{"id":100421,"date":"2026-07-09T14:46:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T14:46:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/100421\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T14:46:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T14:46:10","slug":"what-gives-brands-an-edge-when-ai-agents-make-purchase-recommendations-google-leaders-explain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/100421\/","title":{"rendered":"What gives brands an edge when AI agents make purchase recommendations? Google leaders explain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google says 93% of consumer journeys in India for discovering a new brand, product, or service touch Google or YouTube. At the roundtable at the India edition of Google Marketing Live 2026,\u00a0Dan Taylor<\/a>, Vice President of Global Ads at Google, and Roma Datta Chobey<\/a>, Managing Director of Connected Consumer Commerce at Google India, walked us through a stack of new tools built around Gemini, the company’s AI model.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Taylor set the tone early, describing the moment as one where the old rules of discovery no longer fully apply. “AI is really creating an expansionary opportunity for advertisers,” he said, adding that the last 25 years of Google’s ad business had been built on understanding intent, and that Gemini was now the engine accelerating that same idea further.<\/p>\n

Roma Datta Chobey framed it similarly, tying the shift directly to how much attention and trust Indian audiences place in Google’s platforms already. “With 86% of surveyed online Indians turning to Google Search and YouTube, Indian businesses have a tremendous opportunity to meet consumers where they are, and we are enabling that with Gemini,” she said.<\/p>\n

The numbers Google shared back up the premise of a changing search behaviour. Average query length in AI Mode is three times longer than traditional search, and one in six AI Mode queries are non-text, made up of voice or images. In India, 84% of users say they make faster decisions and 87% say they make more confident ones when using AI Mode.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In line with this, the company unveiled a set of tools meant to keep pace, running from new ad formats in Search to a fully agentic layer meant to sit across a marketer’s entire toolkit.<\/p>\n

Reinventing ads for a search experience that no longer looks like search<\/p>\n

The company introduced Business Agent for Leads, now in beta in India, which places a brand-trained chat agent directly inside an ad rather than a static lead form. Taylor described it as suited to advertisers selling complex, considered purchases rather than impulse buys, since it lets a prospective customer question the agent before ever filling out a form. UpGrad was cited as an early adopter, using the tool to handle round-the-clock student queries that were previously routed through counselors making cold calls.<\/p>\n

On YouTube, the company introduced YouTube BrandStack, a planning, buying and measurement tool built in India that aims to collapse the usual separation between brand campaigns and performance campaigns.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Roma Datta Chobey argued this separation was becoming unnecessary altogether. “Whether their goal is long-term brand building or driving immediate performance, they no longer have to choose. All of the objectives can be met on a single platform, and that is, of course, YouTube,” she said. Axis Max Life Insurance used BrandStack alongside YouTube Connected TV during India’s cricket season and reported an 18.4% rise in brand search queries and a 23% increase in quality leads. YouTube also expanded its shopping integrations, with Tira Beauty joining existing partners Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa and Purplle, alongside a new Affiliate Partnerships Boost format that lets brands turn tagged creator content into paid campaigns.<\/p>\n

Performance Max gained a retention mode with dynamic remarketing to re-engage lapsed customers, alongside Google Pay as a new inventory surface. Demand Gen campaigns are expanding to Google Maps and gaining Merchant Center product video integration. AI Max for Search, which Google says is currently its fastest-growing AI-powered search ads product, is now joined by AI Max for Shopping, which reads deeper into Merchant Center feed data such as material and fit. A companion tool called AI Brief lets advertisers write a plain language brief, complete with brand guardrails, that Gemini interprets into live ad previews.<\/p>\n

Agentic tools promise efficiency, but the real question is what survives once agents decide<\/p>\n

Google also unveiled Ask Advisor, a unified agent meant to work across Google Ads, Analytics, Google Marketing Platform, and soon Merchant Center, stitching together the separate in-product assistants the company introduced last year. Taylor described a scenario where a marketer could ask, in one continuous conversation, to find new customers for a product, and have the agent pull data from Merchant Center to set up a live campaign in minutes.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is also where agentic commerce enters the picture, and where the sharper question sits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When Social Samosa asked what becomes the biggest competitive advantage for brands if AI agents increasingly make the purchase recommendations themselves, Taylor\u00a0pointed to new additions like conversational attributes in Merchant Center, which let sellers add details such as frequently bought accessories or shipping policy, as ways brands can now feed richer information to the models making these recommendations. “I think these are ways that we see brands differentiating themselves right now,” he added.<\/p>\n

It is a notably modest answer for a company unveiling a full agentic stack, and it echoes what Taylor told us in an earlier interview,<\/a> where he had said that regardless of which AI platform advertisers bet on, the inputs feeding these systems, product data, creative assets, landing pages and campaign goals, matter more than ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Google’s own framing, through its Universal Commerce Protocol built with retail partners including Flipkart in India, positions the company as a bridge between shoppers and retailers rather than a retailer or marketplace.<\/p>\n

Measurement gets a rework, because none of this holds up without proof<\/p>\n

The roundtable also touched upon measurement, an area Taylor described as no longer a report card but the signal that tells AI where to invest next. Google is integrating Meridian, its open-source marketing mix model, directly into Google Analytics 360, letting businesses analyse cross-channel and first-party data in one place globally.<\/p>\n

A new metric, Attributed Branded Searches, is designed to measure how a YouTube video ad exposure translates into a branded search on Google, addressing a gap advertisers have long flagged around quantifying brand campaign impact. Cars24 used the tool in beta and reported two times incremental searches with a 7% better customer acquisition cost, later extending the approach to YouTube Connected TV, which the company said performed nearly twice as well on the same metric.<\/p>\n

Asset Studio, Google’s creative hub, was also upgraded to accept full marketing briefs, reference images and brand guidelines in natural language, generating text, image and video assets in one pass, though this update is currently available only in English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google says 93% of consumer journeys in India for discovering a new brand, product, or service touch Google…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100322,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[24,405,52230,132,24481,1429,17891,8063,19432,19751,52231],"class_list":["post-100421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-google","tag-ai","tag-ai-agents","tag-dan-taylor-google","tag-google","tag-google-advertising","tag-google-ai","tag-google-ai-features","tag-google-ai-mode","tag-google-ai-overview","tag-google-ai-search","tag-roma-datta-chobey-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}