Philipp Schindler, Google's Chief Business Officer, got on stage at Marketing Live last week and told advertisers there's a "large gap between what the technology can do and what marketers are actually doing with it." A platform saying that about its own tools, in front of its own customers, is worth paying attention to.
Fifty-seven announcements came out of GML this year. New ad formats inside AI Mode. A conversational agent that qualifies leads before they ever fill out a form. Checkout inside YouTube ads. A single interface that replaces four separate tools. But Schindler's admission is the part that matters most for how you actually run your program.
The gap he described isn't about awareness of the tools. Most senior marketers have heard of AI Max and Performance Max by now. The gap is about adoption and signal quality. The new formats only run inside those two campaign types. The AI gets smarter only when it's fed actual revenue signals, not form fills. The measurement gets defensible only when first-party data is flowing cleanly through the infrastructure you've built.
None of that is complicated, but it requires doing the work that most teams keep pushing to next quarter.
So the practical question isn't "did you watch the GML keynote." It's whether your campaigns are actually on AI Max and PMax, whether your bidding is tied to revenue events rather than form fills, and whether you've broken out AI-referred traffic as its own channel so you can see what's working. Those three things close most of the gap Schindler described.
Level.Signal, our AI-powered propensity-based lead scoring tool, is how we do the second one for clients, but the priority is getting the foundation right regardless of how you get there.
Search didn't get harder. It got clearer about what it rewards.
Now for this week's stories.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
What's interesting this week
The Level x Google measurement session is now on demand
Level hosted a 45-minute insider session with Google's Advanced Measurement team on how to build a measurement framework that holds up when platforms shift and budgets need defending. The session covered signal quality, when MMM is actually the right tool (and the partner-count threshold that tells you), and how to audit what your data ecosystem is missing.
Key takeaway: Most marketing teams already have enough data. The breakdown is in the systems that connect it to decisions. That's the gap this session is built to close.
Digiday's Kimeko McCoy reports that the transparency concerns that followed PMax are showing up again with the agentic ad tools Google launched at GML. Marketers are wrestling with how much control they hand over to Business Agent for Leads and the conversational AI Mode formats, and what they can actually audit after the fact.
Key takeaway: These tools are genuinely capable and genuinely early. Every team running them will need to answer the accountability question for a client or a finance lead before the year is out. Getting ahead of it now is cheaper than explaining it in a quarterly review.
846,000 searches reveal how AI Overviews are changing user behavior
ClickStream Solutions analyzed 846,000 anonymized Google search sessions from February and March 2026 and found that AI Overview presence changes how users move through the page. Users on AIO SERPs spend roughly half their scroll time going back up, compared to 27% on pages without one.
Key takeaway: The search experience has slowed down and turned comparative. When someone pauses and reconsiders your listing against the one above it, your title and meta description are doing the deciding, not your position.
Google showed up to Marketing Live this year with 57 product announcements and one thesis underneath all of them: the platform is betting that most of the actual work of running campaigns eventually happens inside the AI, not around it. Agentic tools that qualify leads before a form gets filled. Checkout inside YouTube. A single interface where the media buy, the creative, and the measurement all live together.
The honest read is that Google is building toward a world where the advertiser's job shifts from managing campaigns to feeding the machine well. Signal quality in, outcomes out. The teams that figure out how to give the AI something worth optimizing against are going to look pretty different from the teams that were good at the old version of search.
There's genuinely too much here to cover properly in a newsletter. We put the full breakdown on our site. Four-phase action plan, specific milestones, where to start.
Announced at Google I/O on May 19, Gemini Omni is Google's new multimodal video model. You input any combination of text, images, audio, and existing video, and the model generates or edits a clip through back-and-forth conversation. Each instruction builds on the last without losing character consistency. It replaces Veo in the Gemini app and currently produces roughly ten-second clips with synchronized audio.
For marketing teams, the most immediate use is short-form social and explainer content. A product brief becomes a scene. A stat from a case study becomes a shareable clip. The ten-second cap is the real constraint for now, but Google has said it will expand. Plus, every video carries a SynthID digital watermark, which is worth knowing if your team is working through AI content disclosure standards.
And one more thing...
I'm not going to pretend this isn't a plug. But it's a good one.
Level is in Boston for SMX Advanced from June 3 through 5, and we have two sessions worth building into your schedule.
Brad Stephenson is presenting "Organic, paid, and AI search: One strategy to rule them all" on Thursday, June 4, a framework for running all three channels as one compounding program with real client data behind it.
Josh Muskin, Level's VP of Sales, is presenting "How AI lead scoring turns your search traffic into predictable pipeline" the same day, covering how Level.Signal feeds predictive lead scores directly into bidding.
Heading to Boston? Find our team at Booth #9. If you're not registered yet, use code LevelAgency15 for 15% off.
When a potential buyer asks an AI agent for a Top 5 list in your category, do you make the cut? More importantly: Why or why not?
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