Google Just Revealed AI Search Ads

Last week, Google gave the clearest look yet at how search ads will work inside AI Mode for home service businesses, and it’s set to fundamentally change how your prospects find and interact with your business over the next 12 months.

After 8 years managing home service ad accounts (and over a million dollars in active Google Ads spend across our clients), this is the biggest shift in Google Ads I’ve seen. Here’s why Google has to make this change, what it means for your ad strategy, and how to prepare your business right now so you keep generating leads as AI search becomes the new normal.

The Old Way Search Ads Worked

Before we get into what’s changing, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about how things have worked until now.

A customer searches “roof repair near me.” They land on Google’s search results page, click your ad, get sent to your landing page, maybe read some content, fill out a form, and eventually call your business.

The whole system was built on one assumption: your website is where the buying decision happens. Someone clicks your ad (you pay for that click), lands on your page, and that page turns into a lead. That’s the old way, and it’s becoming the old way fast, because people are increasingly not going to websites at all. They’re using AI Mode instead.

Why Google Has to Make This Change

Google is solving for three problems at once:

1. The shift to AI Mode. Traditional search results pages are disappearing. Type a query into Google today and it routes you straight into AI Mode instead of the classic results page. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has said 2027 is “the year of the agents” Google wants people using AI Mode because it wants people using agents. Which raises an obvious question: if people are being funneled into AI Mode, how does Google keep showing (and monetizing) ads?

2. Google Business Profiles are the most trusted local asset. For home service businesses, your Google Business Profile is the number one digital asset you have. It’s what Google trusts most, and it’s what local customers trust most, reviews, hours, photos, real data. Google needs a way to bring that trust into the AI Mode experience.

3. Google can’t afford to kill its monetization engine. Google is a trillion-dollar ad business. It can’t let people route every query through an AI agent without a way to keep ads in the loop.

The solution Google rolled out addresses all three problems at once.

The New Ad Format: “Talk to the Business”
Inside AI Mode

Here’s what’s actually rolling out, based on Google’s own documentation:

• A search ad now shows a “Talk to the Business” option.
• Inside AI Mode, this opens an AI agent trained on your Google Business Profile and website data.
• The agent hands the conversation off to a human when necessary.
• A new Promote tab turns that messaging experience into its own paid ad channel.

In other words: search ad → AI agent → business profile, all in one loop. That single loop solves Google’s AI Mode problem, its trust problem, and its monetization problem simultaneously.

Google calls this Business Agent for Leads, announced May 20, 2026 as part of “a new generation of ads for the AI era of search.” Instead of clicking through to a static landing page and filling out a form, a prospect can click “chat” right inside the ad and get instant, specific answers pulled from your business data. It’s already live in early form, for example, a university-search version lets a prospective student ask “where are the top colleges?” and get an immediate, conversational answer instead of a static page.

How This Connects to Your Google Business Profile

This is built directly on top of your Google Business Profile messaging features.

Quick bit of history: GBP messaging existed a couple of years ago, but Google turned it off in 2024 because businesses weren’t responding to customer messages and it created a bad experience. Now it’s back, but built out much further. You now get:

• A welcome message
• Conversation starters
• A customer handoff toggle (yes/no)
• FAQs and business information you can use to train the agent

Put simply: AI Mode plus your Google Business Profile now form a direct communication channel with your business.

According to Darren Shaw of Whitespark, who broke down the rollout in detail, clicking the messages button in your GBP now opens a panel with four tabs: Messages, Insights, Settings, and Promote. Messages are split into “needs your attention” and “handled by your agent.” The Promote tab is where you can launch ads directly, letting people engage with your Google Business Profile’s AI chatbot straight from the ad itself.

How the AI Chatbot Actually Learns
About Your Business

The obvious question is: how does the chatbot know the right answers about your business?

The agent only answers based on the data you give it. For the retail/e-commerce version, Google’s Gemini models read your Merchant Center feed. For local businesses, the same logic applies to your profile fields, service hours, and reviews. Thin data produces weak or wrong answers.

This is the exact point I’ve been making in my content for the past several months: you need a real, verified knowledge base about your business, not guesses, not filler. If you don’t actually know what your customers’ most common questions are, you can’t build the FAQs that make this agent useful. That means going back to real customer conversations to find out what people actually ask.

What This Means for Your Business:
Trust Beats Pretty Websites

The competitive advantage is no longer a nicer website or a higher-converting landing page. The new advantage is how well AI understands your business and how much trust you can build with a prospect during the conversation itself.

The best way to build that trust: answer a customer’s problem more thoroughly than they even know how to ask it. If you can tell them the questions they should be asking, before they ask them, they know you’re the expert.

That means:

• Build detailed service pages and pricing information
• Add real photos, stories, and project examples to your profile
• Build structured FAQs from actual customer questions
• Give the AI everything it needs to answer accurately, don’t leave gaps for it to guess

Building a Knowledge Catalog to Train Your AI Agent

For our clients, we’re now building full knowledge catalogs, using an agent that listens to client calls, pulls out the real questions customers ask on the phone, and turns those into a structured knowledge base with clear answers.

You can do this too, even without automation:

• Collect real customer questions from calls, emails, and messages
• Organize pricing guidelines (not necessarily a public price sheet), why your price is different from “the $99 guy,” what makes a job’s cost go up or down
• Create structured FAQs from that real data
• Use it to train the AI agents that now sit on top of your Google Business Profile

Those same answers will power AI chat, AI search, and whatever comes next from Google. The businesses with the cleanest, most verified data win, the platforms trust businesses that have the most robust information, not the ones jamming keywords into blog posts or posting generic “Happy Earth Day” content.

Old Way vs. New Way

Old Way	New Way
Website is the decision point	Business Profile is the decision point
Search ad → landing page → form → wait	Search ad → talk to the business → AI agent → book
Nicer website wins	AI-readable business wins
Ads drive clicks to your site	Ads drive conversations into your profile
Manual follow-up after form fill	AI agent quotes, schedules, and books in real time

5 Steps to Prepare Your Business Right Now

1. Audit your Google Business Profile messaging setup, welcome message, conversation starters, handoff settings.
2. Build out detailed service pages and pricing information.
3. Create structured FAQs from real customer questions, not guesses.
4. Organize project examples and review counts.
5. Build a knowledge catalog the AI can actually use, and get it deployed so the platforms trust your business.

Google is shifting hard toward AI Mode, and it has to figure out how to keep making money as it does. The businesses that win from here won’t be the ones with the prettiest landing pages, they’ll be the ones with the most complete, verified, AI-readable information about what they actually do.