If you have managed a paid search account in the last two years, you have felt the change. Customers are no longer typing two-word keywords.
They are asking full questions in a single breath: “Where can I find a high quality aso-oke pant under ₦40,000 in Lagos?” Keyword lists cannot keep up, and the auction is rewarding accounts that have moved past keyword-only thinking.
What follows is less a list of features and more a working list of what to actually change, three habits, and two clusters of tools worth knowing.
1. Stop optimising keyword lists. Start writing intent briefs
The biggest mindset shift this year is this: the unit of optimisation is no longer the keyword. It is the brief.
Marketers have spent fifteen years getting good at keyword research, match types, and negatives. That muscle still matters, but it is no longer where the leverage lives.
The leverage lives in how clearly you can describe, in plain language, what you sell, who you serve, and where you do not want to play.
The teams getting the most out of AI-powered search are the ones whose briefs read like strategy memos, not lists of words.
If you do not already have a one-page intent brief per campaign, that is the first deliverable for this quarter.
2. Treat your feed and your landing pages as creative.
For most Nigerian e-commerce and lead-gen advertisers, the feed and landing-page set are owned by engineering or merchandising, and the marketing team takes whatever it is given. That has to change.
AI-driven systems read your feed and your URLs as inputs to their matching decisions. Material, sizing, availability, structured attributes, page titles, on-page copy, these are no longer hygiene tasks. They are creative assets.
Cleaning them up moves the same metrics that ad-copy A/B tests used to move.
Build a quarterly feed and landing-page audit into your calendar. Treat it with the same seriousness you treat creative refresh.
3. The horizontal AI tools worth testing now
If you are going to test one new thing this quarter, the most consequential is Google’s AI Max for Search ads, now a year in market. It sits on top of your existing Search campaigns and uses AI to read the full intent behind a query, expanding reach to conversational searches your keyword list was never going to capture.
Two pieces sit alongside it. AI Brief lets you steer the system in plain English, focus on sustainable traditional wear, exclude wholesale queries, keep a premium tone, instead of fighting it through layers of negatives.
Final URL Expansion sends customers to the most relevant page on your site automatically, which is invaluable if you run a deep catalogue. Together, this trio is becoming the default account structure for advertisers leaning into AI, and the performance signal is strong enough to act on.
4. Build an experimentation cadence into your account.
The accounts pulling ahead are not the ones that “went AI” overnight. They are the ones that built a disciplined test cadence and stuck with it.
A simple version: every quarter, pick one campaign with high keyword volume and a clear conversion goal. Run a controlled experiment against an AI-driven structure for four weeks. Read the results, then read them again at twelve weeks, and make a decision.
Without this, every AI conversation becomes a debate of opinion. With it, the answer comes from your own account, and you build a pattern of evidence over time that no vendor pitch can match.
5. Vertical updates worth tracking
AI updates are arriving by vertical too. Retailers should know that AI Max now extends to Shopping campaigns: it reads your product feed to match items to conversational queries, and can tailor titles and headlines to fit what the shopper actually asked.
Travel advertisers should know that Google is consolidating travel inventory under Search campaigns, with travel-specific feeds plugged into AI Max, fewer campaign types to manage, access to the same AI improvements other verticals are getting.
Finance, insurance, healthcare, and pharma advertisers should know about text disclaimers, which guarantee mandatory legal text appears in every ad served from a campaign, finally making AI creative usable under local laws.
The pattern is worth naming: AI in search is not a one-product story. Track the updates that touch your vertical; ignore the ones that do not.
Where to start
Pick one campaign. Write the brief. Audit the feed. Run a four-week test. Read the result. The auction has moved, and the marketers who rebuild the way they think before they rebuild the way they buy will compound the gains over the next year.
