Advertisers Question 10% to 30% of Google Search Budgets, Agencies Say
Agencies say advertisers are questioning 10%–30% of Google Search budgets, shifting some spend to Meta, TikTok and AI Max as Google's search revenue growth slows.
Clients are putting Google search through the kind of review usually saved for newer channels, Digiday reported on November 2 after talking to 18 media buyers. They want to know whether search clicks turn into qualified leads and revenue. Lindsay Marty, founder of Above the Bar Marketing, says the amount questioned is "generally around 10% to 20%" of the Google budget. Bryce Hamlin, VP of data intelligence at Power Digital, says a growing number of marketers are asking whether some of it would be better spent elsewhere, "to the tune of 10% to 30% of the Google search budget getting reallocated." Farhad Divecha, group CEO of Accuracast, puts it at about 10% now and possibly 20% to 30% around the holiday peak. Digiday links the pressure to AI Overviews, which change how often people click through. Automated bidding that pays up for the remaining ad slots adds to it.
The agencies don't agree on where the money goes. Marty's clients are open to Meta and Local Services Ads. Divecha says advertisers are looking at other options, "especially ChatGPT," and Digiday reports more of the money landing on Meta and TikTok. Victor Batista, global search lead at Jellyfish, sees clients moving from keyword campaigns into AI Max and Performance Max. They're adding YouTube and Demand Gen too, with diversification "generally contained within the Google ecosystem." For a B2B demand team, those are two different decisions. Shifting money to another platform is a channel bet. Shifting it into AI Max keeps the same dollars at Google on looser terms. Only the first spreads the risk. Either way, the audit is worth doing.
Moving spend into AI Max trades keyword control for reach
Google's help page on ads in AI-powered experiences says advertisers can't target ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode on their own, or opt out of them. Exact and phrase match keywords "aren't eligible for contextual matching on broader exploratory questions" on those surfaces, the page says, while AI Max, broad match and Performance Max are. Results from those surfaces are folded into the standard campaign and search-terms reports, so you can't break them out. The Gemini-written explainers shown with ads can't be edited either. Negative keywords and other account guardrails still apply. As we read it, advertisers gain reach on exploratory questions and give up keyword control and separate reporting on AI surfaces. Existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns are eligible for AI Mode ads by default, as we covered when Google started selling AI Mode ads in 10 more countries.
Google's own numbers are mixed. Search and other revenue grew 12% year over year to $63.35 billion in the third quarter, per Alphabet's earnings release. Growth had been 19% in Q1 and 17% in Q2, according to Search Engine Journal's report of the earnings call. Google's chief business officer Philipp Schindler named lower monetization in AI Mode as one of several reasons, alongside currency and other factors. CEO Sundar Pichai said query growth was the highest in five years. Google told Digiday its AI-powered campaigns keep advertisers in control, but it published no performance figures.
The case for leaving search alone comes from the same reporting. Michelle Merklin, VP of search at Tinuiti, told Digiday that impressions and clicks rose in Q3, along with a 5% rise in branded cost per click. Merklin said most Tinuiti advertisers are looking for new budget or moving spend from elsewhere instead of cutting search. That argument holds for brand and bottom-funnel keywords, where exact and phrase match still serve queries with direct commercial intent. It's weaker for exploratory and competitor terms. Merklin says some advertisers are already pulling money from competitor-keyword campaigns.
Every budget share in Digiday's piece comes from an agency, and the piece has no independent performance data. Digiday also doesn't say how many of the 18 buyers run B2B budgets. Read the percentages as a direction of travel. What carries over to B2B is the mechanism.
What this means for B2B demand-gen leaders who own search budgets
Grade search on qualified pipeline after the click before you move any of it. Import opportunity-created and closed-won events from your CRM as offline conversions, and break them out by campaign and match type. Google's help page recommends pairing AI Max with Smart Bidding backed by first-party conversion data from the Google tag or offline conversion imports. The data your audit needs is data Google's bidding asks for anyway.
Split the 10% to 30% question by intent. Keep exact and phrase match on the brand and bottom-funnel terms that produce pipeline. Review exploratory and competitor-keyword spend first. If you test AI Max, keep a matched keyword campaign running alongside it.
Before you move a dollar, write down what you give up. You lose your choice of keywords and separate reporting on AI Overviews and AI Mode. You also lose control over the explainer copy next to your ad. If your team can't tell after the move whether a lead came from an AI surface, put that loss in the budget memo next to the cost-per-click savings.
Fund the AI-surface test as its own line in the 2027 plan, outside the search budget. That line can cover answer engines beyond Google, including a ChatGPT ads test while rates are falling. Hold it to the same qualified-pipeline bar you set for search.
The audit is worth doing. Moving the money into another Google campaign type doesn't diversify anything.
Before the 2027 plan locks, check which of your Google search leads became qualified pipeline, then fund the AI-surface test as its own line held to that same bar.
