‘Trust becomes the product’: Marketers grapple with Google’s new suite of AI-powered ad agents

By Kimeko McCoy • May 21, 2026 •

Ivy Liu

First comes innovation, then comes transparency. At least that seems to be Google’s approach as the tech behemoth enters its agentic era.

At Google Marketing Live (GML) yesterday, Google announced a new souped up suite of agentic ad tools backed by its LLM, Gemini. Google plans to roll out more ads in AI Mode in the coming year, including ads with AI explainers and shopping ads with AI-generated product explainers.

Google execs also announced “Ask Advisor,” an agent built with Gemini that works across Google properties. For example, a marketer looking for new customers can prompt Ask Advisor to pull product details, set up the campaign and surface insights from Google Ads and Google Analytics.

The features were teased as marketers struggle to decide how much control to hand over to machines. Marketers say they need a manual kill switch to account for things like hallucination. Another part of it is pressure from clients. As AI improves performance, marketers say granular lever insights help guide campaign optimization for even greater performance.

As Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler addressed marketers during his GML presentation: “You handle the strategy and define your goals. AI handles the optimization.”

Performance over control

At a time when advertisers are grappling with transparency (or a lack thereof) around things like data on ad placements and LLMs’ decision making processes, Google is asking advertisers to relinquish more control and put their trust (and ad dollars) into its AI tools.

“The more autonomous these systems become, the more trust becomes the product,” said John Geletka, founder and chief experience officer of creative and strategic agency Geletka+, in an email to Digiday. He added, “Marketers increasingly have to trust the machine’s recommendations without fully understanding the mechanics underneath them.”

PMax déjà vu

If it sounds like déjà vu, that’s because it is. Google’s Performance Max (PMax) has been the poster child for black box ad platforms. Last year, one marketer anonymously told Digiday that their agency was advising clients to walk away from PMax, shifting tens of millions of dollars away from the platform. And Google execs stayed tight lipped on where ad dollars worked across the platform’s ecosystem, according to Phil Case, president and chief client officer at Max Connect Digital, a performance driven digital agency.

Agencies “forced Google’s hand,” he said, pressuring Google to provide better transparency in recording and reporting.

AI Max for search campaigns, which has become a go-to ad type for some performance marketers, hasn’t received the same amount of pushback. One agency exec, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, said performance gains within Google’s AI ad systems are small and slow. Clients, however, want sizable growth but “don’t trust that AI built by media owners will deliver.”

Katya Constantine, CEO of performance marketing agency DigiShopGirl Media, said Google has yet to provide a breakout report on things like AI inventory, though the agency can see the volume of impact from AI Max.

AI ad spending continues

Lack of transparency, however, won’t stop advertisers from spending. AI-powered ad spend is expected to hit $57 billion and account for roughly 12% of the estimated $475 billion U.S. ad market. Out of the 13 agency execs Digiday spoke with for this piece, none said clients were pulling dollars out of Google due to the black box effect.

Google execs announced AI Performance Insights, a tool Google claims will help merchants better understand how their brand shows up in AI search results in comparison to competitors. That’ll roll out in the U.S., Australia, Canada, India and New Zealand in the coming months.

Execs also said they would bring Meridian, its open-source Marketing Mix Model, into Google Analytics 360. That’ll allow marketers to unify their insights, better measure performance and use predictive scenarios to manage investments.

“I have sensed more of a partnership, more of an open, honest, transparent conversation coming to us from our dedicated team at Google than I ever have before,” Case said.

‘Google usually operates as a black box’

For marketers, Google’s new tools mean access to an emerging channel more than it’s about granular insights, according to Ryan Schuster, Exverus’ director of search and social. It’s similar to the tone OpenAI’s ad pilot within ChatGPT struck with marketers, he added.

“Search engine queries continue to go more long-tail and conversational, so the reality is the reporting granularity that Google Search ads trained us to expect is over,” Schuster said.