What’s next in Paid Search, and how can brands prepare? A Q&A with our Senior Paid Search Partner, Steve Hughes

Before we start, can you tell us a little bit about your role as Senior Paid Search Partner at OP?

At Open Partners, my role focuses on the development of our Paid Search product, making sure it aligns with our agency mission, to be The Agency of Next, and our purpose, to be smarter, faster, and better for everyone. In practice that means my job is to think about the future of Paid Search so our clients don’t have to, and ensure that offering is delivered with speed, efficiency, and at the cutting edge of what platforms like Google have to offer.

In the current landscape, my focus is centered around the amalgamation of search. A lot of people think search is just something that happens on Google, but it’s happening everywhere. On YouTube, TikTok, in AI engines. It’s far more fragmented than it used to be, so our focus on the Paid team is ensuring our strategies align with that shift in consumer behaviour so we can deliver the best possible outcomes for our clients.

I also make sure my team and I maintain strong, collaborative relationships with clients so that we really understand their business and goals and deliver to an ultra high standard. Without that, we wouldn’t be able to tailor growth strategies in the right way.

The Paid Search landscape is undergoing a lot of rapid change in the AI era. What’s been the most significant change, and what’s the situation today?

The reality is that AI has been used in paid search optimisation for a long time. We’ve seen the technology in bid strategies since 2016. This moved us away from manual bid management using excel and aggregated data, toward optimising for individual users through machine learning.

So until fairly recently, AI’s biggest impact was largely centered around automation and efficiency. But over the last couple of years its use cases in PPC have exploded. Manual tasks like writing ad copy and managing basic performance evaluations are big time savers now that help PPC’ers focus on higher-level strategic initiatives.

In 2026, we’re operating in a completely different space compared to even a few years ago. Paid Search has evolved from individual campaigns to a more consolidated model. Every major platform also functions as a search engine now, so the likes of Google have expanded bottom-funnel marketing beyond traditional SERPs into YouTube, Discover feeds, and Gmail, and we’re able to track a single user across multiple services within a single campaign. Strategies now need to be really tailored toward individual users, factor in multiple platforms and focus on discoverability.

There’s also the small matter of optimising not just for humans, but for the machines as agentic AI grows.

You’ve just come back from Google Marketing Live. What do you think are the biggest changes or growth opportunities in Paid Search right now?

Speaking of more in the immediate term, I think AI models will significantly shorten consumer journeys and reduce friction across every industry. If you think about the process of buying a nice gift for someone, you’d usually research across multiple sites, maybe even see the product in person. But you now can put specifications and details into an AI engine and get the perfect item surfaced straight away, and then you may be able to buy that natively on Google via Google Pay, without ever going to a website or dealing with a checkout process.

That lack of friction means the overall retail index will get bigger. The amount of revenue, products sold, and the size of the industry could skyrocket from this alone. That in particular is a huge opportunity for retail brands to capitalise on. But obviously the ones who act sooner will grab the biggest piece of the pie.

And what about the longer term?

Definitely agentic AI, where AI agents will, in part, replace human decision-making around purchasing. At GML, it was remarkable how fast all of this is moving, and Google Spark really caught my attention, as it connects natively across the entire Google infrastructure on your phone, computer, etc. to make autonomous decisions on behalf of users. It’s basically the ultimate tool to browse, book, and buy, with the eventual reality being that an AI agent can, for example, plan an entire holiday for you, including putting it in your calendar and planning it out for you, through to booking the flights and accommodation and completing all your travel shopping.

Personally, I don’t think humans are quite there yet though. It won’t be until the recommendations are really good time and time again, that people feel they can trust the AI to operate independently on their behalf. But that is generally the direction we are headed in.

And this comes just after OpenAI announced ChatGPT Ads in the UK. What should brands be focusing on right now to ensure they’re prepared for all of this?

There’s quite a lot to cover to answer that, but in summary there are a few core areas of focus for brands. The first is prioritising their technical infrastructure, meaning shifting from people-first websites to optimising infrastructure that appeals to bots. Data architecture is incredibly important as it feeds algorithms with the correct information that enables them to perform properly against business goals.

The ChatGPT platform is brand new, and it’s being marketed as a pilot for a reason, it’s as-yet unproven and the inputs and controls available to users are years behind a platform like Google Ads but It’s my guess that it will catch up at a very fast pace.

While we need to attract the bots and optimise for AI engines, the brand still needs to resonate with people, and initial brand discovery by the human user is essential. Brands should really aim for integration and harmony between organic and paid search, making sure they surface in LLMs through strong organic visibility and citations and pair this with highly tailored paid ads at the point of purchase.

Speaking of ChatGPT Ads, do you think this new channel is going to be disruptive? How do you see it playing out?

I think the initial pilot of ChatGPT Ads is going to be really interesting because it’s a brand new Paid Search platform, and we’ve not had a breakthrough platform like that in a very long time. It’s causing a lot of chatter right now, because I think it has the potential to become massive, but it really depends on whether it really can deliver performance that scales for brands.

If the pilot struggles to show true incrementality over organic search or existing Paid Search, brands may lose interest.

The natural evolution, and what might ensure it sticks around, is it expanding beyond its current model, as it currently only offers CPM or CPC strategies. It will change with the introduction of conversion-based bid strategies, similar to those pioneered by Google, and sophisticated interfaces that show reporting on audiences and search queries like in more established platforms.

Which verticals do you think will benefit most from ChatGPT ads?

Definitely travel and automotive, or brands that offer goods that need a lot of consideration. I recently bought a new car (and I know nothing about cars), so I used ChatGPT to help me figure out what to buy. That would be a great opportunity for an Automotive brand to have served an ad.

Essentially, any instance where a user needs to purchase something that takes quite a lot of consideration and research is a strong opportunity for an ad.

There’s plenty to be keeping on top of in Paid Search. How are you able to operate at pace for clients?

I think it definitely comes down to a few things. Firstly, the agency is just relentlessly focused on the future, and that means we’re actively encouraged to get to the latest events, access the latest training, and work really closely with our Alpha Partners (Google, Meta, TikTok, and Amazon). We actually support them with beta testing and helping shape future products, so we’re always a few steps ahead of the market.

Then there’s our model, which is totally integrated. We have three core disciplines: Media, Data, and Creative, and having those pillars under one roof, with the right specialists in the right areas working together, means operations are super fast and frictionless. The speed at which we can move has probably quadrupled even over the last couple of years.

Search is its own entity, but it is powered significantly by the data and the creative that is fed into it. Take for example YouTube, which is the second biggest search engine in the world – you need to feed strong creative into those campaigns to get them to perform. But they also need to be targeted based on the right data. It’s all extremely intertwined so our integrated model just makes my job a lot easier, and the results for clients a lot stronger.

Finally, what’s your main piece of advice to brands doing paid search in 2026?

The pace at which marketing is moving is pretty unprecedented, and it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out, getting left behind. Some may even have a sense of existential dread. The main thing to remember is that platforms like Google have made accessing all of their newest innovations incredibly easy, starting in 2021 with the introduction of Performance Max.

My advice is simple – lean into the new way that paid search is done as soon as you can. Opt into the new age of Google products, Pmax and AI max are a brilliant start. Test these with optimism and the right approach to media, creative and data and the results will follow.