Discovery Ads sunset October 2024. The replacement is Demand Gen — a black-box format that runs across YouTube, Discover, and Gmail with almost no advertiser control. Performance Max ate everything else. Procter & Gamble's Marc Pritchard, Unilever's CMO Esi Eggleston Bracey, and the ANA's Bob Liodice have each said publicly some version of the same complaint: Google moved measurement and control inside a layer advertisers cannot audit. The 2024 DOJ antitrust ruling against Google in the search-advertising case did not change the product roadmap.
The Discovery to Demand Gen handoff
Discovery Ads launched 2019 under Vidhya Srinivasan, then VP of Google Ads Buy Side. The pitch was clean: take Facebook's native-feed format, apply it to YouTube, Discover, and Gmail, layer in Google's intent signal. It worked for direct-response advertisers. American Eagle, Dollar Shave Club, and Allbirds ran among the largest spends. CPMs were competitive with Meta. The format was killed September 2023 — wind-down ran through October 2024 — and migrated into Demand Gen, which added Lookalike Segments, AI-generated creative variants, and short-form video as native units.
Google's argument: better performance, more volume, AI handling what your media planner used to do manually. Vidhya Srinivasan and the Google Ads leadership team pitched Demand Gen at Google Marketing Live 2024 as the future of upper-funnel performance. The advertiser experience differed. Search Engine Land's Ginny Marvin, who covers Google Ads more closely than anyone else in trade press, documented the asset-level reporting gaps in real time. Adalysis founder Brad Geddes published a series on cost-per-acquisition swings inside Demand Gen that read like beta-testing on production budgets. Aaron Levy at Tinuiti called the format opaque enough that he ran client holdouts to verify the platform's incrementality claims independently.
Performance Max: what it took, what it broke
Performance Max launched November 2021 and went general availability mid-2022. Smart Shopping, Local campaigns, and standard Display were absorbed. By 2024, Performance Max accounted for the majority of Google Ads incremental revenue growth. By 2025, large advertisers — including Marriott, MGM Resorts, Allstate, Lowe's, and Wayfair — had spent two full years trying to break the format into modules they could actually steer. The Optmyzr 2024 PPC Town Hall reports tracked the share of Google budget that moved into Performance Max across more than 12,000 advertiser accounts: from under 10% in 2022 to north of 40% by mid-2025.
What got better: cross-channel optimization without manually managing five campaign types. What got worse: brand safety controls, search-query transparency, and the ability to exclude existing customers from acquisition spend. The cannibalization of branded search became the single most-discussed measurement problem of the post-pandemic ad era. Adidas — through then head of media effectiveness Simon Peel — disclosed in 2018 that nearly 80% of their digital spend had been incremental-free brand search; the disclosure prompted an industry-wide audit cycle that Performance Max made considerably harder to repeat.
The data Google won't show you
Advertisers cannot see — in Performance Max or Demand Gen — the breakdown by individual surface, the search terms that triggered which conversion, the placement-level brand safety data, or the share of spend going to YouTube versus Display versus Search Partners versus Gmail. Some of this is recoverable through scripts written by Mike Rhodes at WebSavvy or Frederick Vallaeys at Optmyzr, and through BigQuery exports for advertisers on GA4 360. Most of it is not. The DOJ antitrust filings made public during the 2023 and 2024 trial confirmed what most advertisers already suspected: the data Google withholds is the data that would let advertisers price their campaigns rationally. Judge Amit Mehta's August 2024 ruling that Google is a monopolist did not unlock the reporting layer.
The advertiser revolt timeline
Procter & Gamble cut digital advertising by $200M in 2017 and showed no revenue impact. The lesson stuck across the largest spenders. By 2023, Unilever, Diageo, and Estée Lauder were running structured holdouts inside Performance Max. By 2024, the trade press carried a steady stream of CMOs publicly questioning Google's reporting. Marketing Brew, Digiday, AdExchanger, and Adweek each ran multi-part investigations through 2024 and 2025. The Association of National Advertisers' 2023 transparency report, authored by Bob Liodice, accused the programmatic ecosystem of leaking up to 30% of every advertiser dollar before it reached working media. By 2025, the WPP and Publicis frameworks for incrementality testing had become standard procurement requirements for any advertiser spending more than $50M annually on Google. Omnicom's Annalect and Dentsu's Merkle published their own measurement frameworks in response.
The structural threat to Google Ads is not a competing ad network. It is a category of consumer behavior — research inside an AI engine — that does not generate a Google query at all. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said in late 2024 the company was considering an advertising model; OpenAI walked the comments back days later. Perplexity launched sponsored questions in mid-2024 under Aravind Srinivas and continued to expand the format through 2025; advertisers including Indeed and Whole Foods ran early placements. Anthropic, under Dario Amodei, has not entered the ad market and has publicly signaled it does not intend to. Google AI Overviews carry no ads in most surfaces as of mid-2026; the monetization model remains unresolved despite Sundar Pichai signaling on earnings calls that an ad layer is being tested.
Demand Gen as a format may be the best preview of what advertising inside an AI engine eventually looks like: native, surface-agnostic, low-control, AI-mediated creative. Advertisers who learn to work the format now — and who treat its opacity as a forecast rather than a complaint — have a head start on the next channel.
What survives
Branded search inside Google still converts at rates no other channel matches. Performance Max is a tool, not a strategy. Direct media buys on premium publishers — the open-web inventory most performance teams stopped buying around 2018 in favor of programmatic — are quietly rotating back into plans. The Trade Desk, under Jeff Green, has gained share from Google's DV360 as advertisers seek alternatives that publish more transparent placement data. Retail media — Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, Target Roundel, Kroger Precision Marketing, Instacart Ads — has absorbed the budget that used to fund Google Shopping. Connected TV through Roku, Samsung Ads, Hulu, Disney's ad-tier, and Netflix's Microsoft-partnered ad product picked up a structural share of upper-funnel video that YouTube did not entirely defend.
The advertisers winning in 2026 are running a portfolio: Performance Max for reach, manual search for branded intent, programmatic through The Trade Desk for control, retail media for commerce-intent, CTV for awareness, and AI engine citation work for the discovery layer the ad market has not figured out yet. Build the diversified stack. The single-channel performance bet is the most expensive insurance policy in marketing.
Everything-PR is the intelligence platform for communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era. Thirty-plus publications. Publishing since 2009. Original reporting, research, and analysis — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
