The Future of PPC, AI, and Becoming the #1 PPC Influencer with Jyll Saskin Gales

Episode Description

Fred Vallaeys, CEO & Co-Founder of Optmyzr and author of The AI Amplified Marketer, sits down with Jyll Saskin Gales—this year’s number one most influential PPC marketer, Google Ads coach, and founder of the Inside Google Ads course, podcast, book, and conference—to talk about what it actually means to use AI as a marketer, not just as a shortcut.

Jyll spent six years at Google helping Canadian companies expand internationally, then left during COVID to build something of her own. What started with Google Ads management and a client who asked if she could coach them turned into a full ecosystem: courses, a podcast, a book, a conference, and a LinkedIn presence that landed her the top spot in PPC influence this year.

This conversation covers where AI genuinely fits into Jyll’s work and where it falls short. They discuss the impact of personalized search on PPC, why negative keywords may matter less than we thought, and what it means to be a great PPC manager in a world where pushing buttons is increasingly a machine’s job.

If you want a grounded, honest take on what AI actually does for a working marketer, this is worth watching.

Here’s what was discussed in this chat:

• Smart bidding has been AI all along
• AI doesn’t make writing easier; it raises the standards
• Keeping up with the industry is about people, not platforms
• Personalized search raises real questions for advertisers
• Using Claude Co-work to get past blank-page syndrome

Episode Takeaways

Jyll Saskin Gales didn’t set out to become the most influential PPC marketer of 2026. She set out to leave a job she was good at but didn’t love. Six years at Google, helping Canadian companies expand internationally, came to a quiet end during COVID.

Without the free lunches and the office energy, the case for staying got harder to make. So she left, said yes to a client who asked if she could coach them, started a podcast, posted on LinkedIn, wrote a book, launched a conference in Toronto—and the rest is history.

What makes this conversation worth paying attention to isn’t the career story. It’s that Jyll is one of the few people in PPC who has built real expertise, a real audience, and a real content operation. And is now navigating what AI actually does and doesn’t do for someone working at that level. Not theoretically, but in practice, with a second book almost finished and a new computer bought specifically to run Claude Co-work.

Smart bidding has been AI all along

The conversation opens with a reframe that matters more than it first sounds. Before anyone starts talking about AI Max or AI overviews or the latest Google IO announcements, Jyll makes a point that tends to get lost in the hype cycle: the AI transformation in Google Ads didn’t start this year.

Smart bidding has been running for a decade. The tools that learn from conversion data, adjust bids in real time, and optimize toward business outcomes—those are all AI, which means AI has been present for years.

The implication is that the question isn’t whether to trust AI in advertising. It’s whether you’re giving it anything worth working with.

“AI is an average maker,” Jyll said. “It gets all the people who wouldn’t normally be able to get good results and lets them get good results with smart bidding. But now we don’t want good results. We want excellent results. We want the most profit possible.”

The path to excellent results runs through business context. Full-funnel conversion tracking, customer lists, exceptional creative: these are the inputs that let smart bidding perform above average. The advertisers winning aren’t the ones who set up a campaign and let Google run it. They’re the ones pairing Google’s AI with their own data.

AI doesn’t make writing easier; it raises the standards

The first book she wrote entirely without AI, a point of pride she mentioned in the book itself. Going into the second one—about bidding strategy—she leaned on AI heavily to help gather her thoughts, expected it to compress the writing timeline, and found the opposite.

“I would ask Claude for something and then wait there for a few minutes and then it would come back and it’s not quite right. And it didn’t actually save as much time as I thought it would.”

What it did do was change the nature of the work. The blank page became less terrifying because something was always on it. But the editing that followed—bringing the draft from 85% her voice to fully her voice—turned out to be its own significant task. The time didn’t disappear. It relocated.

Where AI has genuinely helped is in the ideation and outlining phase, through a tool she calls JyllBot: a personal repository of everything she’s written, recorded, and published, trained to surface her own thinking back to her when she needs a starting point.

Before recording a podcast episode or spinning a LinkedIn post, she asks JyllBot what she’s already said about the topic. It returns her own phrases, analogies, and frameworks—which is less about AI generating ideas and more about AI serving as an external memory that doesn’t degrade. From that base, she writes.

Fred articulated something similar from his own experience. “AI isn’t always about saving time,” Fred said. “I think that was the original premise—we thought hey, we can just get the work done so much quicker. But the reality is it just forces you to maybe be better.”

What used to be “good enough, people will enjoy it” becomes a more rigorous standard because the tool to interrogate the work is always available. This is what economists call Jevons paradox applied to AI: the cheaper and more capable it gets, the more you use it, and the more time you end up spending, just on things that matter more.

Keeping up with the industry is about people, not platforms

The pace of change in Google Ads is relentless. New features, new formats, new campaign types, policy shifts, and interface updates are enough to fill a full-time job just tracking it. Jyll stays current through the PPC Newsfeed newsletter from Hannah for daily headlines, but the deeper learning happens through the LinkedIn PPC community.

“I think keeping up with the industry is about news and updates and features,” Jyll said. “But what I find so much more helpful is keeping up with other folks in the space, whether they are also influencers or maybe someone I’ve never seen or heard of before, but they’re sharing a unique perspective.”

When Andrew Lolk posted that negative keywords may be unnecessary, her first instinct was skepticism. She’d never heard that before. But she dug in, debated it, and it ended up changing her thinking, and producing real results for her clients. Two different coaching clients removed all their negative keywords on her recommendation. Both saw ROAS improvements.

The argument behind it connects directly to Jyll’s first book, which is about audiences rather than search terms. Smart bidding doesn’t just look at what someone typed. It looks at who typed it, their signals, their history, their context. A generic one-word query that would normally be excluded by a negative keyword might be exactly right for a specific searcher 1% of the time. Negative keywords, built over years and never revisited, can quietly block those opportunities.

Personalized search raises real questions for advertisers

The Google IO announcement that personalized, adaptive search interfaces are coming—where every user potentially sees a different UI, different formats, different ad arrangements—is legitimately unsettling if you’ve spent years building expertise around how search works. Jyll’s response is worth taking seriously because it doesn’t dismiss the concern or overclaim the opportunity.

As a consumer, she finds it exciting. As an advertiser, she’s skeptical but grounded: Google isn’t walking away from a hundred-billion-dollar business, and the fundamentals of advertising—reaching the right person with the right message at the right moment—aren’t changing. What changes is everything around the execution of that idea.

Fred extended the point. “Your time is not going to be spent logging into an interface and pushing the buttons,” Fred said. “That no longer qualifies you as a PPC expert. The expertise comes from understanding the business, understanding how the consumer thinks about things, putting those dots together, and then letting the machine go and figure out what buttons to push.”

The PPC experts who thrive in this environment won’t be the ones who were best at pushing buttons. They’ll be the ones who were always thinking beyond the buttons anyway.

Using Claude Cowork to get past blank-page syndrome

Jyll bought a new computer specifically to download Claude Cowork. Not to replace her writing, but to get unstuck from it.

The challenge with her second book wasn’t the topic itself. It was the audience assumption problem. Her first book covered audience targeting, something even experienced practitioners often don’t understand well, so the ground was clear and the value proposition obvious.

But bidding is different. Every Google Ads user has been touching bid settings since day one. Writing something genuinely useful for people who think they already understand the subject is a harder creative problem to solve.

She fed Claude Cowork her first book as a style reference, gave it her own source material, and had it draft the harder chapters. Everything that came back was roughly 85% her voice. The job now is editing that final 15% into place: adding client examples, correcting nuances, bringing in the lived knowledge that no AI has access to.

She’s careful not to overclaim the outcome. It didn’t save time. It changed where the time went. The blank-page paralysis that had stalled her halfway through the manuscript dissolved, and in its place is a different kind of work, one she finds more aligned with what she’s actually good at.

“That’s the premise of the AI amplified marketer,” remarked Fred. “You’re not going to the beach and doing your work in two hours. It’s doing the things you maybe were stuck doing, didn’t have time to do, didn’t have the skills to do in the past.”

Jyll’s closing line landed it: “Unleveling the playing field for myself, as it were,” referring to the previous book published by Fred.

Episode Transcript

Frederick Vallaeys: Hi, I’m Fred Vallaeys, and I wrote a book about the AI amplified marketer. And I wanted to have conversations with marketers who embody this whole principle of taking themselves to the next level. And who better to bring in than this year’s number one most influential PPC marketer, Jyll Saskin Gales. Welcome to the studio. It’s good to see you again, Jyll.

Jyll Saskin Gales: Yes, great to see you in the flesh in your studio. It’s wonderful to be here.

Frederick Vallaeys: And for people who don’t know you, you have overtaken me as the number one most influential PPC person this year. So congrats on that.

Jyll Saskin Gales: Thank you. We’ll give you a little run for your money next year. The competition’s on.

Frederick Vallaeys: I look forward to it. But you’ve also written a book, right? So why don’t we show that to the audience and give us a little bit about your background. So your years at Google, what you do now, and how did you become so influential in PPC?

Jyll Saskin Gales: I’m Jyll Saskin Gales. I am a Google Ads coach and the founder of the Inside Google Ads course, podcast, book, and conference in Toronto. And how I got here is I worked at Google for six years as part of the large customer sales team. And specifically, my job there was to help Canadian companies expand outside of Canada through Google’s insights and ad products.

And I always say I loved being a Googler, but I didn’t love the work I was doing at Google. And so during COVID, stuck at home, didn’t have the free lunches and everything I was used to, decided to strike it out on my own. And so started with Google Ads management, a client asked if I could coach them, I said yes. Just kept saying yes to opportunities and launched the podcast, launched courses, started posting on LinkedIn, met the PPC community, and somehow here we are, a person of influence, shall we say.

Frederick Vallaeys: So doing as many things as you do, I’m sure AI must be helping you. So tell us a little bit about where it fits in your life.

Jyll Saskin Gales: The primary place AI fits into my life is within Google Ads itself. I know now people like to say, “Oh, AI mode and AI overviews and AI Max,” but smart bidding’s been here for a decade now. And there are AI tools within Google Ads that have been helping me and my clients for many years. And now incorporating AI into my business in other ways as well—that’s been something newer and definitely helping me save time.

Frederick Vallaeys: And let me pull out—so this is my order book, this is Unlevel the Playing Field. But this is basically what I was saying, right? There’s so much AI in Google that it makes it a really level playing field and anyone can be successful there. But clearly what you do is you coach people to go beyond unleveling. So even think about smart bidding—what can people do? Are they just bound by the AI that Google does for you, or can you go above and beyond that?

Jyll Saskin Gales: You absolutely can go above and beyond. I think I said a recent time when we spoke that AI is an average maker, right? So it gets all the people who wouldn’t normally be able to get good results and lets them get good results with smart bidding. But now we don’t want good results. We want excellent results. We want the most profit possible.

And so that’s where you need to bring your own business context to the AI. And in the Google Ads ecosystem, that means your own business data. So things like full-funnel conversion tracking, your customer lists, really exceptional creative—pairing that with Google’s AI like smart bidding is how you can get above-average results and beat the competition.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so as you share these tidbits about how to do better, I was thinking about this where I’m a developer but also a writer. And when I write a program, a piece of software, a piece of code, I feel very comfortable just giving that to Claude and whatever it spits out, I don’t even look at it. It’s, “Here you go.” But when it comes to writing, it’s actually more—does it sound like an AI bot? Does it sound like me? And so often I go back and significantly redraft everything, and sometimes I just throw it away. I’m like, “This is not passable.” Now in your life, trying to share all these things that you know, where does AI fit into the writing process?

Jyll Saskin Gales: I’ve had trouble using AI in the writing process. I’m getting better. I’m actually—I haven’t shared this with anyone yet—but I’m almost finished writing my second book. In my first book, I didn’t use AI at all, and it was a point of pride. I wrote about it in the book—no AI touched this book.

Going into the second book, which is about bidding, I used a lot of AI to help gather my thoughts. And I thought that it would save me so much time, but in a way it actually made the writing process a lot trickier because I would ask Claude for something and then wait there for a few minutes, and then it would come back and it’s not quite right. And it didn’t actually save as much time as I thought it would.

Where I have found AI to be more helpful in my content is just in the initial outlining and ideation stage. So for example, let’s say I’m sitting down to record a podcast episode about maximize conversions and why I advise generally starting with maximize conversions. I will go to my repository—I call it JyllBot—of all my information, and I’ll ask it, “What does Jyll say about why you should always start with maximize conversions?” And it just spits back to me things that I’ve already said, talked about, terms or phrases I like, or analogies I’ve used before, and helps me get started so I’m not staring at a blank page. And then I write it from there.

And so that’s what I do a lot of times now. If I’m recording a new lesson for one of my courses, or if I’m taking a LinkedIn post I’ve done before and I want to do a new spin on it, I ask JyllBot—which is like asking myself—“What does Jyll say about this? What does Jyll think about this?”

Or sometimes I actually type that into Google. I learned this trick from my clients. A lot of my clients say they’ll ask Google, “What does Jyll Saskin Gales say about blank?” And then it quotes me. “What does Jyll Saskin Gales say about smart bidding exploration?” “Oh, good idea, Jyll Saskin Gales.”

So that’s where I have found AI really helpful—just reminding me, since I do create so much content, “What do I think and say about that? Oh yeah, okay. Now let me build on that and add my own human creativity and experience and knowledge on top of that.”

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, that makes sense. It’s a more reliable form of memory than the human one, which tends to degrade with age.

Jyll Saskin Gales: Yes.

Frederick Vallaeys: And I was just writing something too, and I’m then reading through what the AI has written. And so yeah, “In 2023 you said blah blah blah.” And I’m like, “Wait, did I—oh yeah, that’s right.” And then you go back and it’s, “Oh great, I can leverage that content again.” So it can be quite helpful.

But like you’re seeing, AI isn’t always about saving time. And I think that was the original premise—we thought, “Hey, we can go on a vacation and just get the work that we do so much quicker.” But the reality is it just forces you to maybe be better, right? So in the writing process of a book, I wrote the book mostly myself actually, like entirely myself, but then you go to AI and you’re like, “What are the gaps? What should I add?” And then the process starts, right?

That’s the thing I wouldn’t have done in the past. It would have just been like, “Okay, here it is. It’s good enough and people will enjoy it.” But now I’ve spent all this extra time. And but it’s beautiful because it’s read that book 20, 30 times on my behalf and I’m like, “Does it really address this question enough?” And then it points out, “You could make this paragraph stronger and that section could benefit here.” And so it’s a bit of Jevons paradox where as the AI becomes cheaper, it just becomes more prevalent, and we actually end up using it more, and as a result spending more time.

Jyll Saskin Gales: It’s true. It’s not spending less time, which I think is how AI was sold to a lot. “It’s going to save you time. It’s going to do your job for you.” And it’s no—it just lets us think about things in different ways, reflect more. I have found it’s like holding up a mirror and getting to converse with myself without it being weird. But that’s helpful to allow me to reflect that way and to challenge me in a way that pushes me to think harder and pushes me to be more original really, and to think about things in new ways that I might not have done on my own.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And so when it comes to educating yourself, you obviously speak to a lot of clients and have a lot of coaching calls, but how do you keep up with the industry news? And again, there’s so much coming out of Google, out of Microsoft. How do you make sense of it, what matters and what deserves your time?

Jyll Saskin Gales: I think about that a lot because there are new things happening every single day. I subscribe to the PPC Newsfeed newsletter from Hannah, and so I get that in my inbox every morning—just quick updates, things people have spotted, things I need to know about.

And then the LinkedIn PPC community is really how I stay up to date, not just with the news and updates out of Google but different perspectives and what people are talking about. For example, when Andrew Lolk posted recently about how, “Oh, you don’t need negative keywords at all,” I’m like, “What? I’ve never heard that before.” But I dug into it and was able to debate, and then it really changed my perspective on things.

And so I think that’s so important. We think keeping up with the industry is about news and updates and features. But what I find so much more helpful is keeping up with other folks in the space, whether they are also influencers or maybe someone I’ve never seen or heard of before, but they’re sharing a unique perspective. That’s where I find I learn so much, and then in turn my clients can really benefit from that.

For example, after I learned that from Andrew, there were two different coaching clients where I advised each of them, “What if we just removed all your negative keywords?” And in both cases, they saw an improvement in ROAS after that. And I never would have learned that without learning from folks around me trying new things and different perspectives.

Frederick Vallaeys: And for the folks who haven’t read Andrew’s post, the premise is that you build these massive negative keyword lists over a long span of time, and eventually the way people search changes. And do these negative keywords from six years ago, do they still matter, or would you have been better off without them and letting Google’s AI sort of figure it out for you?

Jyll Saskin Gales: And a way I built on that is my whole first book is about audiences. And so when you’re running search ads, we focus so much on the search and we don’t think at all about the searcher, but smart bidding does. It’s paying attention to all those signals.

So let’s say there’s some kind of generic one-word query that normally you would never want to advertise on. Maybe 99% of the time you wouldn’t want to advertise on that query. But 1% of the time it totally makes sense because of who the searcher is. And negative keywords don’t let you capture that opportunity.

And so I saw what Andrew was saying and then I built on it with my own experience, and now it’s something that I’ve incorporated. And there are plenty of examples of this, and I know that I inspire other people in the same way. And I think that’s what’s so great about our industry—there’s really this culture of sharing and openness that used to be more on Twitter X, and now I find a lot of that conversation happens on LinkedIn.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah, I agree. It’s a lot on LinkedIn. Now, at Google IO, there was one sort of announcement that is a little bit scary to me as a PPC person coming out of having done this for such a long time. But it’s this idea that the search will become personalized and even have different user interfaces and little widgets for every single user.

And what you were alluding to was there’s a certain way that we expect people to search, certain keywords they will put in. When it comes to audiences and targeting, these are all the historical ways we’ve reached our audience. But what happens when everybody gets their own result? And what happens when the impressions basically go away because the AI mode is very good at saying, “Here’s the one ad that makes sense to you,” but if you’re not that ad, how do you get back in? What do you think about this future of how search is presented?

Jyll Saskin Gales: I, as a consumer, think it’s really exciting. I’m skeptical but excited, I guess, is how I would feel about it. And as an advertiser, I know that Google’s not giving up the hundred-billion-dollar cash cow, and there’s going to be great opportunities for advertisers there.

Is it going to be exact match query targeting or even specific audience-targeted ads the way we’re used to? No. But this is the direction Google has been going for quite some time now, and it’s going more and more towards: give Google your business data, your feeds, your conversions, etc., and then give it the leeway it needs, powered by Gemini, to go place the right ads with the right user with the right message at the right time.

So I think those foundations of how ads work are actually going to remain remarkably unchanged. But the execution of that, the formats of that, will change for those advertisers that are willing to lean in and test it—maybe not on day one, but once Google figures it out.

Frederick Vallaeys: Yeah. And the execution and the buttons you push to achieve those goals, those are changing and they’re also being done more and more by the machines. And I think you’re a Claude Cowork user.

Jyll Saskin Gales: Just starting to be. Yes.

Frederick Vallaeys: But so the message is clear, right? Your time is not going to be spent logging into an interface and pushing the buttons. And that no longer qualifies you as a PPC expert, right? The expertise comes from understanding the business, understanding how the consumer thinks about things, putting those dots together, and then let the machine go and figure out what buttons to push.

Jyll Saskin Gales: And I’d argue that’s even already the case. Even if you’re not using things like Claude Cowork, the best PPC managers today are not the ones who just push the exact buttons they’re told and close up shop and go home for the day. It’s the ones who are thinking creatively and strategically.

We think of Google Ads and media buying as such a mathematical proposition, and it is. It’s very logical. But there’s also room for so much creativity—not just in ad creative of course, but in the strategies, interpreting data, understanding your consumer. And so I think that will only grow.

And as we were speaking about earlier, it’s not that AI is going to save us time or take our jobs. It’s going to enable us to do our jobs in new ways. And that will be scary, but ultimately I find that exciting. That’s one of the reasons I love this industry—it’s constantly changing.

Frederick Vallaeys: So as far as Claude Cowork, give us one example of one way that you’ve used it that you think is pretty cool.

Jyll Saskin Gales: A way I’ve used it that I think is pretty cool is actually in helping me fill out some chapters for my next book. So I gave it the entire manuscript of my first book.

Frederick Vallaeys: What’s the second book about?

Jyll Saskin Gales: It’s about bidding. So my first book is all about audience targeting. The next one’s all about bidding. Very foundational concept. And I found that really tricky to write because when I was writing a book about audience targeting, I knew that most people didn’t know anything about Google Ads audience targeting, even advanced practitioners. Whereas bidding is something we all use from day one, every day.

And so there were certain chapters I was just really having a hard time getting into. And so I took information from my own sources and gave it to Claude Cowork. I gave it my first book as “this is my writing style” and had it just draft the initial draft of the chapters for me, so I could get over the sort of blank-page syndrome that happened when I was halfway through writing.

And it took a few weeks, but now everything’s on the page. And now my job is to go through and edit because everything sounds maybe 85% like me. And so the key there is to bring that additional 15% and adapt it from there.

So that’s the main way I—I went out and bought a whole new computer just so I could download Claude Cowork, just so it could help me with this task. And again, I don’t know that it saved me time per se. It took a long time to do this. But just that way of working—being able to get something there that I can work on—was really helpful to me. And so now I see my real work begins: editing and molding, bringing in my client examples, etc.

Frederick Vallaeys: And then that’s the premise of the AI amplified marketer—that you’re not going to the beach and doing your work in two hours. It’s you’re doing the things you maybe were stuck doing, didn’t have time to do, didn’t have the skills to do in the past. And that’s what’s so exciting. So it’s great to hear that you’re using all of this to get to the next level.

Jyll Saskin Gales: Yes. Unleveling the playing field for myself, as it were.

Frederick Vallaeys: Okay, Jyll, that’s great advice on how to use Claude Cowork and any AI really to just become more efficient and do all of these things that maybe were a little bit harder in the past and take yourself to the next level. Thanks for joining us in the studio. It was great hanging out with you, and hope to do another podcast with you soon.

Jyll Saskin Gales: Thanks for having me, Fred. It’s been a pleasure as always.