In this brief interview, Aaron Young explains that his agency uses Claude, an AI language model, only as a diagnostic aid for Google Ads accounts, not to generate direct optimization recommendations. He warns that many agencies rely on AI‑generated suggestion dumps, which provide just enough information to be misleading and can make practitioners "dumber" by bypassing the deep learning of ad platforms. Young emphasizes that success with Google Ads (and Meta) requires two layers of expertise: a thorough understanding of the client’s business and a deep mastery of the advertising platform. Without both, agencies cannot achieve sustainable results.
In terms of getting Claude to give recommendations about what optimizations to do inside of Google Ads, we don't do it and I don't recommend it. But as a diagnostic tool, we use it every day of the week.
Because you made a YouTube video called AI is Making Google Ads Agencies Dumber.
Yeah.
Was that— was there anything else in that video that you want to touch on?
Because I don't know if you— I don't know if you get this, but we get like, so from members or from Like, like we're reviewing an account where people will give us this big word dump from Claude going, oh, these are all the recommendations that Claude's given us.
I think it is making a lot of people dumber because they don't go through the process of actually learning these channels correctly and instead they just take the first AI response.
They've got just enough information to be dangerous and essentially that's what happens from there and that's where these things fall down when you look at these big business analysis is that we go, I'm a big one in saying that for success with Google Ads, And the same would be true for success with Meta is you need to understand two, you need to have two levels of expertise. You need to understand the business and you also need to understand the platform. And if you don't have those two things, you can't see success.
