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New AI-powered bidding and budgeting innovations in Search and Shopping
General summary
Google is rolling out new artificial intelligence tools to help you automate bidding and budgeting in Search and Shopping campaigns. You can now use "journey-aware" bidding to better track lead quality and expand your reach to new customers through Smart Bidding Exploration. Additionally, upcoming demand-led pacing will automatically adjust your daily spend to match consumer interest while staying within your total budget.
Summaries were generated by Google AI. Generative AI is experimental.Bullet points
- Google’s new AI tools for Search and Shopping help you capture more customer demand.
- Journey-aware bidding helps Google AI better understand your full lead-to-sales process.
- Smart Bidding Exploration now helps you find new customers across Performance Max and Shopping.
- New demand-led pacing automatically adjusts your daily spend to match changing consumer interest.
- These updates reduce manual work so you can focus on hitting your business goals.
Basic explainer
Google is updating its ads to use AI for smarter bidding and budgeting. These tools help businesses find new customers automatically without needing manual work. The system now adjusts spending based on how many people are searching for products each day. This helps companies reach their goals while saving time on boring tasks.
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Bidding and budgeting are the foundation of any successful campaign, but with consumer behavior changing every day, traditional solutions can sometimes miss hidden opportunities. In 2025, innovations like Smart Bidding Exploration and campaign total budgets allowed you to expand your reach, capture additional value and manage budgets the same way you manage your business. Today, we’re announcing even more flexibility and power to fuel AI. By pairing smarter bidding strategies with flexible budgets, you can capture high-value opportunities without the manual heavy lifting. Here’s how our newest innovations help you hit your goals and stay ahead of the competition.
Reach your business goals with smarter bidding
More than ever, your bidding strategy needs to be as dynamic as your customers. That’s why, since 2025 we’ve made over 20 improvements to Search and Shopping bid strategies and increased value for advertisers. 1
Help Google AI better understand complex lead generation customer journeys with journey-aware bidding, currently in beta. When you track your full lead to sales journey, Search Ads campaigns optimizing to a Target CPA will be able to learn from both biddable and non-biddable conversion goals. By seeing the whole picture, Google AI can better predict what works and optimize your performance.
Journey-aware bidding allows your Search campaigns to learn from your full lead to sales journey including phone calls, form submission, newsletter signups and more.
Search’s expansionary moment is also your biggest growth opportunity — your customers may be searching for things you didn’t even anticipate. To help you capture these queries, last year we introduced Smart Bidding Exploration to Search campaigns. By fueling Google AI with a ROAS tolerance, you can get more conversions from less obvious queries that you weren’t able to win before, without changing your targeting. Search campaigns using Smart Bidding Exploration on average see 27% more unique converting users. 2 Soon you’ll be able to use that same capability to reach new customers and capture additional conversions across both Performance Max and Shopping campaigns.
Smart Bidding Exploration in both Shopping campaigns and Performance Max campaigns with product feeds will let you adjust your Target ROAS tolerance and capture new Shopping traffic.
Smart Bidding Exploration for Performance Max is currently in beta. We’ll be launching the beta for Performance Max with product feeds and Shopping campaigns in a few weeks.
Manage dynamic budgets that capture demand, not cap it
Tired of tedious, manual budget adjustments during peak times? We launched campaign total budgets earlier this year to all Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns, letting you specify a duration for budgets to run, from a few days to a few weeks. We found that advertisers using campaign total budgets saw a 66% average reduction in manual budget adjustments compared to using daily budgets. 3
Consumer demand changes every day, so your budget needs to be flexible to help you capture every opportunity without limitation and prevent you from falling behind the competition. To better predict consumer behavior and follow demand automatically, we’re upgrading our budget pacing in Search and Shopping campaigns in the coming months. With demand-led pacing, Google AI will better optimize spend to follow consumer demand — capturing more demand on peak days and reducing spend on slower days — all while never going beyond your monthly budget and daily spending limits.
Smarter bidding helps you identify where your potential customers are, and dynamic budgeting ensures you have the funds ready to capture them at exactly the right moment.
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