The overnight 10x
Every week there's another post claiming that connecting Claude to a Google Ads account will 10x revenue overnight. Honestly, I find it a bit embarrassing for our industry.
What bothers me most is that some of it comes from people with big followings in PPC, people others look to for direction. If the message from the top is "plug AI in and everything's fixed", then I'm not sure what anyone is paying a specialist for.
I don't think that's true, and I don't think most of the people posting it believe it either. But it's an easy story to sell, and eCommerce owners under pressure to cut costs are exactly the audience who'll want to believe it.
Google already has the better model
Google and Meta run some of the most sophisticated machine learning systems in the world. Their bidding sees auction-time signals, user behaviour, device, location, conversion history and a lot more that never shows up in your account.
An LLM connected through an API sees the reporting layer: the same campaign, keyword and search term data you could export yourself. It can't see the auction, and it can't bid better than Smart Bidding on signals it doesn't have access to.
So I'd be wary of anyone framing AI as the thing that outsmarts the platform. That isn't where the value is.
Where AI genuinely helps
This isn't me being anti AI. I use it every day, and it's made me noticeably faster at the parts of the job that used to eat hours.
- Reporting and analysis. Pulling performance data together, spotting what moved and why, and turning it into something a client can actually read. What used to take an afternoon now takes far less.
- Finding negatives. Working through thousands of search terms to flag irrelevant intent is exactly the kind of pattern matching LLMs are good at. I still review the list, but the first pass is much quicker.
- Iterating on copy and creative ideas. Generating headline variations, testing angles and briefing visual concepts. It's a good sparring partner when you've been staring at the same ad for too long.
- Keyword grouping. Sorting a long keyword list into tight, themed ad groups is tedious by hand and quick with AI, as long as you know what a good grouping looks like.
- Keyword research. Expanding seed terms, finding long-tail variations and surfacing angles you hadn't considered.
What I'd point out is that every one of these is a speed task. They save time, but none of them decide what the account should be doing. (I've gone into more detail on each in what should AI actually be used for in PPC.)
What it doesn't replace
AI hasn't replaced the thinking. It still needs someone who knows what a healthy account looks like, which questions are worth asking, and when the answer it gives back is confidently wrong. And it will be confidently wrong, regularly.
The decisions that actually move profit for an eCommerce brand are still human ones. How the account is structured, which products deserve budget, what margin each sale really carries, whether a campaign is driving incremental revenue or just claiming credit for sales that would have happened anyway.
Those are commercial judgements. An LLM can help you get to them faster, but it doesn't know your margins, your stock position or your business goals unless someone who does tells it.
If it doubled your ROAS, ask why
If an LLM really does double your ROAS in a fortnight, I'd say that tells you more about the state of the account beforehand than it does about the AI.
In most accounts I audit, the big wins come from fundamentals: bloated structures, broad match left unchecked, wasted spend on irrelevant search terms, tracking that doesn't reflect real revenue. AI can surface those faster, but a competent media buyer should have been catching them anyway.
So if you've seen a dramatic jump after plugging AI in, it's worth asking what was being missed before, and whether whoever was managing the account should have spotted it.
The honest version
AI makes a good media buyer faster and sharper. It doesn't make a media buyer unnecessary, and it won't fix an account that nobody is thinking about properly.
If you've been sold the overnight version and the results haven't followed, or you'd like a second opinion on where your account actually stands, get in touch.