Google Is Getting Better at Capturing Demand. That Changes What We As Marketers Need to Do.

By Carole Lawson, Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm

For the last several months, I have been writing about something I believe is becoming increasingly important to understand: Google is becoming the world’s most sophisticated demand capture engine. And the changes rolling out now make that direction even clearer.

Search is becoming more AI-driven. Advertising is becoming more automated. Advertisers are giving algorithms more control over targeting, matching and creative decisions. AI Overviews and AI Mode are increasingly answering questions without requiring someone to leave Google at all. Individually, each of these changes can look like another Google product update. Taken together, they tell a much bigger story.

Google is changing its role in the customer journey

For most of the history of search, Google performed a relatively straightforward job. Someone had a question or a need. They searched. Google presented a collection of links. The user clicked one and continued their journey somewhere else. That model created an entire marketing industry built around earning the click. SEO tried to earn the organic click. Paid search tried to buy the click. Websites were built to receive the click. Analytics platforms measured the click.

The standout message is this: Google doesn’t need to send the consumer anywhere.

AI Overviews and AI Mode allow Google to answer questions inside Google’s own environment. Maps, Business Profiles, Local Services and other Google products have already been moving in this direction for years. The website isn’t disappearing, but the assumption that search automatically leads to a website is.

Something similar is happening on the paid side. Google has been steadily moving advertisers away from manually controlling individual components of campaigns and toward AI-managed systems. AI Max is another step in that direction. Google’s systems can increasingly determine which searches are relevant, which creative should appear, how messages should be customized and which users are most likely to respond.

The end of keywords as we know it

There are still controls available to advertisers, and this isn’t literally the end of keywords overnight. However, the directional change is difficult to miss. Google wants advertisers to tell it more about the business and the desired outcome and let Google’s AI determine more of what happens in between.

That may make Google’s demand capture engine considerably more efficient, but it also changes where marketers can create an advantage.

If everyone is using increasingly automated tools inside the same ecosystem, differentiation cannot come entirely from manipulating the machinery inside that ecosystem. Some of it has to happen earlier.

I think that is where this gets really interesting.

Search feels like the beginning of the customer journey because it is easy to see. Someone searches for a tax preparation service. Someone searches for a Pilates studio. Someone searches for AC repair. Someone searches for a particular brand. Google records the search. The ad platform records the click. The CRM records the lead. It creates a beautifully measurable chain of events.

Why are they searching in the first place?

It doesn’t tell us why they searched for one category instead of another. It doesn’t tell us why a particular company name was already familiar. It doesn’t tell us what they saw, read, heard or experienced during the days or weeks before that search.

Search often isn’t the beginning of demand. It is where existing demand becomes visible.

At MarketStorm, we have started thinking about the modern customer journey as an interaction between two different layers. The first is what we call the Intent & Influence Layer. This is where consumers recognize problems, encounter ideas, discover brands, compare possibilities and gradually form preferences.

Intent and influence aren’t sequential steps in a traditional funnel. They feed one another. A problem creates intent. Intent makes someone more receptive to information. Information creates influence. Influence changes what they investigate and consider. That investigation strengthens or changes intent. The consumer moves back and forth between the two until eventually the need becomes actionable demand.

Intent → Influence → Intent → Influence → Demand.

Then something different happens.

The consumer enters what we call the Demand Capture Layer. They search Google. They ask an AI assistant. They open Maps. They visit a marketplace. They type in a brand name. They call a company. The intent that has been developing becomes an action that a platform can finally see and capture.

Google is becoming exceptionally good at operating in this second layer. MarketStorm is deliberately focused on the first.

We aren’t trying to build a better Google. We don’t need to. Google has enormous amounts of data, extraordinary AI capabilities and one of the strongest expressions of consumer intent ever created: the search itself. Our job happens earlier.

We use live behavioral signals to identify people whose behavior suggests that a problem, interest or need may be developing. We use those signals to create highly specific audiences and reach them across the open internet through display, native, CTV, streaming audio, video and digital out-of-home. Then we continue learning from what happens next.

Intent creates influence. Influence changes behavior. Changed behavior creates new signals. Those signals help us understand where the consumer may be in the journey. The cycle continues until some of those consumers become active demand. Very often, when they do, they go to Google.

That’s not a failure of the marketing that happened before the search. That’s how the actual customer journey works. This is also why I think the industry’s obsession with last-click attribution is going to become increasingly problematic.

Imagine someone sees a brand several times over two weeks. They see a connected TV ad. Later they encounter a display ad while reading an article. They hear the company’s name again while streaming audio. Perhaps they don’t click on any of them. Then the problem becomes urgent. They pick up their phone and search for the company.

Google gets the last click. The CRM says “Google.” But did Google create the customer? Not necessarily.

Google captured the demand at the moment the consumer was ready to act. Everything that happened before that helped shape what they eventually did.

There are two very different marketing functions

Those are two very different marketing functions, and as Google’s ecosystem becomes better at keeping users inside Google, automating advertising decisions and capturing transactions, separating influence and intent development from demand capture becomes even more important.

Agentic AI could accelerate this even further. Today we worry about consumers never clicking through to a website because an AI Overview answered their question. Tomorrow, the consumer may not need to conduct much of the search themselves. They may simply tell an AI agent what they need: find me the best option, compare these companies, book an appointment, buy this product, schedule the service.

When that happens, the distance between intent and transaction becomes remarkably short.

And that raises what I think is one of the most interesting marketing questions of the AI era:

If AI increasingly controls the final steps of the transaction, where will brands create preference?

I believe much of that work will have to happen before the transaction begins.

Brands will need to be known before the agent starts comparing. Trusted before the recommendation is made. Remembered before the search occurs. Considered before demand reaches the capture layer.

This isn’t about fighting Google. In fact, I think marketers should do the opposite. If Google can become better at capturing existing demand, let it. Use the technology for what it does exceptionally well.

Don’t confuse capturing demand with creating or influencing it

The opportunity is to build a marketing architecture in which the two layers work together. MarketStorm operates across the Intent & Influence Layer, identifying emerging intent and building familiarity, relevance and preference before the final action. Google and other lower-funnel platforms operate exceptionally well in the Demand Capture Layer, converting that intent when the consumer is ready to act.

One doesn’t replace the other. They solve different parts of the same problem. Google’s latest changes don’t make what happens outside Google less important. I think they may do exactly the opposite.

The better Google becomes at automating the bottom of the journey, the more valuable differentiation becomes at the top and middle of it. If competitors increasingly use the same automated systems to capture demand, the advantage has to come from somewhere else.

It comes from what the consumer already knows, what they already trust, what they already remember and what influenced them before they ever opened Google and searched.

As Google gets better at capturing demand, the competitive advantage may increasingly belong to the brands that understand how to influence it before Google ever sees it.

By Carole Lawson
Co-Founder & Chief Data Officer, MarketStorm