Are You Ready for a Keywordless Future?

 

The AI revolution in paid media is well underway. Google Ads, Merchant Center and GA4 product development is once again seeing an unprecedented shift, with a huge wave of product updates coming in the next months as outlined at last week’s Google Marketing Live event in Dublin.

 

One topic of contention within the SEM community is the signalled shift to a keywordless future, narrated and optimised by AI. 

As per Google Marketing Live last week, AI is still very much at the forefront of their product development focus but this doesn’t appear to be matched back to advertiser usage. Less than 20% of businesses advertising on Google are starting to adopt AI, and just 1% of the those are completely adopted so there is a long way to go with foundational AI onboarding in general.

 

There are multiple mindsets at play to suggest why brands and advertisers are or are not accelerating their AI. One of the Thought Starters at GML 2025 – The Unsaid: How Mindsets Unlock AI Transformation – suggested that two of the three mindsets identified in their subset fell into the below categories:

 

FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. Brands within this cohort are leaning into AI innovation and testing, feel they ‘can’ and are feeling generally empowered to do so.

 

FOMU – Fear of Messing Up. This is causing paralysis and stagnation within brand growth strategy, as collectively we fear the exchanges required to be ready for AI transformation, be it brand data transparency or tricky internal legalities, or lack of knowledge in marketing teams.

 

To help advertisers and client teams stuck in the FOMU mindset, Google is renewing their Accelerate With Google programme with AI training that is now tailored between key decision makers to channel operational teams. With tools like AI Max on the horizon, Google is fueling further FOMO amongst the industry as these updates sound very exciting, although there are surely some AI foundations to be testing prior to leaping into keywordless strategies. 

 

A new-and-improved Broad Match held the greatest hype over the last year in search campaigns, and when utilised with Smart Bidding, the match type was powered by AI to show your ads for longer tail and unpredictable queries. AI Max takes the predictable out of the unpredictable, by expanding query capture beyond broad and to even be eligible for keywordless searches. AI Max will also allow campaigns to operate like Dynamic Search campaigns with automatically created headlines, descriptions and expanded URLs to match the intent of the user, promoting highly relevant experiences on Google’s search surfaces. AI Max has been developed to capture nuances in intent that LLMs can interpret, while keyword targeting cannot. The updates will be transparent, showing search terms that have been matched through AI Max features, which generally has been a black box for wider automated campaign launches such as PMAX (when first launched) and unknown search terms for Broad.

 

As many brands saw major CPC headwinds from January to April this year on Exact match type keywords, as well as the double ad serving auction updates, and the latest updates to intent-based query matching from GML – we think that match types will be phased out entirely within the near future, prior to a partially keywordless future beyond that. Gemini 2.5 has also released and expected to integrated into the ads platform to power the high quality and thorough query matching from features falling within the AI Max suite.

 

If brands are willing to shift to the FOMO mindset, we think there will be limitless opportunity to unlock to capture users not just in a relevant way, but contextually. The question remains, are you ready?

 

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