Google Marketing Live 2026: 5 changes that affect your ads
Google Marketing Live 2026 took place on 20 May and brought five changes that directly affect your adverts: adverts in AI Mode, stricter Consent Mode rules from 15 June, agentic commerce through the Universal Commerce Protocol, Meridian Studio, and the shift from Dynamic Search Ads to AI Max, which starts in September 2026 and whose phase-out begins in February 2027. Two of these already have a date behind them, so this is no longer a preview but a list to check your account against.
AI Mode gets adverts: your ads will soon appear in AI answers
The biggest shift Google presented on 20 May: adverts in AI Mode. Two new formats were added.
Sponsored Stores appear when customers search for products in AI Mode
Search for the best laptop stand for working from home, and your shop can appear as a sponsored listing among the product panels. Direct Offers go a step further: personalised offers such as discounts, bundles and loyalty perks, embedded in the AI answer at the moment buying intent is highest.
In practice, this means Performance Max and Shopping campaigns pick up these placements automatically
Traffic from AI sources to retail sites is growing fast: Adobe Analytics measured a year-on-year increase of 693 per cent over the November and December 2025 holiday period (Adobe). The figure of 393 per cent for the first quarter of 2026 that is quoted elsewhere does not appear in any publication we could find. Note: incomplete product feeds get skipped. So check today whether your Google Merchant Center feed is complete and up to date.
Consent Mode changed on 15 June: do nothing, and you lose advertising data
A technical but critical change in how data flows from Google Analytics 4 to Google Ads. Until 15 June, Google Signals acted as a safety net: with incomplete Consent Mode settings, it still passed advertising data through. Since that date, that safety net is gone. The ad_storage parameter becomes the only switch that determines whether advertising data flows through.
The risks if you do nothing:
- You lose your remarketing audiences
- No more conversion data comes in
- You can no longer optimise for results
The nasty part: you do not notice it straight away
Your campaigns simply keep running. The percentage doing the rounds, that around 70 per cent of Dutch SMEs struggle with the current Consent Mode v2 setup, has no source you can check. So we do not name a share and stick to the question of whether things are in order for you.
So check whether your CMP, such as Cookiebot or Complianz, passes the parameters through correctly
Test whether the data actually arrives in Google Ads. That date has already passed, so if you have not checked this yet, you are already missing data now. We offer a free consent audit; our PPC specialist looks at it with you.
The consent audit in five steps, so you know whether things are in order for you
Telling you to check your Consent Mode is easy. Below is exactly what you do, because this is the part where most accounts quietly go wrong. Allow half an hour, and do it in this order: each step builds on the one before it, and starting at step four leaves you unable to interpret the outcome.
First check what your banner actually asks
Open your own site in a window with no previous visits and read your consent banner as if you were a customer. Is there a separate choice for marketing or advertising, apart from statistics? If not, your system cannot pass on the distinction Google now requires at all, and the rest of this list is pointless until you have fixed that.Then check what is actually being passed through
Decline everything, and check in Google's Tag Assistant which values your site sends. Then accept everything and check again. What you want to see is that the advertising storage value moves along with your choice. If it stays the same in both cases, your banner is cosmetic: it asks a question and does not pass on the answer.Check the order
This is the most common mistake, and it is invisible. Your consent system needs to be in place before your measurement code runs, otherwise the first measurement fires before the choice is known. In practice, that means your consent script sits first on the page, not somewhere near the bottom with the rest.Check in Google Ads whether what you expect is still coming in
Go to your conversions overview and compare the last few weeks with the same period before. A drop that starts on a date when you changed nothing in your campaigns points to this issue, not to your market. Also check whether your remarketing audiences are still growing or have stalled.Record what you found
Write down the date, what you checked and what you changed. This sounds bureaucratic, and it is the only thing that lets you work out, three months from now, whether a change in your figures came from here or from somewhere else.Two things that are not a solution, however often they get suggested. Building your banner so that declining is impossible or annoying, because that is not valid consent and lands you a different kind of problem. And removing your banner altogether because then you no longer have broken consent: that loses you the same signal, just without anyone having looked at it.
What a clean product feed means, and why yours probably is not one
All the new placements in AI Mode run on the same source: your product feed in Merchant Center. Saying your feed needs to be in order actually means four different things, and you can check each one separately.
Complete. A product without the required fields does not appear anywhere. Which fields those are and which values they may hold is set out by Google in the Merchant Center product data specification, checked on 25 August 2026. The fixed core is a unique identifier, a title, a description, a link to the product page, an image, the price and the availability. Miss one, and the product is not limited but rejected.
Accurate. The price and availability in your feed must match what is on your own product page, and that is where online shops running discount promotions structurally go wrong. If the feed still shows the old price, the product gets rejected at some point, and that happens without anyone calling you.
Current. A feed updated once every 24 hours is fine for slow-moving stock and too slow for fast-moving stock. If you sell things that sell out, make sure your stock level comes through more often than once a day, otherwise you are advertising products you no longer have.
Readable. This is the part that has newly become important. Where a product feed used to be mainly a list for an advertising system, it is now also the source an AI answer draws on to summarise your offering. Titles that consist only of a product code, descriptions copied straight from the manufacturer, and fields you filled in with whatever text was on hand at the time, produce a summary that is not really yours. Write the descriptions of your twenty most important products by hand.
Also check the list of disapproved products in Merchant Center once a month
That number quietly creeps up at almost every online shop, and no one looks at it as long as revenue keeps coming in.
Agentic commerce: Google will soon buy on behalf of your customer
Agentic commerce means AI agents carry out tasks on behalf of the consumer. Not just searching and comparing, but also ordering, paying and returning items. The foundation for this is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), an open standard that lets AI agents communicate directly with online shops.
This is how the process works:
- The consumer tells the AI what they are looking for
- The agent searches for the best offer
- The agent compares prices and availability
- The agent completes the purchase, without the customer ever visiting your website
Etsy and Wayfair are already connected
Shopify, Target and Walmart are following soon. For you as a business owner, this means your product data needs to be machine-readable. Not just for Google Shopping, but for every AI agent. That calls for structured data, prices that are accurate, stock levels that are current and descriptions a machine can read. Start with schema markup on your product pages: the language AI agents speak.
Meridian Studio: measurement gets easier and stricter
Meridian Studio is a new platform for managing marketing mix models. With the GeoX feature, you set up geo experiments: you increase the budget in region A while region B stays unchanged, and you steer by real results instead of estimates. That used to be reserved for large companies with their own data teams. Now it is accessible to everyone.
Google is also unifying the data sources
One tag will soon feed data to Google Ads, Search Console and your CRM at the same time. That eliminates separate tracking pixels per platform and discrepancies between Analytics and Ads.
The flip side is clear: as measurement gets easier, it also becomes harder to hide poor results behind complexity.
DSA moves to AI Max, in two steps
Dynamic Search Ads is going away, but not all at once and not with a bang. Google has stretched the timeline: the actual phase-out and the automatic conversion to AI Max begin in February 2027. In September 2026, only campaigns with automatically generated assets and ad-group-spanning broad match move over. And your campaigns do not stop: ad groups with dynamic targets are converted to standard ad groups, with settings and data carried across to AI Max.
The reading that there is no wind-down period and that campaigns stop is the opposite of what Google states
Source: Google on the conversion from DSA to AI Max. Last checked on 25 August 2026: the post is still there, September 2026 still applies only to those two groups, and February 2027 has not been pushed back again.
The difference between the two: DSA automatically generates adverts based on your website content
AI Max combines landing pages, product feed, keywords and ad copy in an AI-driven system, with less manual control. We do not know how many business owners are already working with it, and we will not add a percentage we cannot back up. What is certain is that the migration takes real work:
- Reviewing your campaign structure
- Optimising landing pages for AI
- Adjusting your bidding strategy
That takes weeks, not hours
Wait too long, and the conversion gets done for you, on Google's timing and with Google's default choices instead of yours. That Google is changing at a rapid pace also shows in the Google May 2026 core update, which ran for almost twelve days according to Google's own status page. Which sectors that update affected exactly is something Google does not publish.
What this means for you if you do not run an online shop
Three of the five topics above are about products, feeds and shopping carts. Most Dutch business owners do not sell products but hours: an installer, a physiotherapist, a solicitor, a painting and decorating firm. For them, the same list looks different, and that difference deserves its own paragraph instead of being left out.
- Consent Mode applies to you in full. In fact, it hits you harder. An online shop with thousands of conversions a month still has enough left to learn from if it loses part of its data. A service provider with fifteen enquiries a month does not have that luxury: lose half of those, and the bidding system has too little to steer by, and your cost per enquiry rises without you having done anything wrong. This is the most urgent of the five points for you.
- The feed is not your issue, your pages are. Where an online shop feeds a product feed, you feed the same system with your service pages, your Business Profile and your listings. The same requirement applies: what a machine cannot read, it cannot recommend. Concretely, that means a separate page per service rather than a list on your homepage, showing your service area, exactly what you do and roughly what it costs.
- Agentic commerce hits you later, but the groundwork for it right away. An agent choosing a roofer on someone's behalf does not need to complete a payment to skip over you. It only needs to be able to work out what you do, where you work and whether you can be reached, and anyone who has not made that readable drops out of the selection before payment even comes into it.
- The move to AI Max only affects you if you work with dynamic ads. Run ordinary search campaigns with your own keywords, and nothing changes on your account in September. Check this rather than assuming it: open your campaign overview and see whether there are any dynamic ad groups anywhere.
- Measuring with regional experiments is rarely feasible for you. A geo experiment needs enough volume to meaningfully compare two areas. Cover three towns, and you are mostly measuring noise. Look instead at something simpler that does work at your scale: record where each enquiry came from, and count them up after a quarter.
In short: of these five topics, there is one for a service provider that costs money today if you do nothing, and that is consent
The rest is preparation for a way of being found that you will have to get used to either way. What that side looks like for a local business is covered in our explanation of advertising with Google Ads.
Frequently asked questions about Google Marketing Live 2026
When is Google Marketing Live 2026?
Google Marketing Live 2026 took place on Tuesday 20 May 2026, with the keynote at 18:00 Dutch time and an EMEA session on 21 May at 12:00 BST. The event was fully virtual and free; the recordings can be watched back.
What are Sponsored Stores and Direct Offers in AI Mode?
Sponsored Stores are sponsored shop listings in the product panels of Google AI Mode. With Direct Offers, you show personalised offers within AI-generated answers. Both formats work through your existing Performance Max and Shopping campaigns.
What changes to Consent Mode on 15 June 2026?
Since 15 June, only the ad_storage parameter determines whether advertising data flows from GA4 to Google Ads. The fallback via Google Signals has been removed. Without correct settings, you lose remarketing audiences and conversion data, with no advance warning.
What is the Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP)?
UCP is an open standard from Google that lets AI agents communicate directly with online shops. Consumers search for, compare and buy products via AI assistants without ever visiting the shop itself. Etsy and Wayfair are already connected; Shopify and Walmart are following.
Do I need to do anything if I already run Performance Max campaigns?
Yes. Make sure your product feed is complete for AI Mode, check your Consent Mode now that 15 June has passed, and optimise your landing pages for AI Max. Performance Max campaigns expand automatically into the new AI placements, but only if your data is in order.
What to do now: 5 actions
Five actions on your plate after the keynote:
- Audit your Consent Mode setup. The most urgent action, because the safety net fell away on 15 June. Check whether ad_storage is being passed through correctly.
- Check your Merchant Center feed. AI Mode adverts run on your product feed. Missing fields, wrong prices or items that are out of stock disqualify you. A clean feed is no longer a nice to have, it is a requirement.
- Start the migration from DSA to AI Max. Do not put this off until September. Proper testing and adjusting takes time, and September is closer than you think.
- Implement structured data. Schema markup on your most important pages ensures AI agents interpret your content correctly. This is the foundation for everything Google is building towards agentic commerce.
- Watch the keynote back. The event was free and fully virtual: the keynote on 20 May lasted around an hour and a half, and the EMEA session followed on 21 May. The recordings are on googlemarketinglive.com.
Do you work locally? Then make sure your business profile is in order too; our Google Business Profile optimisation tips for 2026 help you with that. Want to read more about updates like this one? Our knowledge base has everything on SEO, Google Ads and AI.
Of these five actions, there is one that costs money today if you leave it undone, and that is the first. If you would rather we run that one check with you instead of you writing it down and forgetting it, send us the name of your business and your site address via contact. We will then walk through the five steps of the consent audit with you and tell you what we see, even if the outcome is that things have long been in order for you and there is nothing further to do.