You’re reading PMax wrong
💪 Delivery reflects certainty, not strength, what 2025 data reveals about Google’s AI search rollout, and more!
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In this newsletter, you’ll find:
💪You’re Reading PMax Wrong
🔍 AI Overviews Are Rewriting Search Behavior
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💪You’re Reading PMax Wrong
Google didn’t give advertisers clarity. It gave them context.
And that distinction matters more than most teams realize.
The new reporting around Performance Max is being treated like a truth machine. People are scanning rows, comparing channels, drawing conclusions, and reallocating budgets as if the system is finally explaining itself.
It isn’t. What it’s actually doing is exposing how comfortable the algorithm feels with the inputs you’re feeding it. That’s a very different lens.
The Real Question Isn’t “Which Channel Won”
Performance Max doesn’t wake up and decide to favor Search, Display, or YouTube.
It decides which inputs feel predictable.
When certain formats dominate delivery, it’s not because they’re “better.” It’s because they’re safer. Feed-driven ads, for example, remove ambiguity. The system understands products, prices, and intent patterns with fewer unknowns.
Asset-heavy creative introduces interpretation. Interpretation introduces risk. So when you see delivery skew, what you’re really seeing is the model hedging.
Why most advertisers will misread this data
The temptation is to optimize toward whatever shows the cleanest numbers. That’s how accounts slowly collapse.
Because performance isn’t coming from where spend flows. It’s coming from where confidence already exists.
The report doesn’t tell you where to invest more. It tells you where the system stopped trusting you to experiment. That’s a warning sign, not a victory lap.
The move you should make:
Don’t try to “fix channel mix.” Audit creative certainty.
Which assets remove friction?
Which ones introduce hesitation.
Which ones does the system test briefly, then abandons?
Those drop-offs are more valuable than the winners. They reveal where your messaging forces the algorithm to guess.
What does this change about operating PMax
Performance Max isn’t a channel strategy anymore. It’s a signal hygiene problem. If your assets are clean, specific, and interpretable, the system expands. If they’re vague, clever, or overproduced, it retreats to what it already understands.
The reporting didn’t unlock control. It exposed accountability. And that’s uncomfortable for teams still treating automation like a shortcut instead of a mirror.
🔍 AI Overviews Are Rewriting Search Behavior
New research from Semrush shows how quickly Google’s AI Overviews are reshaping search visibility, intent, and click behavior. What started as a low-risk experiment is now moving deeper into commercial and navigational territory.
The Breakdown:
1. Volatile Adoption, Not Linear Growth - AI Overviews appeared on just 6.49% of keywords in January 2025, surged to nearly 25% by July, then settled at 15.69% in November, suggesting Google is actively tuning scope rather than rolling out AIOs evenly.
In January, 91.3% of AIO-triggering queries were informational, but by October, that fell to 57.1%. Commercial queries rose from 8.15% to 18.57%, transactional from 1.98% to 13.94%, and navigational from 0.74% to 10.33%.
2. Click Behavior Is More Nuanced Than Expected - While AIO queries skew toward historically zero-click searches, zero-click rates actually declined after AIOs appeared. For the same keywords, zero-click rates dropped from 33.75% to 31.53%.
AI Overviews now almost always appear alongside People Also Ask (90.03%) and Related Searches (95.32%). Google Ads at the bottom of AIO SERPs jumped from under 1% to 25%.
AI Overviews are reshaping visibility, intent, and SERP structure, but Google’s position is that the fundamentals have not changed. Its leadership continues to stress that optimizing for AI search mirrors traditional SEO, with strong sites, clear structure, and genuinely useful content remaining the core strategy for earning visibility.
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