Google staged the EMEA edition of its annual Google Marketing Live event today, broadcasting a digital-only show that asked advertisers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa to move more of their campaign work into the hands of artificial intelligence. The roughly 72-minute programme repackaged announcements first made one day earlier at the main Mountain View keynote and the I/O developer event, framing them for a regional audience through customer case studies and a live product question-and-answer segment.

The EMEA show opened with a single organising idea that the company calls the "Gemini advantage." Debbie Weinstein, Google's president in EMEA, set the tone in her opening segment. According to Weinstein, the year marked 25 years since Google first opened regional offices in London and Hamburg, and she described the current period as an "expansionary moment" for the company in the region. Her central argument concerned ownership of the underlying technology. According to Weinstein, Google builds the full stack rather than renting it, spanning the chips, the research, the models and the advertising platform.

The presentation, hosted by YouTube creator Max Klymenko, divided its content into four areas: search and commerce, performance on YouTube, measurement, and what Google terms agentic marketing. Steph Davis, Google's vice president for customer solutions in EMEA, named those four areas at the start of the broadcast. The structure mirrored the main Google Marketing Live keynote, which took place on May 20, 2026, one day after Google I/O 2026.

A new generation of search ad formats

Search occupied the largest share of the EMEA programme. Shashi Thakur, vice president for Search Ads and Ads on Google Experiences, framed the shift around changing user behaviour. According to figures presented during the show, AI Overviews now reaches more than 2.5 billion monthly users, and queries entered into AI Mode run roughly three times longer than traditional searches. Google argues that longer queries produce richer signals of purchase intent, and that those signals require ad formats built to interpret conversational language rather than discrete keywords.

The company confirmed during the broadcast that AI Max for Search has moved out of beta. AI Max for Search campaigns operate through three mechanisms: search term matching that expands reach using broad match and keywordless technology, text customisation that generates headlines and descriptions, and final URL expansion that directs users to the most relevant landing page. Google declared the format out of beta on April 15, 2026, in the same announcement that confirmed Dynamic Search Ads will be retired and automatically upgraded to AI Max for Search starting in September 2026.

During the EMEA show, Google cited a 27% conversion uplift for AI Max. That figure carries a history. When the format first entered global open beta on May 6, 2025, Google promised a 14% uplift in conversions or conversion value at similar cost-per-acquisition targets, with a 27% figure applied to campaigns still relying mostly on exact and phrase keywords. Independent testing has produced less consistent results. A study covering more than 250 retail campaigns, published in November 2025, found that AI Max delivered conversions at approximately 35% lower return on ad spend compared to traditional match types. Earlier testing documented in August 2025 found that roughly 99% of impressions across about 30,000 search terms produced zero conversions in one analysis.

Friction around the transition has also surfaced. Advertisers have warned that AI Max routes specific product queries to generic landing pages, a function that Dynamic Search Ads performed reliably. One freelance Google Ads manager posted a side-by-side example on LinkedIn in early May 2026 showing three precise refrigerator searches that an older Dynamic Search Ads campaign would have sent to individual product pages.

Formats inside AI Mode

Brandon Ervin, a director of product management at Google Ads, presented exclusive highlights from the main keynote showing how ads appear inside AI Mode. The demonstrations covered a new format that surfaces a relevant product within an AI-generated answer, AI-powered shopping ads that present three Gemini-curated listings with key features written in natural language, and a lead-generation format that allows a shopper to ask follow-up questions inside the ad itself before being routed to an advertiser's admissions or sales team.

According to the presentation, several of these formats are testing live in the United States, with selected European businesses in export verticals also included in trials for the lead format. The AI Mode formats are exclusive to AI Max and Performance Max campaigns.

Google has been adding paid placements to AI Mode in stages. The company formally announced a shopping ad format for AI Mode on February 11, 2026, by which point the surface had reached more than 75 million daily active users. Direct Offers, the format that lets retailers surface exclusive discounts when a shopper signals high intent, began as a pilot in January 2026 with brands including Chewy, Gap and L'Oreal, and is being upgraded with promotion bundling, native checkout and travel expansion.

Google also introduced AI Brief, a tool that lets advertisers describe brand voice, target audiences and guardrails in conversational language. According to the demonstration, the system interprets those instructions and generates ad guidelines, with previews so that advertisers can refine the output. During the product question-and-answer segment, a Google product leader contrasted AI Brief with negative keywords, arguing that conversational guidelines can express what an advertiser wants to exclude more efficiently than long negative keyword lists.

Agentic commerce and the Universal Cart

Dan Taylor, who leads global teams shaping Google's commerce technology, presented the commerce segment. According to Taylor, the foundation is the Shopping Graph, which Google describes as containing more than 60 billion product listings. The commerce announcements centre on what Google calls the Universal Commerce Protocol, an open industry standard intended to let AI agents and merchant systems exchange information in a common language.

Google unveiled the Universal Cart on May 19, 2026 at Google I/O 2026, describing it as a single intelligent shopping cart that spans merchants, surfaces and services. According to the EMEA presentation, the Universal Cart tracks price changes and alerts shoppers when items return to stock, and it is rolling out in the United States across Search and the Gemini app over the summer, with YouTube and Gemini integration to follow.

The protocol underneath it has a longer record. Google launched the Universal Commerce Protocol on January 11, 2026 at the National Retail Federation's annual conference, with Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, Target and Walmart among the co-developers. The same day, Target and Walmart enabled checkout directly inside Google's Gemini assistant. The protocol has also drawn scrutiny. A surveillance pricing debate followed the launch, with some observers questioning whether the protocol represents open commerce infrastructure or a strategic move to maintain Google's advertising position. Google published a Merchant Center help page detailing how UCP-powered checkout works on March 2, 2026, providing the clearest technical documentation to date.

According to Taylor, retailers including Zalando and Carrefour in EMEA are already using the protocol to let live inventory and loyalty data flow into search results. He also pointed to the Universal Cart and Native Checkout as products coming to the United States, describing the goal as moving a customer from curiosity to checkout in a single flow.

Creative production through Asset Studio

The commerce segment also addressed creative tools. According to Google, the company has integrated its Veo video model and the Gemini image model informally known as "nano banana" into Asset Studio, its creative production platform. Asset Studio was first announced at Google Marketing Live in May 2025 and reached advertiser accounts globally in beta in August 2025. During the EMEA show, Google said it would add a further model, referred to as Gemini Omni, over the summer.

Asset Studio also gained one-click A/B testing, a function that runs selected assets against an advertiser's best performers automatically. According to the presentation, Asset Studio connects to creative workflows including YouTube Studio, Product Studio, the Google Labs tool Pomeli, Canva and Adobe, and the company is opening the system through an API for advertisers managing large volumes of ads.

YouTube and Demand Gen

Melissa, a director of product management for YouTube ads, answered four audience questions in a dedicated segment. According to figures presented during the show, conversions on Demand Gen campaigns have grown more than 30% over the prior six months, and creator partnerships can produce a 20% increase in conversion lift when brands use authentic creator assets. Google said YouTube has more than 3 million creators vetted and available to work with brands.

Demand Gen evolved from Google's consolidation of video advertising products, with YouTube Video Action campaigns transitioning to the format by April 2025. At Google Marketing Live 2026, Google announced a package of Demand Gen updates including Google Maps as a new ad inventory surface, product feed expansion to the automotive category, AI-assisted campaign creation that copies settings from an existing Performance Max campaign, and checkout links expanded to nine new markets. The EMEA show confirmed that Demand Gen ads have launched on Google Maps directly.

According to Google, the combination of Google and YouTube appears on 82% of all purchase journeys, and a marketing mix modelling study conducted with TransUnion found 40% higher return on ad spend when the two are used together. The company also stated that YouTube delivers 1.3 times the return on investment of paid social media in EMEA. These figures were presented by Google and were not independently verified during the broadcast.

A regional detail surfaced during the YouTube segment: according to data Google cited, 55% of YouTube Shorts viewers in Germany are not present on TikTok. Creator partnership infrastructure has been a recurring subject of Google's 2026 product communication, with the company unifying BrandConnect and the Creator Partnerships Hub into a single tool in March 2026.

Measurement: Meridian moves into Analytics 360

Harikesh Nair, who leads Google's measurement team, presented the data segment, structuring it around three elements: data strength, causality and a unified view. The headline structural change is the integration of Meridian, Google's open-source marketing mix model, directly into a reimagined Google Analytics 360.

Google announced at Google Marketing Live 2026 that it is integrating Meridian into Google Analytics 360 while introducing Qualified Future Conversions, a Gemini-powered metric designed to connect current advertising spend to predicted future sales. According to that coverage, the change represents the most significant structural shift in how Google's tools handle cross-channel performance data since Meridian became globally available in January 2025.

The EMEA show detailed two new metrics. The first, attributed branded searches, measures the link between a user seeing an ad and that user subsequently searching for the brand. The second, qualified future conversions, analyses key actions a user takes shortly after seeing an ad and uses AI to connect those actions to sales as far as six months ahead. According to the presentation, attributed branded searches address short-run impact while qualified future conversions address long-run impact.

The integration lets advertisers analyse performance across Google, Pinterest, Snap and other social channels in one location, and run scenario planning through a conversational interface. Meridian itself has undergone steady development, including a September 2025 update that added pricing and promotion variables and channel-level contribution priors, and a Scenario Planner that launched in February 2026 to provide a no-code budget planning interface. Google's pre-event measurement disclosures in May 2026 covered a Data Manager Map View, Meridian GeoX and Meridian Studio.

During the product question-and-answer segment, a Google representative noted a privacy-related change for advertisers. According to the explanation given on stage, starting June 15, 2026, settings that control the collection of Google Ads cookie identifiers from the Analytics tag become destination-specific: data used in Google Analytics will be controlled by Google signals, and data used in Google Ads will be controlled by Ads consent mode. The representative noted that advertisers who set ad storage to denied may see a decrease in remarketing list sizes.

The measurement team also addressed data foundations. According to the presentation, advertisers who adopt Google Tag Gateway see a 14% average increase in conversions, and advertisers who build first-party data strength see an 11% average increase in incremental return on ad spend.

Ask Advisor: from many agents to one

The final product segment, presented by Steph Davis, covered what Google calls agentic marketing. According to Davis, Google is moving from a family of separate agents to a single agent called Ask Advisor.

Google launched Ask Advisor at Google Marketing Live 2026, describing it as a unified Gemini agent that connects Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Marketing Platform and Merchant Center into one continuous conversational interface. According to Google, Ask Advisor absorbs Ads Advisor, Analytics Advisor and a Merchant Center agent that was in development, and it carries a shared memory layer so the agent retains a user's goals across tasks.

The predecessor tools had only recently matured. Ads Advisor reached all English-language Google Ads accounts in December 2025 after a staged rollout that began at Think Week in September 2025, and gained three agentic safety features, including real-time policy reviews, in April 2026. According to the EMEA presentation, Ask Advisor can answer questions such as how to optimise a campaign for new customer acquisition, and Google framed it as a tool that allows a smaller business to access expertise it could not previously afford, and an agency to service more clients with the same team. Ask Advisor is available globally for English-language accounts and is currently in beta.

Why this matters for the marketing community

The EMEA show carried a consistent message beneath its individual announcements: Google wants advertisers to move the execution layer of campaign management to Gemini, while retaining control over goals, inputs and guardrails. PPC Land's recap of the main keynote described the effect as moving advertiser control upstream, with Gemini handling keyword matching, asset generation, optimisation and measurement. For marketers, that shift changes the nature of the work rather than removing it. Steph Davis told the EMEA audience that execution is "becoming a commodity," and that an advertiser's thinking and judgement are what set the work apart.

The practical consequences are concrete. The retirement of Dynamic Search Ads in September 2026 forces a structural change on every advertiser still running that format. The integration of marketing mix modelling into a standard analytics product lowers the barrier to a measurement method that previously required dedicated data-science teams. The Universal Commerce Protocol, if adopted broadly, changes where a transaction completes, moving checkout onto Google's surfaces rather than a merchant's website.

Several caveats deserve attention. Many of the products shown at the EMEA event are not yet generally available: the AI Mode ad formats are testing in the United States, the Universal Cart is rolling out in the United States over the summer, and Ask Advisor remains in beta for English-language accounts. The performance figures cited throughout the broadcast - the 27% conversion uplift, the 40% return on ad spend gain, the 1.3 times advantage over paid social - were presented by Google. Independent testing of AI Max, documented by PPC Land across 2025, has produced results that diverge from Google's headline claims, which gives advertisers reason to validate performance against their own data before committing budget.

The EMEA edition also sits within a wider pattern. At I/O 2026 on May 19, Google upgraded AI Mode with a new default model, persistent background agents and a redesigned search box, and reported that AI Mode had surpassed one billion monthly users. The advertising announcements at Google Marketing Live build directly on that consumer-facing search infrastructure. For marketers in EMEA, the show functioned less as a set of discrete product launches and more as a single direction of travel, one that asks practitioners to reconsider how they spend their time as the technical side of campaign management becomes increasingly automated.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Google presented the EMEA edition of Google Marketing Live, hosted by YouTube creator Max Klymenko, with appearances from Debbie Weinstein (president, EMEA), Steph Davis (vice president, customer solutions, EMEA), Shashi Thakur (vice president, Search Ads and Ads on Google Experiences), Dan Taylor (commerce technology lead), Harikesh Nair (measurement lead) and several product leaders. The audience was advertisers, agencies and marketers across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

What: A roughly 72-minute digital show covering four areas - search and commerce, performance on YouTube, measurement, and agentic marketing. Key items included AI Max for Search out of beta, new AI Mode ad formats and AI Brief, the Universal Cart and Universal Commerce Protocol, Asset Studio updates, Demand Gen on Google Maps, the integration of Meridian into Google Analytics 360 with attributed branded searches and qualified future conversions, and Ask Advisor, a single Gemini agent consolidating Google's separate advisory tools.

When: The EMEA show was broadcast today, May 21, 2026, beginning at 11:00 BST. It followed the main Google Marketing Live keynote on May 20, 2026 and Google I/O 2026 on May 19, 2026.

Where: The event ran as a digital-only broadcast for the EMEA region, distinct from the in-person components Google has historically hosted in Dublin. The main Google Marketing Live keynote was livestreamed from Google's Bay View campus in Mountain View, California.

Why: Google used the show to ask advertisers to move campaign execution into Gemini-powered automation while retaining control over goals and guardrails. The company framed accurate measurement, AI-ready campaign formats and agentic tools as the path to performance in an automated advertising environment, positioning the "Gemini advantage" as the organising idea behind every segment.

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