Google’s October 28 announcement that ads in AI Mode are expanding to ten more countries is a good moment to settle a budgeting rule for every new ad surface: market-level reporting comes before budget.
Opinion column by Prathamesh Barathe. The views are the author’s.
The rule
When a platform opens a new place for ads, the first quarter of spend tends to follow the announcement. I think the order should be the other way round. A team should have a report that isolates the new surface, in each market it buys in, before the share of budget moves. The facts published this week show why that report cannot be taken for granted.
What the public record contains
Google’s post on ads in AI Mode lists Australia, Canada, India, Kenya, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and Singapore as the new markets, with Brazil, Mexico and the United Kingdom planned for Q4 2026. It says click-through rates are already similar between sponsored and organic product list items within AI Mode. Its footnote says that figure is Google internal data for the US from August 20 to September 3, 2026.
I take that figure as stated. It is a US result over about two weeks, for product list items, and the post does not describe a measurement in any of the ten new countries. Alphabet’s third-quarter release adds no further detail, because it reports Google Search and other as one line, $63.4 billion for the quarter, with no separate figure for AI Mode. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, said in that release: “Our AI investments are driving overall Search query growth, including commercial queries.”
The counter-argument
The strongest case against waiting is speed. Google says queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, which suggests richer requests for advertisers to answer. A competitor that moves first may collect cheap early clicks while others build dashboards. Platforms also tend to improve their reporting after launch, so a team that waits for perfect data may wait for a long time.
I accept that early clicks can be cheap and that reporting improves. Neither point changes the rule, because the rule asks for a modest thing: that a test be readable. Testing can start tomorrow. A small budget with a report that isolates AI Mode in the target market tells a team something. A large budget with a blended Search report tells it only that Search spend went up.
There is also a planning reason. A team that spreads one budget across ten countries and a new surface has many cells to read and little spend in each. Starting with the two markets that matter most to revenue, and reading those reports well, gives a decision rule the other eight markets can borrow later. Starting everywhere at once gives ten thin results that nobody trusts enough to act on.
What to ask for
Before moving budget into a new ad surface, ask the account team for three things in writing.
The first is impressions, clicks and conversions for the new surface, separate from standard results, for each market. If the platform cannot supply that yet, ask for a date.
The second is the definition behind any comparison the platform quotes. Which formats, which period, which market, and which metric were compared. Google’s footnote gives a period and a country for its click-through statement, and that is the kind of detail a buyer should expect for every market a plan covers.
The third is how a new format counts. Google is launching multiturn ads in the U.S., which can appear on follow-up queries in one conversation. Ask whether each turn counts as its own impression, and how conversions are attributed when a conversation runs over several turns. The post does not say, and the answer decides what a cost-per-conversion figure means.
The same discipline applies to every new surface. Our earlier look at ChatGPT ads measurement found one sale able to count twice, and the lesson carries over: decide how a result will be counted before the spend starts. The IAB’s cross-channel measurement decision guide takes the same decision-first approach.
None of this requires a new tool. It requires a request to the account team, a holdout in the campaign settings where they are available, and the patience to read one report before the next budget meeting.
Source: Google
