What 3x longer searches mean for your ads

Are your Search campaigns built for the way people actually search today?

We all know Search is undergoing its biggest transformation, well, ever. With AI Overviews and AI Mode, how people search is changing fast - and those shifts have direct implications for businesses advertising on Search. To understand what’s actually happening beneath the surface, I sat down with Shivani Mohan , VP, Search Data Science and User Experience Research (UXR). 

Shivani sits on the consumer Search team - not in advertising - where her organization studies how billions of people interact with Search, including how they’re searching and the types of content they’re gravitating to.

Below you’ll find what their research reveals about how search habits are changing, and what it means for advertisers, plus our full conversation here:

Curiosities are no longer constrained by keywords

Perhaps the biggest impact of AI in Search isn’t just the new experiences - it’s the huge reduction in friction to ask natural questions, and then more follow-up questions.

People are asking net-new questions they wouldn't have previously thought to ask Search, and they no longer worry about phrasing queries in "search-ese": 

• They’re searching using natural, conversational sentences instead of short 2- to 3-word keyword strings.
• Queries are 3X longer in AI Mode on average.*
• 1 in 6 searches in AI Mode use voice or images.*

Could more searches actually mean people aren’t satisfied with the results? I put this question to Shivani. She shared that Google’s systems penalize “manual refinements” - instances where a user rephrases their query because their initial intent wasn’t met. People are searching more today because it’s frictionless to dig deeper. 

Pro tip: Align your content with the deeper, more complex questions and real-world scenarios your customers are bringing  to Search. Use PMax and/or AI Max campaigns to capture more complex, conversational queries in new ad formats designed for conversational experience.

*All data applies to AI Mode in the U.S. unless otherwise noted and is sourced from internal Google Search data, including Google Trends data. For more details on this information, see page 27 of How people are using AI Mode in the US

Search is driving more discovery

As conversational and multimodal tools remove friction for users, consumer search habits are moving up-funnel. Search is becoming a place for early-stage discovery, brainstorming, and evaluation well before a purchase decision is made.

Brands that only focus on bottom-funnel product and lead generation landing pages risk missing  potential customers earlier in their decision journey. Think helpful content like educational guides, first-hand practitioner perspectives, and video walkthroughs.

Pro tip: Map your campaign strategy to the full customer journey with landing pages and creative assets that will be relevant to customer  intent in all phases.

Connecting the dots to your campaigns

To capture the more complex intent users are coming to Search with, manual keyword lists are no longer enough. 

This is where search term matching in AI Max comes in: using broad match in the backend and Gemini-driven keywordless targeting to semantically align campaigns with long-tail intents that standard match types miss.

Text customization and final URL expansion in AI Max are then designed to serve up an ad and landing page combination that matches the user’s specific query intent. 

Pro tip: Make sure your Data Strength is optimized with durable tagging and Enhanced Conversions so that AI Max has the high-quality signals it needs to bid appropriately on complex, longer queries. Check out my recent article on advanced measurement for a step-by-step guide to tagging and importing your first-party data.

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Ginny