Spend enough time learning about the future of Search and it’s easy to come away thinking everything is changing. AI Max, conversational search, automated campaign types, productive creativity, agent workflow – there’s no shortage of topics telling us that the old playbook is no longer applicable.
I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about all that noise, and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: the fundamentals haven’t changed. What changes is where competitive advantage comes from.
Paid strip search is back to basics and success comes down to one thing: winning an auction. Google built one of the most profitable businesses in history with a remarkably simple idea: every auction is won by some combination of the bid you submit and the quality of the ad you display. That was true when I started searching in 2011, and I expect it still will be (should it be?!) reality long after today’s wave of AI products has evolved into something else.
What is being replaced by AI is not the auction itself. It’s how much influence we have on each side of it, and where agencies create the most value for clients.
The bid: it’s normal, but it’s harder than it looks
The bidding side hasn’t changed much thematically. Success still depends on a safe balance of privacy, high-quality first-party data and bidding on the right business outcomes with value-based bidding. None of those ideas are particularly new.
What has changed is the level of sophistication required to get them right. Measurement has become more difficult, the law has increased the level of data collection, and Google’s automation only works with the signals provided. That means learning from data is no longer an expert skill that sits alongside search. It has become a central part of modern Search itself.
There is another effect that needs more attention. As advertisers get better at generating value from every click, Google’s bidding systems naturally allow them to compete aggressively in auctions. A higher cost per click doesn’t just improve efficiency; increases the amount of assets a business can realistically acquire. A combination of better trading performance and greater market share without someone having to manually increase bids.
Advertisement: when I had to change my mind
When the bidding side becomes more technologically demanding, a big change is happening on the creative side.
For much of Brainlabs’ history, one of our strongest competitive advantages has come from account building. Whether it was SKAGs, keyword themes or a date frame, we believed that better structure created better relevance, and therefore better ads. It has been a real benefit and has been delivering results for our clients.
Lately, I’ve found myself wondering if that benefit is as important as it once was.
Some structural principles remain important. Planning campaigns thoughtfully, maintaining adequate conversion volume and smart fundraising goals is still good practice. But when Google can customize creatives in real time, understand intent more effectively than ever before and optimize campaigns with products like AI Max, the amount of work that account structure alone does becomes less.
That requires a change in thinking.
For many years, agencies have invested a lot of effort in creating the best design because design has been one of the best ways to influence the quality of an ad. Increasingly, the most powerful lever is the quality of the goods themselves. Google’s guidelines point in this way: strong headlines, descriptions, images and messages give its systems more to work with, producing better results than structure alone.
If that is true, the agency’s opportunity changes again.
Instead of treating production as something that supports campaign management, we should be planning how to produce better art in the first place. This is where most of our investment in Brainlabs has gone. We’ve built tools that analyze competitor messages across the SERP, identify which creative assets are driving real performance, and automate repeatable campaign processes so our teams can spend less time rebuilding foundations and more time improving what customers actually see.
Viewed through that lens, AI does not diminish the value the agency provides. It changes where that value resides.
Important work now
At Brainlabs, I increasingly think about our work through two different lenses.
The first is to help clients reach the table stakes. Every advertiser should have a strong measurement, privacy-safe data collection, clear logical business objectives, strong campaign foundations and effective creative hygiene. These are no longer places where clients should expect to pay for random thinking every time. They must be delivered continuously through iterative processes, technologies and cumulative technologies.
That is why we have invested in two complementary strengths. The skills, developed by our Brainlabs Search team, are coded in Notion and accessed through Claude to ensure repeatable ways to perform tasks such as creating campaigns and reviewing ad copy. Next to this sits CortexAI, our proprietary platform, which surpasses the logic written in Claude with purpose-built tools that support our teams in delivering the excellence of Search at the highest level.
But reaching the top of the table is never the end goal.
The real value comes from getting an edge that competitors don’t have.
That limitation rarely appears in the best general practice. It comes from solving problems unique to the client’s business, category, competitors and customers. Sometimes that’s a balancing act. Sometimes it creates. Sometimes it’s an audience strategy, automation or a completely new technology. Increasingly, AI is empowering us to build those solutions faster than ever before, allowing us to build bespoke capabilities alongside customers instead of relying solely on predefined frameworks.
To me, that’s the most exciting part of where Sesho is headed.
The conversation moves from a discussion of campaign equipment and to solving business problems. AI should make the basics easier to deliver, freeing up professionals to spend more time using judgement, creativity and commercial thinking where it has the most impact.
The auction is still important. Winning it is still important. But the way we win is changing. Successful agencies won’t just be the ones with the cleanest account structures. They will be the ones who use technology to make the beauty repeatable, while helping each client get the benefits that no amount of automation can reveal on its own.
