Forget ChatGPT. The search engines of 2024 that don’t use generative AI have become a puzzle for marketers to figure out. Ads are harder to control and more expensive, said Sweetgreen’s director of media and growth Jeff Lin at the Possible Miami advertising conference in Florida.

“Make sure that you’re establishing the right success metrics, and understand whether partners will drive the business objectives,” Lin said. He also urged the audience to not trust the measurement numbers provided by the platforms, which can’t always be trusted to report their own performance accurately.

Automation at the expense of transparency

A key change underlying growing unease within search marketing is Google’s Performance Max, Google’s 3-year-old tool that uses AI to place ads across search, video and display environments. Buyers dislike its lack of transparency, and have accused it of placing ads in environments that they would not have chosen.

Sweetgreen has had to experiment to make Performance Max work for local campaigns, according to Lin, and the lack of transparency has made it difficult for the restaurant chain to justify spending there.

“I’ve been pushing my Google reps,” Lin said. “You want me to spend more money, give me more reporting.”

Despite the lack of transparency, however, Google’s tools still deliver results.

“Do you care whether it’s display or video, or did you just care about getting the conversions and the revenue?” he said.

Increased competition

In addition to handling the changes that come with automation, search marketers also have to deal with higher ad costs. During the panel, the ad network AdMedia shared statistics that cost per click on major search engines is up 20% to 70% for non-branded activity and conquest. Non-branded activity is when brands buy search terms that aren’t its own name, while conquest happens when brands bid on competitors’ search terms.

“It puts a lot of pressure on agencies, as well as brand marketers search teams,” said Jeff Alderman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at AdMedia.

U.S. ad spend on search is expected to rise 9.5% this year, making up nearly 30% of total media spend, according to Insider Intelligence data cited at the presentation.

Moreover, more than 20 years of search ads and search engine optimization tricks has Google crowded with ads, creating a chaotic advertising experience. It is a popular Google search hack to append “Reddit” to a query to cut through this noise.

“Search experiences and sponsored ads—it’s very convoluted,” Alderman said. “If you do a search on simplified keywords like ‘shoes,’ you’ll notice it’s not really clear what’s sponsored and what’s not. It’s not clear either what’s a product ad.”