According to Google, 93% of consumer journeys to discover new brands, products, and services in India go to Google or YouTube. At Google Marketing Live 2026 India Roundtable, Dan TaylorVice President of Global Advertising, Google Roma Datta ChobeyGoogle India’s Managing Director, Connected Consumer Commerce, walked us through a new set of tools built around Gemini, the company’s AI model.
Taylor set the tone early on, describing it as a moment when the old rules of discovery no longer fully apply. “AI is really creating an expansion opportunity for advertisers,” he said, adding that Google’s advertising business for the past 25 years has been built on understanding intent, and Gemini is now the driving force to further accelerate that same thinking.
Roma Datta Chobey similarly framed this change by directly tying it to how much attention and trust Indian audiences already have on Google’s platforms. “With 86% of online Indians surveyed turning to Google Search and YouTube, Indian businesses have a tremendous opportunity to meet consumers, and with Gemini we are enabling them,” she said.
The numbers shared by Google support the premise of changing search behavior. The average query length in AI mode is three times that of traditional search, and one in six queries in AI mode is non-text and consists of audio or images. In India, 84% of users say AI mode helps them make faster decisions, and 87% say they feel more confident in making decisions.
In conjunction with this, the company announced a suite of tools to help keep pace, from new ad formats in search to a complete agent tier across marketers’ toolkits.
Reinventing advertising for a search experience that doesn’t feel like search
The company introduced Business Agent for Leads, which is currently in beta in India. This puts your brand’s trained chat agents directly inside your ad instead of a static lead form. Taylor explained that because prospects can ask agents questions before filling out a form, it’s a good fit for advertisers selling complex products that are considered purchases rather than impulse buys. UpGrad was cited as an early adopter, using the tool to process student questions around the clock that previously were sent through cold calls by counselors.
At YouTube, the company introduced YouTube BrandStack. It is an India-built planning, buying and measuring tool that aims to break down the usual separation between brand and performance campaigns.
Roma Datta Chobey argued that this separation was becoming completely unnecessary. “Whether their goal is long-term brand building or immediate performance improvement, they no longer have to choose. All goals can be achieved on a single platform, and that is, of course, YouTube,” she said. Axis Max Life Insurance reported an 18.4% increase in branded search queries and a 23% increase in qualified leads using BrandStack and YouTube Connected TV during the Indian cricket season. YouTube has also expanded its shopping integrations, with Tira Beauty joining existing partners Flipkart, Myntra, Nykaa, and Purplle in a new affiliate partnership boost format that allows brands to turn tagged creator content into paid campaigns.
P-MAX now has a retention mode with dynamic remarketing to re-engage lapsed customers, along with Google Pay as a new inventory aspect. Demand Gen campaigns expand to Google Maps and integrate with product videos in Merchant Center. Google says AI Max for Search, today’s fastest growing AI-powered search advertising product, now includes AI Max for Shopping, which provides a deeper read into Merchant Center feed data such as fabric and fit. A companion tool called AI Brief allows advertisers to write briefs in plain language with branded guardrails, which Gemini interprets and creates live ad previews.
Agent tools promise efficiency, but the real question is what survives after the agent makes a decision.
Google also announced Ask Advisor, a unified agent that works across Google Ads, Analytics, Google Marketing Platform, and soon Merchant Center, integrating the separate in-product assistants the company introduced last year. Taylor described a scenario where marketers can ask to find new customers for their products in one continuous conversation, and agents can pull data from Merchant Center and set up live campaigns in minutes.
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This is also where agent commerce comes into play, and where more pointed questions exist.
When Social Samosa asked what the biggest competitive advantage would be for brands if AI agents increasingly made their own purchase recommendations, Taylor’s answer was that while the interface may change, the fundamentals remain the same.
“Our core guiding principles for brands, including merchants, remain the same: create human-first content and optimize for everything humans need to discover, because agents act on behalf of the humans who make them work,” he said.
He pointed to new additions like Conversation Attributes in Merchant Center, which allows merchants to add details like frequently purchased accessories and shipping policies, allowing brands to provide richer information to the models making these recommendations. “I think these are ways that brands are trying to differentiate themselves now,” he added.
This is a very modest answer for a company announcing a complete agent stack, and echoes what Taylor told us in the following article. previous interview, So, he said, regardless of which AI platform advertisers bet on, the inputs, product data, creative assets, landing pages, and campaign goals they feed into these systems will be more important than ever.
Google’s unique framework through the Universal Commerce Protocol, built with retail partners including Flipkart in India, positions us as a bridge between shoppers and retailers, rather than retailers or marketplaces.
Nothing holds true without evidence, so measurements must be repeated.
The roundtable also touched on measurement, with Taylor saying that this area is no longer a report card, but a signal telling AI where to invest next. Google is integrating Meridian, an open-source marketing mix model, directly into Google Analytics 360, allowing businesses to analyze cross-channel and first-party data in one place around the world.
The new metric, Attribute Brand Search, is designed to measure how YouTube video ad exposures translate to branded searches on Google, addressing a longstanding gap for advertisers in quantifying the impact of their brand campaigns. Cars24 used the tool in beta and reported a 7% increase in customer acquisition costs with 2x incremental searches. The company then extended this approach to YouTube Connected TV, which the company says delivered nearly twice the performance on the same metrics.
Google’s creative hub, Asset Studio, has also been upgraded to accept full marketing briefs, reference images, and brand guidelines in natural language, and generate text, image, and video assets in a single pass. However, this update is currently only available in English.
