Agentic Commerce & Google Ads... Is your eCom Brand Ready?

If you're an e-commerce brand owner running Google Ads, this is an interview that you do need to take note of, sit back and watch. And the reason is, is because Google is going to be rolling out a lot of changes in regards to the way that people search, and more importantly, how that corresponds with the ads platform, including not only what you need to include in your Google Merchant Shopping Center, but also how those ads are actually displayed to your potential customers. So you may have heard some terms like Agentic Commerce, and you also may be aware that AI Max is coming for Shopping campaigns, and you can also add in AI attributes within your Google Shopping feed. So that's why I invited Mike Ryan from Smarter Ecommerce so we could sit down and break down what you as the brand owner needs to do right now inside of Google Ads to make sure that you're best prepared so that you don't lose those valuable sales over the coming weeks and months as these changes are rolled out inside of Google Ads. So why don't you sit down and relax and watch this interview with Mike Ryan.

Hi everyone, as you can see, I've got Mike Ryan from Smarter Ecommerce. Mike, absolute pleasure to have you here.

Really good to talk to you, Aaron. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so Mike and I actually connected over at Google Marketing Live and Mike had been one of those people with, you know, we'd been connections and friends on LinkedIn, but it was really, really great to get him to meet, come in person. When we were talking throughout the event, I did ask Mike to come on and really share about UCP. We're going to get into some other topics and those type of things, but what this one is really going to be about is what e-commerce brands need to start being preparing for and doing now, because there are going to be some really, really sudden changes coming down the line. Mike's actually involved in some of the betters for AI Shopping Max. I believe I can say that. And so he's going to be sharing, he's got some insights that he can share really about what brands can do right now. So hey, Mike, why don't we start at ground one? Just because there would be some people that may not even know what we're talking about with UCP, but can you just give a really, really quick overview of UCP and then also go into what problem does it actually solve?

Sure. Yeah, UCP stands for Universal Commerce Protocol, and this was co-developed by Google and Shopify, but since everyone has signed on, even all their competitors like Amazon, Microsoft, everyone has signed on at this point, um, except for OpenAI. But UCP— no hard feelings— UCP is, is, uh, I think it's easiest to start with what problem it solves. It should be this, uh, infrastructure upon which agentic shopping is built. I don't— I hate the term agentic shopping. I think it's vague, people misunderstand it. Um, I think really what we're talking about is AI-assisted Shopping, that's something that consumers could immediately understand. And, you know, there are a couple of approaches to how this could all work. There was the idea as recently as a year ago or so that AIs would literally be navigating your website and clicking on products, adding them to the cart, doing the checkout, all this stuff. This is very slow, dangerous, expensive. There's all kinds of problems with an approach like this. The alternative would be to build millions of individual API connections between every Agentic service and every merchant backend. And with all these layers in there, like payments and ERP and everything, and that's, that's also not a way to do this. So yeah, UCP takes those two sides of the market and builds a middleware in between them so they can talk to each other.

Hey, I'm gonna get you right back to the interview with Mike Moran very, very soon, but I did wanna let you know that this interview was brought to you by Define Digital Academy. And Define Digital Academy exists for one reason, and that is to help you, the business or brand owner, get better results with your business in 2026. And one of the best ways that we do this is our on-demand program. Now, our Define Digital Academy on-demand program is a done-with-you program that where we come alongside you and give you the strategic inputs that you need to see better results with Google Ads. It comes from the core belief that for the best success with Google Ads, you don't only need to understand how the business operates, but you also need to know very clearly how Google Ads works. So if you wanna make sure that you are never left behind with any of these updates that are coming inside of Google Ads, and you would like some extra support, and our on-demand program is designed to help remove all the barriers so that you can see the best results. We complete a full audit and strategy review of what's happening inside of Google Ads. And then we also offer you one-on-one coaching calls and a private Slack channel. So you know exactly what to do to see the next levels of success and profit with your business. And if you'd like to find out more about our on-demand program, and apply, just follow that link in the description below.

But right now, let's head back to the interview. You, you just ran a masterclass for Inside of Google Ads Mastery for us, and I think you gave a great example of— perfect example is if you've got, you know, someone who's running off Microsoft Teams in terms of their email service, someone's running off Gmail, you can actually still connect and talk to each other because there's the protocols that join them together.

Exactly. This is a protocol for commerce, and so A big part of what it does is just define what are the building blocks of commerce, like your orders, your checkouts, these kind of thing. And then it doesn't matter if someone is using a certain kind of API or if they're using one of these trendy new things like MCP that you might have heard of, it's all resolved inside of there. They're able to communicate with each other once some basic steps are taken. Yeah, exactly.

All right, let's now move into, because obviously for me, a lot of people watching this are gonna be business owners, brand owners running their own brands, or even marketing teams for brands. And what we really want to get down into is, you know, what does this mean for me? What do I need to do? And how does it operate? So I think what would be great to share is I've just got a couple of slides that you may have seen before because they are actually from you. So giving Mike 100% credit of this one is I did like the way that you displayed this through. So if you just want to talk us through this one first, just the format of where we are now, because I know there was a lot of fear in this that, you know, where we're all going to be, you know, Google's going to be gone and there's going to be no search anymore. But yeah, just walk us through this and where we're kind of at and where you see we are.

Yeah, I mean, the idea that ChatGPT, for example, would be a Google search killer, I think we all recognize now it's not playing out like that. And Google is emerging as a very dominant player here themselves. So if we look at the white line here, this would be traditional search and also all the acquisition activities that we know they're like getting site onto your e-com, getting traffic onto your e-commerce site, whether paid or organic. These CPC models, everything we're familiar with. And then the yellow line would be this new way of shopping and these new kind of surfaces. So AI shopping assistance, purchases happening in chat instead of on your website. Potentially commissioned models. That's what OpenAI was proposing at one point. And the, the fear here would be that if that classic model that we've built on, we understand, we're optimized for it, if that diminishes too fast, it's like falling off a cliff. Or if the other one rises too suddenly, it's like crashing into a wall. I don't know what the ultimate share of, of these two will end at. And I don't know how long it will take, but I think that it's not going to be a cliff or a wall. It's going to be this transition. And Google has every interest, by the way, of bringing people along for the ride because they need advertisers, for example.

Yeah, and that's the biggest take-home that I got from Google Marketing Live is that I really, you know, walking away from the event, I really felt that there's going to be a real tension in individual accounts where you can't just turn everything off. And hey, we don't have our search campaigns, we don't have our shopping campaigns in the traditional format because there's still going to be a large percentage of the market that are doing 3, 4, 5 keyword searches and not using the AI features. But then there's going to be this growth of people going into conversational searches and really leveraging that. And that's why I really liked the way that you put this together because for me, that's where I see there is going to be a real tension and you need to be making sure that you're catering for both sort of formats of search of people coming through.

Exactly. We're gonna have to do both. You won't be able to just forget about what you've been doing. It's gonna continue to be relevant and you're gonna have to start practicing these new activities as well. Yeah.

And then for me, that's why I always thought the talk of Google going away was, and I've been on the record of saying that, was a bit silly because you look at where Google is positioned, you know, people are trying to say it's gonna be the next Yellow Pages or the next Kodak. But what's different in this situation with Google is that they are the ones that are actually helping to generate the new world that they're going to. And when you look at it, you know, they do have Google Search, but on top of that, they also do have Gemini. You know, they've also got YouTube and they've got all these other formats. We won't mention about the mistake, which was Bard. But apart from that, it's, you know, they've got all the elements in place for what they need to be part of this new world. I agree.

And jump onto—

and then if you could just walk us through this one, 'cause I think this one is important for people to get their head around in terms of, you know, traditional search and what is gonna be happening in these new AI surfaces?

Yeah, and I think there's a challenge here both for advertisers and for Google, and I think both parties need to work on this. But basically in a classic search engine result page, and just think of keyword advertising that we've been familiar with for years. Everyone's been saying for years that keywords are dying.

Yeah.

But you always have this relevance triangle between the keyword or the search term, the landing page and the ad copy. And these things all kind of needed to reflect each other in some way so that there'd be this satisfying user experience. Google always rewarded this with more visibility, lower CPCs, things like that. So this relevant— relevance model, I think, is pretty well understood by now, but it's changing. Um, and first off, there's a whole new point coming into this, which is the AI content that's in in the context of a place like AI Mode, but even search engine results where AI overviews are serving all the time, um, it's going to happen more often that our ads are serving next to or within AI content. Uh, so the, the ads need to be relevant to that and, and feel native to that, or no one will ever click on them. They're just going to be disruption, and Google doesn't want this. No one really wants this. Uh, the other thing is that what's happening with keywords, I mean, queries are becoming more like prompts. They're becoming way longer, potentially 3 times longer. Um, so this is, it's hard to target that with the tools we've been used to. And that's why Google's campaign technology is going in a certain direction. It's going toward keyword lists and it's going towards these very dynamic creatives. Uh, also landing page selection is super relevant. For them.

And I think that's where we probably spend some time talking, because those two new points. So let's, let's firstly break it down to— we want to talk about obviously the query and the prompt, and then also the, the AI element. So let's just talk through the query and prompt. And this is the one thing where I think people do have to get more used to, is when— the one thing that I will concede to, to, to, to Google is we are not going to get as much data. And essentially, how can they give data of, depending on the budgets, you could have thousands of different conversations. It doesn't all fit into individual search terms. So look, I do think, and I have said this to some people, I do think this is where we may get search themes coming back into the mix. And I know that has a lot of baggage in it, so they probably need to rebrand it. But I do think that's eventually where we're going to probably end up getting is it's just going to be getting categories of queries or searches because you just can't get the individual searches. I'd like to know your thoughts on that, but that's the one thing that I think will happen.

I agree.

It's a massive long tail challenge. And that's, you know, for Google, they talk about privacy thresholds where they can't share all these super specific things. And but also, you know, even if you did get all of that data, it would be very hard for you to process this and work with it and optimize on it. Um, it would just— it's this long tailification of that. So I think that's, that's a challenge.

Yeah, what I am hoping, and I'm hoping with this is obviously because now there's more and more integration of Gemini into into Google, also the Google Ads dashboard. I'm hoping that'll be a tool where it'll effectively be like a chat that you as the advertiser or the business owner can actually talk to Gemini to get that data out that you need inside of Google.

Yeah, I think they are working on things like Agentic Advisor, which, or Ads Advisor, which doesn't work that great right now, but maybe it will. And if you look at the way there's also Search Term Insights, which was introduced with PMax. And they're already doing some clustering for you. Um, they're also working on stuff like synthetic keywords, which is the idea is that they'll basically distill a very long prompt into something resembling a keyword so you get the essence of it. But we don't, we don't know how that's going to evolve, but they're certainly working on this. Another thing I'll just mention quickly is you might have heard of smart bidding exploration, which is their goal is to increase the amount of diverse queries that you're matching against. And I think that they do that as well to help fill auctions for this new category where maybe their own bidding models don't quite know what to expect. So they're coming at this from multiple fronts.

Yeah. So I think the biggest message that I've got for business owners and brand owners is especially when we move into this world of more and more of AI searches is that we're going to have to accept that we're not going to get clean, pretty keyword lists and search terms. It's just not going to be the case there. But let's now work over to the other point of this box that you had, which on the screen share we just looked through, which is the AI elements. And we probably need to break this down into two elements as well, and elements within elements is obviously the ads. So if you just probably want to speak there, I think one thing you really brought out and hit home in the masterclass as well is that don't think that these elements are only going to appear inside of AO Overviews and AO Mode. There are going to be new ad formats just appearing in normal Google searches as well.

Yeah, that, that's correct. So they've introduced several native AI formats and like conversational discovery ads, highlighted answers, and some of these are exclusive for the time being, at least to AI mode. But others will appear in the classic search engine result page. They have AI-powered shopping ads, and basically if a query is specific enough, they'll swap out that classic product carousel and they'll serve this new format instead, which has way more text description, which in turn depends on having a great feed. Um, so this is coming to the main SERP. It's coming to everywhere. There, there are also buy box experiences are not only scoped like to ads or to inside of AI mode. There's already buy box experiences happening in organic classic SERP. Results. So it's all surfaces really.

Yeah. And the thing I've been talking to some business owners about already is what they need to start getting their head around is if you look at it, I'll give a classic example. Say for example, a coffee machine. I could be coming into it and really asking super, super specific questions about the size and the dimensions just because for us we're moving to a smaller apartment. So I've got a large coffee machine but a smaller bench space. So I'm looking for that type of thing, like a smaller boutique coffee machine. So dimensions are like, the sizes are really important to me. You know, Mike, you could do the same search, but you could be more interested in the grinding capacities, the boiler rate, all of those things. So it's the same product, but we need to see two different ads because our interest, our entry levels into that product are really, really different. And that's where I think people have to be able to start giving the control over in the right format. Because if I'm searching about dimensions and I'm getting more information about grinders, grinder capacity and boiler capacity, it's not relevant for me and vice versa. It wouldn't be relevant for you if you're asking for those specifics and getting the dimensions.

Totally. And with AIMAX for shopping, it won't even just be these new formats. You know, I really want to emphasize how much this is going to permeate things. It's not just AI mode. It's not just a search engine result page or even new shopping formats. Standard shopping formats, they'll be using this to rewrite the titles because right now they can work with your dynamic or excuse me, your static feed title, which is not gonna satisfy you looking for specific size specs and it's not gonna satisfy me looking for the pressure or whatever. Yeah. So they'll be able to rewrite your product title to match that query. Yes. So they'll be, it's a very exciting time actually.

So yeah, and I 100% agree with you, Mike. The, the other thing I was, I, so I do want to talk about, so we've spoken about ad formats. Let's now start talking about what people do need to get prepared from. Obviously there's going to be AI shopping that's coming in, but what I more probably want to focus on is what data attributes. So the other side of that is that we're going to need to be giving different, I guess, data feeds into Google. So can you just walk people through what they should start preparing for to be able to make sure that their Merchant Center, their Google Feed, and basically everything is correct so Google can display their ads in the right way?

Yeah, there's a couple of there's kind of this native checkout experience which is coming where there'll be a universal cart and buy buttons and so on. Um, there's a few things you need to do on your website as well, uh, to, to enable UCP to handle that. But also from your feed, you need to opt products into that. Um, which is also a strategic thing. What are the products that I don't want to be in these experiences for one reason or another? You also have to kind of review the eligibility because if you have customized products or age-restricted products, that will be a problem. The products need to be in stock. You need to have your shipping and tax, stuff like that. So that part isn't actually too crazy. Um, it's more you need to do some stuff on your website to be prepared. But the, the bigger topic, and isn't— is this will again cut across all layers. This is going to affect your, your organic visibility, your paid visibility, you being selected by agents in product shortlists and things like that, the ad copy that gets written, it really is incredibly important and it's your product feed. So Google, right now, classic product feeds are not up to the task and they're introducing new attributes, they're called conversational attributes. There are 6 already globally available and Google says that dozens will be coming. So this is gonna be kind of the next frontier, a place you can optimize, a place you can get a first mover advantage and There are things like question and answers. If you have Q&A data, you can bring this into your feed, and the AI will be able to read that and use it to generate ad copy or better answer people's questions. Also, for example, document URLs. If you have PDFs with instruction manuals or spec sheets or whatever, you can also bring these URLs into your feed, potentially pretty easy. And again, the AI will be able to read those manuals. It's crazy to think about, but they're, they're just gonna shred manuals and churn out answers and ad copy and know if your product is relevant to select. So this is a huge frontier right now.

Yeah, and that's the big message I think for me that people really need to be getting ready on because that is gonna be the big move. Is it the businesses and is the brands that I guess have made that data available early? They're gonna get that early advantage because obviously when you think of it from Google's point of view, what is not changing in all of this is the underlying core that what Google's goal is is search inquiry. Now, it could be conversation, but it's still a search inquiry. Most relevant ad, most relevant landing page. And that game hasn't changed. But what will change is that if someone's giving out like a, you know, 3 or 4 questions through, and there's an advertiser which has all the Q&As, it has all the extra attributes, and then you've got another advertiser that hasn't added those, it just becomes an easy win for Google as to whose ad gets the high rank or even gets shown in the auction.

Exactly that, that relevance bar has risen dramatically. And you also have to think that this is especially in AI mode where it's really part of a conversation. People can be changing their specs or adding specs as they go along. They can be kind of using AI to filter through products. And so you really want, there could be multiple chances for you to appear in principle. Yeah, you just need to have that data available.

And I think it's a big thing that people not to get scared of is remembering that for me, the best ads have always been the most relevant ads. And so it just comes back to that. If your ad, if you think you can win in this next, you know, this next season of Google Ads just by doing what we've been doing for the past, it's just not going to work because, you know, people are just not going to be clicking on your ads even if they do get shown, because they're not going to be relevant for what they're asking. Yeah, absolutely. Hey Mike, really, really appreciate it. I know this is like barely scratching the surface of this conversation because there's so many different other tangents we could get on with AI shopping and, uh, sorry, AI Max for Shopping and, and all of these different things. But what we will do is I just wanted to give, I guess, the core basics of—

I'll let people to start dipping their toe into this conversation.

But what I will also do for anyone watching this video is in the link in the description below, I'm going to include Mike's details where you see him and see his company. So thank you so much for coming on, and hopefully this has started the conversation for a lot of brand owners and business owners in this space.

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I would just say don't, don't be afraid of it. The main thing is don't try to do everything all at once. It's about prioritization. And yeah, feel free to reach out. Thanks for having me.

Thanks, Mike. You have a great day.

Likewise.