Scale & Strategy
This is Scale & Strategy. We are back! Hope everyone who celebrates dad a Happy Turkey day!
Here’s what we got for you today:
- How to Tell If Google’s AI Max for Search Is Actually Pulling Its Weight
- AI Chatbots Want to Handle Your Holiday Shopping
How to Tell If Google’s AI Max for Search Is Actually Pulling Its Weight
Ever since the beta started eating budgets, everyone’s been trying to decode what AI Max is doing behind the curtain. Ginny Marvin laid out what it is, and Anu Adegbola broke down how to judge it. Here’s the distilled version without the fluff.
What AI Max is actually built to do
Think of it as an expansion pack, not a replacement. Your existing keywords still run the show. AI Max just fills in the gaps, scooping up conversions from searches your current setup misses. If a query matches one of your keywords, that keyword still wins the auction.
What’s under the hood
It rolls broad match intelligence, keywordless matching, and dynamic creative optimization into one engine. The difference this time: you get better brand and location controls plus clearer search-term visibility. Basically, the wild west… but fenced in.
What to expect based on your current setup
Your results will hinge on how you’ve been running Search:
- Heavy on phrase/exact? Expect the biggest jump, because AI Max opens the top of the funnel you’ve been ignoring.
- Already living in broad-match land? Incremental lift will be smaller since you’ve already expanded your reach.
- Running a ton of PMax? Still room for lift because AI Max extends those matching muscles directly into Search.
If CPA looks weird at first, chill. Incremental customers cost more than the ones your core keywords already catch.
And don’t bother comparing match types in isolation. The only metric that matters: does total campaign value improve at your efficiency target?
How to measure if it’s actually working
Run A/B tests splitting traffic between control and treatment. Keep in mind:
- Brand and location controls aren’t supported in experiment mode yet.
- Ignore the learning period unless you enjoy misleading data.
AI Chatbots Want to Handle Your Holiday Shopping
AI companies are still hunting for real revenue streams, and apparently your Christmas list is looking pretty delicious right now.
With social platforms already minting billions from ecommerce, model developers are trying to wedge themselves into the consumer shopping flow too. Perplexity and OpenAI both rolled out holiday-timed shopping tools, hoping to turn chatbots into high-intent storefronts.
OpenAI launched “shopping research,” a feature inside ChatGPT that basically turns product hunting into a conversational task. Tell it you need the best cordless vacuum or a toy for your four-year-old niece and it spits out curated picks, asks follow-ups, and pulls context from previous chats to refine the list.
Perplexity countered with a free agentic shopping tool that lets you buy directly from its results, plus a virtual try-on experience using avatars. Built with PayPal, the system taps into 5,000+ merchants and aims to be far more personalized than its earlier paid product, “Buy With Pro.”
Google, meanwhile, didn’t launch a shopping tool, but it did the predictable thing: it jammed ads into AI Mode, making sure its most expensive product line actually pays rent.
According to Pat Copeland, GM of Commerce Media at Moloco, ecommerce gives AI firms a triple win:
- new revenue,
- more personalized user data, and
- models that feel increasingly baked into your daily life.
“Intent” is the gold mine here. When users tell a chatbot what they want, what they like, and what they’re researching, that becomes high-value signal for advertisers or model-training.
And once these systems get dialed in, the convenience becomes addictive. At some point the line between “shopping assistant” and “holiday elf” gets blurry.
As Grant Deken, head of product at Klaviyo, put it: shopping is one of the most universal, high-frequency behaviors online. Which makes it catnip for AI.
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