What happens to your Google Ads when people search with AI

The question

In discovery calls I keep getting the same one, in almost the same words every time. How are Google Ads going to work if people are searching with AI now.

It is not only asked in private. The same question runs through the public advertising forums all year, from firms far larger than a solo practice, usually after a quarter where enquiries came in thinner than the quarter before.

The anxiety is reasonable. The answer is more specific than the conversation usually allows, and most of it has already been measured.

What a randomised trial found

Two researchers, at the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon, ran a pre-registered randomised controlled trial on 1,065 users, using a browser extension that suppressed AI Overviews for half of them, over January and February 2026.

When an AI Overview fires, outbound organic clicks fall by 39.8 per cent. The probability that a search ends without any click rises from 0.54 to 0.73.

Sponsored clicks showed no effect. Neither did overall search frequency.

That is the cleanest available answer to the discovery-call question. AI answers are eating the free listings. They have not, so far, been measured eating the paid ones.

Two supporting facts point the same way. An agency tracking this across 2025 and into 2026 found paid click-through when an AI Overview is shown went up rather than down, from 14.6 per cent at the start of 2025 to 16.2 per cent by February 2026. Their sentence: whatever AI Overviews are doing to organic results, they are not doing the same thing to paid ads. Paid and organic are operating in different environments on the same results page.

And Alphabet's filings say the same in money. Google's Search revenue growth bottomed out in the first quarter of 2025, roughly a year after AI Overviews launched broadly, and has accelerated for four straight quarters since. It is growing faster now than it was before AI Overviews shipped.

So what is actually moving

Something is, and it is worth separating from the story everyone reaches for first.

Every benchmark that reports impressions shows them down, in the range of six to eleven per cent year over year. Cost per click is up. Clicks are roughly flat outside Shopping. Advertisers are paying more to hold the same traffic.

The two large benchmark panels disagree on how much, and the disagreement is informative rather than inconvenient. For the second quarter of 2026 one reported clicks up thirteen per cent with cost per click up one, the other reported clicks up two with cost per click up fourteen. The first panel is retail heavy, and its own breakdown shows the growth is in Shopping, with text ads up only eight per cent. Anyone who hands you a single market-wide number for this is averaging two samples that do not agree.

Then there is conversion rate, which is where a practice actually feels it. This is where I have to stop short of the story I wanted to tell.

I went looking for a clean measurement showing that ad account automation, rather than AI answers, is what moved conversion rates this year. It is not there. The most-cited benchmark set puts the average Google Ads conversion rate for 2026 at 8.18 per cent across industries, as a level rather than a trend, and where it mentions automated campaign types at all it describes them as raising conversion and relevancy rates rather than lowering them.

So the honest position is narrower than the confident version doing the rounds. Nobody has published a clean causal number for either explanation. What is measured is that AI answers cut organic clicks hard and left sponsored clicks alone. Everything past that is inference.

The date that is worth acting on anyway

The evidence above is thin in both directions, which is exactly why the next paragraph is a decision rather than an alarm.

September 2026, which means now. Campaigns using automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match auto-upgrade to AI Max for Search. The separate Dynamic Search Ads upgrade was pushed back to February 2027, which is exactly why this one gets missed. A practice that read the February headline and relaxed has the wrong date in its calendar.

AI Max may well work. Google's own help page states that advertisers activating it "will typically see 14% more conversions or conversion value at a similar CPA/ROAS", sourced to Google internal data for non-Retail advertisers. That is Google measuring Google, and no independent replication was found. Treat the upgrade as a decision to make deliberately this month, with a clean before and after period, rather than a change to discover in an October report.

What is already true in Canada

AI Overviews have been live in Canada since October 2024. AI Mode is available in Canada too. Google lists supported countries and supported languages in two separate lists on that page and does not map one to the other, so treat any claim about a specific language in a specific country as unconfirmed.

Ads inside AI Overviews are live here, and the wording on Google's own help page is worth reading exactly: they "are currently available in English on mobile and desktop devices in the following countries", and the list of twelve includes Canada.

In English. That is the constraint most coverage drops. There is no opt-in and no separate campaign type, so text and Shopping ads from existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns became eligible automatically. A practice running English-language Search ads in Canada has been serving inside AI answers without switching anything on. A practice advertising in French has not.

One caveat stated plainly rather than glossed. That help page lists excluded verticals as adult, alcohol, gambling, finance, healthcare, politics, "and more". Immigration is not named and the phrase ends undefined, so eligibility for an immigration practice is unconfirmed rather than confirmed. Check your own placement reporting instead of taking anyone's word for it, this page included.

On the demand side, CIRA's 2026 survey of two thousand Canadians found 46 per cent had used a generative AI tool in the past year, up from 33 the year before, and that 52 per cent of those used it as a search engine. Only 19 per cent said they always verify the output.

The number worth sitting with is from a separate Canadian survey of 1,518 people: trust in AI for legal guidance came in at 31 per cent, the lowest of every category tested. Canadians are using these tools to look things up and trust them least for exactly the kind of question your practice answers. That gap is the opportunity, and it does not get closed by ad spend.

The reporting problem

Traffic from Google's AI surfaces cannot be separated out. AI Overview and AI Mode visits arrive labelled as ordinary Google traffic with no distinguishing marker. Across assistant products generally, around seven in ten AI-origin visits land in analytics as Direct, because the apps strip the referrer.

So any agency handing a practice a precise figure for what AI search is doing to its conversions is reporting an artifact. Ask how the number was derived.

The volume is also smaller than the noise suggests. Multi-site measurements put AI referral traffic at roughly one per cent of website visits. It is growing quickly and it is not yet why anybody's enquiries fell. If they fell this year, check campaign structure, landing page and auction entrants before reaching for the AI explanation.

The new surface, and why it is closed to you

ChatGPT began carrying ads in February 2026 and reached Canada in March. Self serve is available here now, with a minimum daily budget of twenty five Canadian dollars, down from a two hundred thousand dollar minimum commitment at the start of the year.

We took an account. AFDV was approved on 24 August 2026, and we have spent nothing on it.

OpenAI's advertising policy, in its August 2026 revision, says two things that land on this profession. Ads for legal advice, representation or legal services, with immigration named explicitly in that list, are permitted in the United States only, and only where the advertiser is licensed to practise law where the ad is shown. Then, in its own sentence: ads for legal services outside of the United States are currently prohibited. Separately, under sensitive topics, advertising that meaningfully references sensitive social issues is not permitted, and immigration is named there too.

A Canadian immigration practice sits outside both the permitted geography and the permitted subject matter. Review covers the advertiser, the creative and the landing page, not the ad text alone. An approved account is not an approved category.

Most published guidance on this is now out of date in the other direction. Agency articles still in circulation say legal services are banned outright, which the August revision changed for the United States. The clause that matters here did not change.

One more date

5 October 2026. Google's Government documents and services policy tightens. It restricts ads promoting the direct acquisition of government documents and names electronic travel authorisations, with the Canadian eTA as its example. Only certified governments and authorised providers may run those, and an authorised provider must have its domain linked from an official government website.

A private practice cannot meet that test, so the exposure sits in the copy. The operative distinction is representation and advice against obtaining a document. This is an advertising platform rule about ad copy, and it applies to every advertiser in the category.