Searchlight is Aztek's marketing news roundup that brings together the week’s most relevant developments in marketing, search, AI, and digital strategy, all in one place. We update this article throughout the week with news we think is worth your time, along with context to help you understand what changed, why it matters, and what it could mean for your business.
This week's topics:
9/8: Google AI Max Continues to Change How Much Control Advertisers Have Over Search Campaigns
Paid search used to reward marketers who were willing to get granular. They picked the keywords, chose the match types, wrote the ads, built the landing pages... the list goes on. Google, however, has been moving away from that level of manual execution for years, but Google AI Max makes the direction especially clear.
Starting in September 2026, eligible Search campaigns using Automatically Created Assets, now called text customization, or campaign-level broad match are being automatically upgraded to AI Max. Google originally planned to include Dynamic Search Ads in that September transition, but pushed the DSA migration to February 2027.
This change isn’t Google suddenly taking every campaign decision away from advertisers, but it does represent a bigger shift in what managing paid search looks like.
What Google AI Max Actually Changes
First things first, AI Max is not a new campaign type. It’s a set of automation features layered onto existing Search campaigns. Those features can expand which searches a campaign reaches, generate customized ad copy and, when enabled, choose a different page from an advertiser’s website when Google believes it better matches the searcher’s intent.
Put those capabilities together, and Google can influence three pretty important parts of a search ad experience:
- Who sees the ad
- What the ad says
- Where that person lands
Control Isn’t Disappearing
It would be easy to frame this as Google taking control away from advertisers. The reality is a little more useful than that. Google AI Max still includes controls around brands, locations, URLs, and search term matching. Advertisers can also turn individual asset optimization features on or off.
Google has also expanded reporting so marketers can see AI Max search terms, assets, and selected landing pages. The bigger change is where control sits. Instead of manually defining every possible execution, marketers increasingly define the goal, provide the inputs, and set the boundaries within which Google’s system operates.
That puts more pressure on the decisions automation can’t make for you, such as:
- What actually counts as a valuable conversion?
- Which customers matter most?
- What claims should your brand make?
- Which parts of your website should Google be allowed to use?
Your Website Is Part Of Your Paid Search Strategy
There’s another consequence that’s easy to overlook. As Google relies more heavily on website content to understand campaigns, generate messaging, and select landing pages, the quality of the website matters even more.
Text customization can use landing page and domain content to generate headlines and descriptions. Final URL expansion can send visitors to a different relevant page on the advertiser’s domain when Google predicts it will perform better.
If your service pages are vague, your positioning is inconsistent, or important pages are outdated, Google has weaker material to work with. That reality doesn’t mean every advertiser should hand Google free rein over their website, but it does mean the line between “the ad account” and “the website” keeps getting blurrier.
Better Automation Still Needs Better Inputs
The takeaway here isn’t to turn every AI Max feature on and hope Google figures it out. It also isn’t to reject automation because paid search used to work differently. It’s to recognize that the marketer’s job is moving upstream.
As Google handles more matching, creative variation, and routing, businesses need better conversion tracking, clearer messaging, stronger landing pages, and smarter guardrails. Marketers also need to keep reviewing what the system is actually doing instead of assuming automation equals optimization.
Google AI Max may reduce some of the manual work inside a Search campaign; it doesn’t reduce the need for strategy. If anything, it makes the fundamentals harder to avoid.
9/10: AI Holiday Shopping Is Changing How Brands Get Discovered Before Peak Season
Holiday marketing has always been a fight for attention. Brands plan promotions, increase media budgets, build gift guides, and prepare for the Black Friday rush. This year, there’s another part of the shopping journey: getting into the consideration set before someone ever clicks an ad.
Microsoft’s latest holiday research says 76% of U.S. shoppers surveyed plan to use AI to help plan their seasonal spending. The company describes shoppers using AI-powered experiences to brainstorm, compare, validate, and make decisions about purchases.
That shift doesn’t mean traditional search, paid media, email, or retailer websites suddenly matter less. It just means AI holiday shopping is becoming another layer in an already messy discovery process.
AI Holiday Shopping Can Start Before Traditional Search
Think about how someone might shop for a gift. Instead of searching Google for “best carry-on suitcase,” they could ask an AI assistant for a lightweight carry-on under $250 for someone who travels twice a month and cares more about durability than extra compartments.
That’s a much more detailed request. The AI system can help narrow the criteria, compare options, and create a shortlist before the shopper ever visits a retailer. ChatGPT, for example, can surface and compare products based on factors like budget, preferences, features, reviews, and other constraints a shopper provides. OpenAI has also expanded its shopping tools to use merchant product data and other retail sources when researching products.
Product Information Is Becoming Marketing Information
That shift puts more pressure on something considerably less flashy than AI: good product data. OpenAI allows merchants to provide product feeds so ChatGPT can access more complete and current information about their products. Shopify product data is also integrated into ChatGPT through Shopify Catalog.
Vague product descriptions and incomplete attributes don’t give people, or automated systems, much to work with. “Premium quality for every lifestyle” might sound nice in a brand deck, but it doesn’t tell someone whether a product weighs five pounds, fits in an overhead bin, works outdoors, comes in a particular size, or solves the problem they’re actually researching.
Clear features, accurate pricing, strong descriptions, comparison information, reviews, shipping details, FAQs, and real differentiation help shoppers make decisions. They also give AI systems better context for understanding those products.
This Shift Is Already Sending Some Traffic Back To Retailers
There’s evidence that these behaviors are moving beyond experimentation. Adobe reported that traffic from generative AI tools to U.S. retail websites increased 693.4% year over year during the 2025 holiday season.
Adobe was also careful to note that the overall base of AI-driven traffic remained modest. A huge growth percentage does not mean AI referrals are replacing Google, paid media, email, or direct traffic anytime soon. It does mean enough shoppers are using these tools for product discovery that businesses should probably stop treating the behavior as theoretical.
Holiday Marketing Still Needs The Fundamentals
The temptation with AI holiday shopping will be to turn it into another optimization race: How do we rank in ChatGPT? How do we get recommended by AI? What new tactic do we need?
Brands should first make sure their product feeds are accurate, their website clearly explains what they sell, their product pages answer real buyer questions, and their reviews and trust signals are easy to find. They should also be creating useful content early enough to reach shoppers before the peak November buying period.
The brands that make themselves easier to understand, evaluate, and trust have a better chance of making the shortlist, whether that shortlist is built in a search engine, an AI assistant, or the shopper’s own browser tabs.
