--- title: "Paid Search in 2026: 10 Essential Lessons From Our Latest Webinar" serpTitle: "Paid Search in 2026: 10 Essential Lessons From Our Latest Webinar" description: "AI overviews, accidental competitor bidding, vanishing clicks, and bad workflows hiding in plain sight. Here’s what the data and insights reveal." date: "2026-04-20" lastmod: "2026-04-20 13:20:05 +0000 UTC" author: "Disha" authorTitle: "Content Marketer" authorCompany: "Optmyzr" url: "https://www.optmyzr.com/blog/paid-search-2026-webinar-takeaways/" categories: - "Paid Search" - "Strategy" featured_image: "/forestry/paid-search-in-2026-10-essential-lessons-from-our-latest-webinar.png" --- # Paid Search in 2026: 10 Essential Lessons From Our Latest Webinar > AI overviews, accidental competitor bidding, vanishing clicks, and bad workflows hiding in plain sight. Here’s what the data and insights reveal. **Author:** Disha | **Published:** April 20, 2026 **Categories:** Paid Search, Strategy --- *AI overviews, vanishing clicks, accidental competitor bidding, and why your 2015 ad copy habits might be quietly hurting you.* In our latest webinar, Aaron Levy from Optmyzr and Mery Hayles from Adthena spent an hour being refreshingly honest about the state of paid search, what the data shows, what's causing problems that nobody's talking about, and where the channel is headed. {{< youtube id="QHS8RUnvzko" title="Mastering Automated Ads in the Age of AI" >}}   If you couldn't make it, here are the 10 insights worth taking away. --- ## 1\. One in four ads is being displaced by AI overviews, but it's not the same story for everyone. Adthena's research puts the number at roughly 25% of ads displaced by AI overviews. That's not a small number. But as Mery pointed out, the impact isn't uniform: > *"It varies by industry, it varies by the location you're in, it varies by the advertiser."* Healthcare and finance are bearing the brunt of it. These are industries where longer, more complex queries are common and AI overviews appear most frequently. If those are your verticals, start preparing now. --- ## 2\. Traffic is down. Performance might actually be fine, if you're a performance advertiser. Aaron shared macro-level data that reframes the panic around falling click volumes. > *"Click and traffic volume was down like 15 to 20% year-over-year. Revenue was up, conversion rate was up, conversion volume was up."* His read is that AI is pre-qualifying users before they ever click. The people who do click are further down the funnel and more likely to convert. Search is becoming, as Aaron put it, **"a true bottom-of-funnel catch-all."**

💡One caveat: if your business model runs on traffic volume, a news publication for example, this is a real problem. For performance advertisers, the numbers look strange on the surface but may be healthier underneath.

  --- ## 3\. Ads inside AI overviews are still barely worth measuring. Everyone wants to know how to get their ads into AI overviews. Adthena has been tracking it, and the honest answer is there's almost nothing to track yet. > *"We are talking about under 0.01%. So while it's a very big hot topic, right now it's very minimal."* ChatGPT ads are in a similar place, early pilot, US-only, statistically too thin to draw conclusions from. So, monitor it, don't obsess over it. --- ## 4\. PMAX and AI Max are causing accidental competitor bidding. Both PMax and AI Max heavily overindex on competitive queries, often causing advertisers to bid on competitor brand terms without ever intending to. > *"On one side you're paying higher CPCs to bid on a competitor's brand name, and on the other side you're getting your own brand CPCs inflated as well."* Mery confirmed they see this consistently with Adthena clients, rising brand CPCs, and inflated competitor counts on brand terms. You need visibility into what's happening before you can fix it. --- ## 5\. You're probably still writing ads like it's 2015. Two habits came up as outdated. First, title case is losing to sentence case. As search gets more conversational, ads written in natural casing are outperforming the traditional Capitalize Every Word approach. People are talking to Google like it's a person now, and ads that feel human are connecting. Second, ad elements are still being written in isolation. Aaron described a Google ad for Gemini where a headline about studying for a test was paired with a video about decorating a dorm room. Each piece made sense alone. Together, they didn't. > *"When people are writing their ads, they need to do them with a sense of like, any combination of this has to make sense."* Every possible pairing of your headlines and descriptions needs to hold up, not some of them, **all of them.** --- ## 6\. Google hiding your data might not be as sinister as it feels. The lack of reporting transparency around AI overviews is somewhat intentional. Aaron shared context from conversations with people inside Google. > *"Google hiding stuff is somewhat intentional, they're not doing it to be scary people who steal all of your money. They're doing it to prevent advertisers from reverting to old behaviors."* If advertisers could split out AI overview performance in reporting, they'd start writing separate ads for AI overviews and traditional search, treating them as different channels. Google doesn't want that because keywords as we've known them are dying. The platform is pushing toward audience-first, conversational targeting, and withholding data is part of how they force that shift. Frustrating, but not completely unreasonable once you understand why. --- ## 7\. A lot of what you're blaming on AI is truly a workflow problem. This was one of Aaron's sharpest points, and worth sitting with: > *"The issues that we're seeing with advertisers, they're not problems with Google, they're not SGE issues, they're not caused by AI. More often than not, they're just bad workflows that are getting exposed."* Focusing on the wrong metrics, clinging to ad structures that made sense five years ago, running on negative keyword lists nobody has audited in a decade. AI is making these things visible, **not creating them.** Fix the underlying problems rather than blame the new environment. --- ## 8\. Competitor intelligence needs to go deeper than who's showing up. Auction insights and share-of-voice data are a starting point. The more valuable read is what competitors are testing in their copy. > *"If you see a whole huge new wave of ads, they just got a new agency. Are they testing discount versus free delivery? That means they want to prove they're a good price but can't go lower. Are they doing a trusted signal thing? That might mean one of your other competitors got bad PR."* Mery also noted that shopping data can surface competitive pricing intelligence most advertisers aren't looking at, even though the signals are right there. --- ## 9\. It might be time to revisit device-level targeting. Mery floated what she called an unpopular opinion: **splitting campaigns by device again.** AI overviews appear at very different rates on desktop versus mobile, which means the competitive picture on those two surfaces is genuinely diverging. > *"For the first time ever, we might see some justification for going back to the idea of splitting things by desktop and mobile."* Aaron added a demographic lens to this, saying older and less tech-native users tend to do serious research and high-intent tasks on desktop, while younger users are increasingly comfortable doing everything on mobile. Neither of them is saying this is the right answer for everyone. But it's worth testing on your highest-revenue campaigns. --- ## 10\. The way you pay for search ads may look very different in a few years. Aaron closed with a prediction worth sitting with. As click volume drops and Google looks for new ways to monetize the SERP, a shift from CPC toward CPM-based bidding, or even a revenue-share model, isn't far-fetched. > *"I could see a pseudo affiliate model coming where you're paying based on percentage revenue, and it's on you to give the best experience."* He pointed to Local Services Ads as a rough proof of concept. The way you "optimize" is by being a good business, answering the phone, staying close to the customer. If that logic extends into the broader Google Ads ecosystem, competitive advantage won't just live in your bidding strategy. It'll be in your product, your service, and your customer experience. --- ## In a nutshell… * AI overviews are displacing ads unevenly, so industry context matters * Click volume is falling but conversion quality is often rising * PMAX and AI Max are creating competitor bidding problems * Sentence case outperforms title case now * Your reporting gaps are probably Google being strategic, not vindictive * And most of the dysfunction people are blaming on AI is older than AI. You can also connect with Aaron and Mery over LinkedIn, if you have any follow-up questions on the insights we covered.
--- *Source: [Paid Search in 2026: 10 Essential Lessons From Our Latest Webinar](https://www.optmyzr.com/blog/paid-search-2026-webinar-takeaways/)* *© Optmyzr. All rights reserved.*