Ignore the AI hype. Watch the engineering.

I was a guest on Michelle Kop’s podcast again. Our discussion included speculating about how to make Google Ads profitable in 2026 and beyond.

You can watch it at the bottom of the page or here if you're interested.

Discussions about the future of Google Ads usually start with what’s announced: new features, calling everything Max-this or AI-that. But often this is PR hype. More for investors than the working professional.

I prefer to look at where Google continues to invest engineering effort over many years. It gives a clue to what the system will depend on in the future.

Over the last few years, Google has invested heavily in infrastructure to allow advertisers to give feedback on what happened after the ad click:

• Integration with the most popular CRM systems like Hubspot, Salesforce and Zoho.
• Integration with call data providers like CallRail, CallTrackingMetrics and Invoca.

And where they haven’t built direct links they’ve got the data manager, the newly-released data manager API and Zapier.

This investment tells us something important about how Google Ads is evolving.

Google Ads has relied on feedback almost since day 1. In 2005 they bought Urchin Software Corporation and rebranded it as Google Analytics. That let them track how many people clicked your ad and what they did on your site afterwards.

Back then humans did the optimisation. A good ad manager could hand-tune a campaign with a little feedback plus good judgement and experience.

Today, apart from a few exceptions, automated systems do the optimisation. These systems make decisions at a scale and speed no human can match. But they also go wrong at the same scale and speed.

A good ad manager could compensate for missing or bad feedback data. With automated systems, missing or bad data actively misleads the system.

I think this is why Google has invested so much into collecting feedback. Not just that someone filled in a form, or called. But if they were a good fit. If they booked an appointment. If they turned into a sale.

Accounts that use this data will get better and better as the systems learn what produces meaningful results.

Accounts that don’t aren’t broken. They can still generate leads. But over time their ads will become less and less profitable as the quality leads go to advertisers who leverage their data. Eventually they’ll either set up the systems or they’ll stop advertising.

Aside: This creates a timing advantage. If you start to use this feedback before anyone else in your market you’ll be ahead.

Google has made genuine efforts to lower the technical barrier to uploading data. The CRM integrations, call tracking connections, and services like Zapier make it easy. This makes me think that Google is trying to keep smaller advertisers in the system by reducing the technical friction.

If you’re not sending feedback to Google and think that you should be I’d love to talk with you. I’m working on some ideas to make this easier and would appreciate your thoughts on them. Message me via the contact form or WhatsApp and we'll set something up.

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