Is Google's New Ask Advisor AI Actually Helping Advertisers? A Hands-On Review
Google continues to push AI deeper into the Google Ads platform, and its latest addition is Ask Advisor – an AI-powered assistant designed to analyse accounts, recommend improvements, and even complete optimisation tasks on your behalf.
On paper, it sounds like the beginning of the fully autonomous AI agent Google demonstrated during Google Marketing Live. But after testing Ask Advisor extensively, the experience reveals both promising functionality and some significant concerns.
Here's what happened when we put Google's new AI assistant to the test.
Key takeaway: Ask Advisor shows genuine promise as an optimisation tool, but in its current beta form it often prioritises recommendations that encourage higher ad spend rather than identifying genuine efficiency improvements.
What Is Google Ads Ask Advisor?
Ask Advisor replaces Google's previous Ads Advisor chatbot, which offered conversational guidance inside the Google Ads interface.
The earlier version was largely limited to answering questions and often produced poor-quality responses. Google's latest version is far more ambitious.
The new Ask Advisor aims to:
- Understand your business goals
- Analyse your Google Ads account
- Suggest campaign improvements
- Complete optimisation tasks automatically
- Interact directly with your account through an AI agent
This represents Google's move towards an agentic AI experience, where AI doesn't simply make recommendations but actively performs work inside your account.
First Impressions: A Promising Start
When launching Ask Advisor, the onboarding process feels surprisingly sensible.
The system first asks questions such as:
- What are your business goals?
- Who are you within the organisation?
- Are you focused on revenue, profit or market share?
This is encouraging because meaningful optimisation should always begin with business objectives rather than generic advertising metrics.
In the test account, the stated goals were straightforward:
- Increase revenue
- Increase profitability
These objectives should theoretically guide every recommendation the AI makes.
Conversion Tracking Check: Good... But Limited
One particularly exciting feature appeared early in the process.
Ask Advisor requested permission to access the website to verify conversion tracking.
This closely resembles the AI demonstrations Google showcased during Google Marketing Live, where AI agents actively inspected websites and verified tracking implementations.
However, the reality was less impressive.
The AI successfully:
- Detected the Google Tag
- Confirmed the tag existed on the website
But it failed to:
- Verify actual conversion actions
- Test whether conversion tracking worked correctly
- Validate the complete tracking setup
Essentially, it behaved similarly to Google Tag Assistant rather than performing a comprehensive conversion audit.
While useful, this functionality currently falls well short of what many advertisers expected.
The First Recommendation: Spend More Money
After understanding the business goals, Ask Advisor analysed the account.
The very first recommendation?
Increase the campaign budget.
The campaign was already spending approximately 104% of its allocated budget, which is perfectly normal for Google Ads.
Instead of examining:
- keyword efficiency
- search terms
- bidding strategy
- account structure
- wasted spend
the AI immediately recommended increasing budget to generate more conversions.
At first glance, this recommendation isn't necessarily wrong.
More budget often does produce more conversions.
However, there is a critical distinction between increasing conversions and improving profitability.
What Happened When the Budget Was Fixed?
To test whether Ask Advisor understood constraints, the AI was told something very simple:
"The budget is fixed."
Rather than adapting its recommendations, the AI responded by suggesting...
...a smaller budget increase.
Despite being explicitly told that increasing spend wasn't possible, the AI continued pushing for additional budget.
This raises an important concern.
An AI optimisation assistant should adapt to business constraints rather than repeatedly recommending actions that have already been ruled out.
Performance Max Was the Next Recommendation
After rejecting further budget increases, Ask Advisor proposed another solution:
Launch a Performance Max campaign.
Again, there were obvious issues.
The account already had:
- a fixed budget
- profitable Search campaigns
- revenue and profit as primary objectives
Launching another campaign would simply split an already limited budget.
Instead of identifying efficiencies inside the existing campaign, the AI recommended adding another campaign type.
Then Came Demand Gen
After rejecting Performance Max, Ask Advisor suggested...
Demand Gen campaigns.
This recommendation was even more surprising.
Demand Gen sits much higher in the marketing funnel than Search.
While Demand Gen absolutely has its place, it generally makes more sense when:
- Search demand has already been maximised
- budgets are healthy
- businesses are looking for incremental growth
None of those conditions applied in this test account.
Once again, the AI appeared more interested in promoting additional campaign types than solving the original business problem.
Does Ask Advisor Really Understand Business Goals?
Throughout the conversation, the AI repeatedly acknowledged the stated objectives:
- increase revenue
- improve profitability
- maintain a fixed budget
Yet its recommendations consistently ignored those constraints.
Only after being challenged several times did the AI eventually agree that Search remained the most logical area for investment.
That raises an important question:
How many less experienced advertisers would simply accept the AI's recommendations without questioning them?
Looking for Genuine Optimisations
After rejecting repeated spending suggestions, the AI was asked something far more practical:
"Can you identify efficiency improvements inside the account?"
Initially, it simply ended the conversation.
Only after further prompting did it begin offering genuine optimisation ideas, including:
- reducing target CPA
- improving landing pages
- reviewing search terms
- finding negative keywords
These recommendations were much more useful.
However, most were fairly generic rather than being deeply personalised using actual account data.
The Most Impressive Feature: AI Search Term Analysis
The highlight of the entire test came when Ask Advisor offered to analyse search terms.
Unlike previous recommendations, this feature genuinely leveraged AI capabilities.
After receiving permission, Google's AI:
- opened the account
- navigated through Search Terms reports
- reviewed actual search queries
- identified potential negative keywords
Even more impressively, it found two legitimate negative keyword opportunities inside a mature account that is already reviewed weekly.
This demonstrated genuine value.
Rather than offering generic advice, the AI successfully analysed real account data and surfaced actionable improvements.
Where It Still Falls Short
Although Ask Advisor identified suitable negative keywords, it stumbled at the final step.
The AI attempted to add the negative keywords automatically but failed to complete the task.
Instead, manual intervention was required before the optimisation could be finished.
Since one of the major promises of agentic AI is completing tasks from start to finish, this remains an area requiring further development.
The Biggest Concern
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from testing Ask Advisor is its apparent incentive structure.
Throughout much of the conversation, the AI consistently prioritised recommendations that would increase Google's advertising revenue:
- increase budgets
- launch Performance Max
- create Demand Gen campaigns
Only after sustained questioning did it begin discussing account efficiency.
That creates a potential risk.
Less experienced advertisers may assume Google's AI always knows best and follow recommendations that aren't actually aligned with their own commercial objectives.
The Good News
Despite the concerns, there are genuine reasons to be optimistic.
The underlying technology clearly has potential.
Features such as:
- automated search term reviews
- browser-based account navigation
- AI-assisted optimisation
- task automation
could save experienced advertisers considerable amounts of time.
If Google continues improving the agent while placing greater emphasis on business objectives rather than advertising spend, Ask Advisor could become a genuinely valuable optimisation assistant.
Final Verdict
Google's Ask Advisor is an interesting glimpse into the future of AI-powered Google Ads management.
The technology already demonstrates some genuinely useful capabilities, particularly around automating repetitive optimisation tasks such as reviewing search terms and identifying negative keywords.
However, in its current beta form, it still behaves more like a sales assistant than a trusted account manager.
Instead of deeply analysing account performance, it frequently defaults to recommending:
- higher budgets
- additional campaign types
- increased advertising spend
Experienced advertisers will likely benefit from challenging the AI's recommendations and using it selectively for automation tasks.
For newer advertisers, however, Ask Advisor should be treated as a source of suggestions rather than unquestionable advice.
As Google's AI continues to evolve, the technology has enormous potential—but for now, human judgement remains essential when making important optimisation decisions.
