Google's New 'Ask Advisor' Folds Ads, Analytics, and Merchant Center Into One Gemini Agent

At Google Marketing Live 2026 in New York on May 20, 2026, Google introduced Ask Advisor, a single Gemini-powered agent that stitches Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center, and the Google Marketing Platform into one continuous workspace. VP of Google Ads and Commerce Vidhya Srinivasan framed it as an "always-on strategic partner" that moves across products without forcing marketers to switch tabs or rebuild context.

The pitch is structural rather than incremental. A campaign manager today juggles half a dozen consoles to read performance data in one place, adjust budgets in another, troubleshoot disapprovals in a third, and rewrite creative in a fourth. Ask Advisor collapses the loop: ask a question in plain English, get back diagnostics, recommendations, and the actions to execute them — all grounded in the advertiser's own account data and tied directly to the underlying tools.

Google also unveiled a fresh slate of Gemini-built ad formats designed for AI Mode in Google Search. Conversational Discovery ads dynamically generate creative tailored to a specific query, Business Agent for Leads replaces static lead-gen forms with a chat agent grounded in the advertiser's website, and AI-powered Shopping ads surface category-relevant products with custom Gemini-written explainers. The bet is that conversational search demands conversational ads, and that legacy keyword-bid formats will not survive intact.

Creative production gets a similar overhaul. Asset Studio now uses Google DeepMind's Gemini Omni multimodal model to generate and edit video ad creative from natural-language prompts, and ingests brand guidelines so output stays on-brand without manual templating. On the measurement side, Google is folding its open-source Marketing Mix Model Meridian into Google Analytics 360 alongside Future Long-Term Conversions, repositioning GA360 as a unified command center for causal performance and predictive planning.

The agentic commerce stack got concrete additions too. The Universal Commerce Protocol is expanding to new verticals, the new Universal Cart standardizes checkout across surfaces, and the Agent Payments Protocol continues to fill in the plumbing for autonomous purchases. Travel partners Booking and Expedia are wired into AI-assisted trip planning, with Direct Offers gaining promotion bundling that lets Gemini construct a deal per query. Taken together, Marketing Live 2026 reads less like a product roadmap than a rebuild of the entire Google ads stack around a single agentic model.