabilities within YouTube Shorts. That’s according to a second agency exec, who heads paid media for a performance media and creative agency, and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Notably, Google isn’t offering incentives or discounts around these initiatives, per two of said agency execs.
There are mixed reviews on the performance of Google’s demand gen campaigns, especially when compared to Meta, per the execs. The two anonymous execs report product improvements around video and image ads, Gmail ads and more have been promising. Meanwhile, Markacy isn’t.
“I would say that we have consistently recommended a pretty heavy allocation to YouTube for our clients, but to stay away from the discovery display placements on Google, and that’s stayed the same since they’ve kind of been pushing this,” said Chris Rigas, vp of media at performance media agency Markacy.
As AI-powered chatbots start to eat into traditional search and more brands look for ways to drum up enough awareness to get picked up in chatbots, it seems Google is hedging its bets via ad product recommendations, “because I don’t think it takes a conspiracy theorist to see where it’s going,” said the second anonymous exec.
