Google Marketing Live 2026: Delivering the Gemini advantage for Indian businesses
Every day, users turn to Google and YouTube to explore interests, seek answers, and make purchasing decisions. In India, Google and YouTube are present in 93% of consumer journeys for discovering a new brand, product, or retailer. 1 For brands, this represents a massive opportunity to be discovered and connect with high-intent audiences.
At Google Marketing Live (GML) 2026, we showcased how Gemini is the core engine driving new ways for brands to boost discovery, creativity, commerce, and measurement. By transforming AI from an operational tool into an intelligent growth engine, we are helping marketers move beyond marketing automation to marketing intelligence.
Reinventing ads for the new era of Search
We are bringing new ad innovations to the core Search experience to turn helpful interactions into valuable conversions. Available in beta in India, Business Agent for Leads—built with Gemini—places an intelligent brand agent directly inside the ad, allowing shoppers to chat in real time with an agent trained specifically on the advertiser’s website.
In India, upGrad recently started testing Business Agent for Leads to transform its traditional lead-generation process. By engaging students 24/7 to answer questions instantly, the agent qualifies and warms up leads, freeing up the sales team to focus entirely on high-value counseling conversations.
Bridging brand storytelling and performance on YouTube
YouTube is ranked as the number one platform by Indian viewers for vetting brands, products, or services they want to buy. 2 To help advertisers seamlessly achieve both brand building and performance objectives, we are introducing YouTube BrandStack—an all-in-one automated solution conceptualized and built in India that unifies campaign planning, buying, and measurement.
Additionally, expanding on YouTube Shopping, we are launching YouTube Affiliate Partnerships Boost, an ad format to help brands scale authentic creator videos where their products are tagged directly into ad campaigns. It helps brands get high-converting, trustworthy creative, while creators can reach new audiences and earn more affiliate commissions.
Driving campaign performance across surfaces
AI-powered campaigns help marketers keep pace with the new ways people are searching and discovering products on Search, YouTube and beyond. In the past one year, we have seen Indian brands across sectors leverage AI Max for Search campaigns to reach billions of net new searches they weren’t reaching before. We are now launching AI Max for Shopping campaign to help retailers future-proof their strategies for the next generation of Search. The campaign leverages Merchant Center feed context to deeply understand products and enhance campaign impact.
To further help advertisers steer their Search performance, AI Brief is rolling out in beta. Powered by Gemini, this tool allows brands to guide AI Max for Search campaigns using everyday language. Advertisers simply share a conversational overview of their goals, and AI Brief applies brand guardrails to generate real-time, customizable ad previews aligned with the brand vision.
Advanced creative tools and cross-channel measurement
All marketers want more and better creative — so we’re launching new features in Asset Studio to remove the friction from the process.
Asset Studio understands the marketing brief, brand guidelines, website, and goals to instantly generate a high-quality range of assets across multiple creative themes and asset types. Brands can create and refine them to match their vision using natural language.
In the AI era, data is the fuel for growth. But beyond a strong foundation, brands need tools that leverage that data to give a complete picture of performance and easy ways to take action.
That’s why we’re bringing Meridian — our open-source Marketing Mix Model — into Google Analytics 360. This will help brands unify their insights, understand what's working, and forecast outcomes to guide smarter investments. Alongside this, we're launching a new metric, Attributed Branded Searches, that will help measure how YouTube video ad exposures directdrively downstream branded searches.
Cars24 used Attributed Branded Searches to measure upper-funnel YouTube Shorts and CTV ads, driving a 2X surge in incremental searches with a 7% better CAC, while CTV performed 1.96X better on branded searches.
Agentic tools for marketers
Our advertising tools are becoming true strategic partners. The new Ask Advisor works across Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Marketing Platform, and soon Merchant Center, offering proactive, personalized recommendations to save marketers time.
Finally, building the foundation for agentic commerce—from a common language for agents with Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to the payments infrastructure to make agentic checkout seamless—we are introducing two key merchant updates to track visibility across Google's AI surfaces:
- AI Performance Insights: A new tool in Merchant Center, rolling out in the coming months, that shows exactly how products perform on surfaces like AI Mode, AI Overviews, and the Gemini app.
- Global Conversational Attributes: Features that help merchants add richer, conversational details directly to their product listings.
With Gemini underpinning our ads and commerce solutions, businesses have the ultimate engine to scale efficiently and grow across Search and YouTube.
