Google's "Personal Intelligence" Just Changed Marketing Forever

Heat. Heat. [music] [music] Hello and welcome to the dojo a search marketing podcast by Exposure Ninja. I'm Dale Davies, the head of marketing exposure ninja. I'm joined by our CEO, Charlie Merchant. Hey Charlie, how's uh 2026 been treating you so far? Pretty fantastic so far. I'm really enjoying the start of this year. How about you Dale? Pretty good. Although, as uh you'll see from the title of this week's podcast, there's quite a lot of stuff coming down the track that we need to be ready for. So, I'll let you take it away from here. What's the first thing that we should be aware of for uh the new year? Yeah, absolutely. So, when it comes to search marketing, Google has dropped three massive news pieces, three massive updates all in the past week. We're going to go through all three of them and what that actually means for businesses and for marketing teams. So, the first and the biggest is Gemini personalization. So, Google's basically just launched something called personal intelligence. This is allowing you to connect your Google apps, Gmail, YouTube, search, photos, all of that directly to Gemini to get personalized answers. This is huge. So, it basically means that Google's Gemini will be able to read your emails, check your past purchases, see your order confirmations in there, see what videos you've been watching on YouTube, where you went on Google Maps, if you reviewed somewhere, where you liked, and then personalize the answers with all of your data. This personalization isn't new in a sense. We've had it in chat GPT for a while. But the huge difference here is that Google's been collecting personal data, behavioral, contextual data about us for decades if we've been Google users. And so many people are Google users. We use search, we use Gmail, maps, photos, all of that tool stack. The big big difference of course is Open AI who own Chatbt hasn't been connecting our data for that long. So what Google's just released here with personal intelligence in Gemini is going to be so much more powerful. Before anyone panics, this is currently just in beta version. It's US only and it's optin. But for me, I think the biggest thing about this is it's hugely changed the game. This is a really aggressive bite back from Google against OpenAI and other AI chatbot competitors that have been focusing on getting this personal context and personalizing answers by integrating it into their own Gemini tool stack. And we always know US always gets the good stuff first and then it rolls out further once they've made a couple of changes and tweaks to it. Have you seen any examples of how this is going to work, Charlie? Yeah. So, Google actually has uh released an example of this. You can go and read it on the uh Google News blog. Um pretty much a live example of someone who was getting a tire replaced for their car or their truck. And in the example, what happens is they're asking Gemini, okay, what do I need? I don't know anything about what specific tire I need for my car. It goes back and looks through their Google photos to a family road trip. Identifies what tire is specifically on that car. Goes back through their emails to check what kind of updates they've made to their car before, like you know, last time they went to the mechanic, last bills that they had to then tell them what it is they actually need to get, what kind of rough price they should actually be expecting for that tire as well. I recall probably this time last year when reviewing all of the other updates that were happening that you you gave a really good example of somebody's purchase journey as like an you know as an ecom buyer. somebody's maybe purchasing some new active wear or you know something like that Gemini or Google or Gemini powered Google is going to go through and understand that you often buy from one particular type of company and then it knows okay when I make my recommendations when you next search for I need a new pair of trousers or whatever it is it's going to recommend them based off it your previous purchase history it's going to look through your through Gmail and see like okay I know that they like this particular brand, I'll make sure I re recommend them first. Which means that your marketing overall has to change to make sure you're constantly in people's inboxes reminding them of, hey, you bought from us before. Yeah, absolutely. So if Google knows that you usually buy from Patagonia over Dathlon because it's seen that in your email history. It's seen your past product confirmations then it's actually going to start recommending you more and more from Patagonia knowing that you like to buy from that kind of brand less and less from brands like Dathlon or Colombia or whoever because it hasn't seen you make past purchases from them. So it's becoming much more advanced in terms of personalization. This was always the route that we were going down. Google always said this was the plan to eventually be able to get to a next level of personalization by integrating connecting all of these Google apps together using this data. I think it's going to be a bit of a scary like heartpang moment for some people because even though Google's been collecting our data for a very very long time and we we all know that Google's collecting our personal data, it's not a secret that any of these tech companies are doing that. This feels like a new level to a lot of people. Like joining all of these dots together suddenly feels like there's so much more data about us because it's actually feeding us answers back. So I think that there are going to be a couple of privacy concerns around this. But I think it will just become a new normal. Do you think that those concerns will last very long that people will change how they use Google? No. I honestly think that there will be a small segment of people who have very strong privacy concerns as there always is and quite rightly should be as well because those people advocate to ensure systems are secure and that data is wellkept which is extremely important. But I think that once Google rolls this out globally it will just become normal to us. We've already seen so many people, billions of people using chat GPT that's personalizing based on conversations that are being had with them and not pushing back against that level of personalization. For me, this is kind of just the next step in an even more personalized search experience. I think it will just become normal for most people when they're searching. What do you think this means for Open AI and Chat GPT and their share of the market? Oh my goodness. Open AI must be like they've got to have been expecting this, but they must feel like what are they going to do now? This is a huge move from Google. And we've been expecting it for some time. And actually, I think there was a bit of a feeling that Google were moving quite slowly compared to Open AI. Open AAI and Chat GBT have pretty much dominated the AI chatbot sector. So they had around 80% or more uh market share early 2025. That slowly started to erode away during last year. By the end of the year it was kind of down to about 60 65% a lot of figures were saying um particularly after Gemini's previous product update their new model um which many people have have loved and enjoyed the release of moved back over to Gemini. TouchBT at the moment though they still have the biggest market share when it comes to AI chat bots. So for me the fight isn't over but I do think this is going to be very very difficult for OpenAI to come back against once it rolls out globally. I suppose this is why OpenAI are having big updates like Chat GBT health was it that came out the other day where you can start to add more personalization in some sense of knowing more about you and kind of hoping that people become more used to using chat GPT as their default and not Google as their default. Yeah. To me, it kind of feels like the red flashing beacons are on, right? And the grenades are being thrown across from OpenAI to [laughter] Google back and forth. Um, and now it's OpenAI's team's turn to be in red alert panic mode about what the next update is going to be to try and claw back some of this market share that they're definitely losing. Were there any other threats to JGBT's uh market share? They were supposed to be working on a deal with Apple, weren't they, at some point? Yes. So, this is you've you've you've bitten the Apple there. This is the second big piece of news that Google has released this week, and this is that Google's Gemini models are going to be powering some of Apple's NextG Foundation models. So, Apple and Google have entered a multi-year AI partnership. Apple's nextgen foundation model is going to be based on Google's Gemini and cloud tech. This is huge because it means that they're going to be powering all of Apple intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri, which is set to come out this year. And Apple's basically chosen not to compete against Google with developing these kind of AI capabilities. And this partnership pretty much has publicly said that Apple thinks Google has the best version, that Gemini is the most powerful AI, that they are essentially backing Google over any other AI competitor. So, it's huge news. And from my perspective, it looks like Apple is prioritizing speed to market over building anything inhouse. Not even bothering to try and take on Google's Gemini and AI. Not going to compete on it at all. It just seems to me that overnight most of the world's mobile phones, smartphones are going to be powered by something that Google owns. beforehand it was just Android devices that were you know had gradually more Google or Gemini powered um tools within them or you know new new additions and features and now you've got all of the iPhone market which is switching over to having Gemini Power as well. That's 100% of the phone market near enough. Yeah, this is absolutely huge. It means that all of us are going to have Google's AI technology in our pockets pretty much whether we've chosen to or not in the end. And anyone who wants to read the original source for this, this was actually an ex post uh on the news from Google. It's not Twitter X account. Uh but it's basically a tweet if anyone wants to go and read the full the full update about it. Um, and I quite rightly many people in our community have been really concerned about this type of move and what it means for the market. It's essentially Google exercising a massive monopoly over the tech and the search market. Um, fantastic person to read on this is Chima from Moz who is very much a thought leader and posts on LinkedIn really regularly uh her thoughts about innovation, what it means if Google has a massive monopoly like this. And it's interesting because Google is of course involved in so many antitrust cases that are very much going on at the moment. But those cases are taking so long to actually make any decision about what's happening with Google monopolizing and probably will take years to reach any sort of outcome or decision if we're honest. That in the meantime, Google's just monopolizing more and more. And one of the big concerns in the SEO community around this is of of course how does that work when it means that there's not going to be that much innovation if there's not that much competition which is one of the reasons that I'm so interested to see what Open AI are going to do in response to some of these updates because Open AI have not been living in the closet. They know that this is going to happen. They know that they're an underdog when it comes to Google and the amount of resource, the amount of money that they actually have to fund this AI technology. So my hope is that there will still be a push for innovation because there are competitors like OpenAI actively trying to do something. And arguably, Google has been forced into making a lot of these big changes that we're seeing, personalization, partnerships with Apple, because there are now new AI chatbot competitors who have come along to challenge how search actually works when really we've been working on a quite traditional 10 blue links type Google search system for decades. And do you feel that a lot of these updates fall on the SEO team or the SEO agency or the SEO person responsible for SEO? Do you think it falls mostly on them or is this actually something that impacts the wider marketing team? For me, this impacts the wider marketing team though the SEOs are definitely going to bear the brunt of it because ultimately it is search optimization. But the bigger picture here is that marketing leaders, CMOs, marketing directors and even CEOs need to understand what is changing in search because an SEO team inhouse in a business can be speaking about this. Same an SEO agency can also be speaking to clients about this. But if the decision makers at the top of the business don't understand how search is changing, how AI is becoming a fixed part of our search journeys, it's going to be very difficult to get buy in to actually be working on AI search, which you have to the the days of 10 blue links, the days of traditional classical Google search as we've known it are over. If anyone I feel like people have been debating between SEO and GEO. It's almost a waste of time because it doesn't matter. Chat GBT overtaking Gemini or Google quashing open AI, none of that matters. All that actually matters at the end of the day is that AI search is going to become a new normal no matter which platform is the winner. So, you don't want to spend loads of time debating about whether SEO and GEO exists or whether Open AI or Google will be the winner. What you actually want to be doing is focusing on where the revenue is coming from for your business and how you're going to be showing up in an AI search world, which is what we are moving into, irrelevant of if that's on Chat GBT, Gemini, or classic Google. So, it's less of a tactical change. It's more of a strategic change that needs to happen. I think this is a huge strategic change that needs to happen and a lot of the tactics in terms of optimization are going to be similar in the sense that taking care of you your website's technical health taking care of your website content publishing the right kinds of content that's going to be a huge shift for many businesses and also the digital PR side tactically they're very similar but actually there's a lot of strategic differences in what the daytoday actual work looks like for SEOs, content writers, developers who are updating the website with said content schema, that kind of thing. If we've got developers working on it and PRs to make sure that content is surfacing in AI because the algorithm is not the same. It's not just the traditional Google algorithm for 10 blue links. AI, Gemini, Chat GBT, Claude Plexity, all of these AIs are working differently. So, if you just do what you've always been doing for the past 20 years, it's not going to get the same result. And when it comes to the types of businesses that are relying on search marketing, whether that's via organic or paid or or directly Google or Bing or whatever, are they going to have to think differently about it depending on what kind of business that they operate? If they're a service-based business where they're more dependent on lead generation, they may do they need to think about it one way or are ecom businesses having to think about exactly the same way. The same kind of strategy for both. I would say there's going to be very different strategies for e-commerce versus lead generation businesses when it comes to AI. And part of that is because of what will happen with ads and the heavy reliance on product ads for many many e-commerce businesses showing up which kinds of leads us into the third big news drop that Google had in the past week. Um that is something that is very dryly named the universal commerce protocol UCP which I feel like was named by a developer rather than a branding specialist. Anyway, what UCP actually is is the technology that's going to allow product purchases to be possible directly in AI mode, which is a Google search browser tab that you can navigate onto and the Gemini app without users needing to go to a website to check out. So they will be able to check out in AI mode search results in Gemini results without navigating to a business's website. For e-commerce, this is huge. This is huge news. Before anyone panics, it's of course US rollout only for now. And Google haven't said that it's happening in classic Google search, the search results with the 10 blue links that we're used to yet. That doesn't mean that it won't come. In my opinion, it definitely will. AI mode is pretty much always the testing ground. It's the test bed and classic search follows. So this universal commerce protocol UCP is a new standard that pretty much allows AI agents to understand products, manage checkouts, and then complete purchases on the users's behalf. It's kind of the next level of aentic AI that we were expecting to get to. I think many of the big leading e-commerce stores have known this was going to be coming and have started taking action around Agentic. But actually seeing this being announced by Google, actually seeing it roll out in the US, like we are here, we are in the age of Aentic AI changing our search experience. I know like having seen you speak quite a lot last year because you're an active speaker and available for more dates this year as well. Um, if you want to uh book Charlie to speak at your conference this year or event, just uh reach out to Charlie via LinkedIn. But I've seen you talk about how the funnel is being condensed gradually and gradually. Seems like it's been condensed to the point where we don't need a website anymore almost. This is a this is a huge condensation condensing of the funnel happening now. Um, so the funnel's been condensed really by chatbt, Gemini, AI, chat bots rapidly across 2024 and 2025. So many people are now doing their research phase directly in those results. Actually, just I've got a working example. Just last weekend, I decided this is the year that I learn to surf. This is the year I can stand up on a surfboard and that I'm getting off of softboard and I'm actually going to be able to surf properly. So, I decided, okay, I'm going to commit my annual leave to going on a two week surf camp. And I asked ChachiBT, where are the best surf camps that are going to take me from surfing in the white wash to actually standing up on a surfboard and being able to surf a wave properly, a green wave? It gave me loads of destinations. And then I obviously had a conversation around, okay, this is my budget and I want these kinds of water temperatures because I don't want to be wearing a 5mm wet suit and having a bad time on holiday. You know, I'm still having a nice holiday ultimately. So, give me a better idea of where I need to go. Narrow it down. So, it narrows down countries and destinations. I'm not using Google search for this. I'm just having a conversation with chat GPT. I have no interest in navigating to all of the links about water temperatures across different countries and different sides of countries and surf destinations and where's good for beginners versus where's good for intermediate. I don't want to read all of that information. I just want to get through the conversation really quickly. Once I'd narrowed down the countries, the kind of budget I want to spend, how warm it's going to be at the time of year I'm available to go on holiday, I'm actually ready to then start considering surf camps. And I've had this conversation in under 10 minutes with ChachiBT, less than that, to actually then reach a decision. Right, these are the couple of destinations that I'm going to consider going to. I'm going to consider going to Guatemala. I'm going to consider going to Sri Lanka. Which surf camps are the best in these destinations? Give me a list. And then it does. And then I've got a list of surf camps. I can actually click on them from the results in chat GPT in this specific query that I've been having. So, in under 10 minutes, I've gone from where am I going to go on holiday and surf to I'm pretty ready to be booking a surf camp based on a final two or three options that I've got from a conversation with Chat GBT. And I've navigated to those websites, which means if those websites are track are tracking AI search traffic, they'll have seen me come from AI. So, they know that I've come from there. That's that's where I originally started the conversation. But booking a holiday is a high ticket item. It's not a quick purchase. You don't make that decision in under 10 minutes and book it or a very small minority of people would make such a decision so quickly. So what will actually happen is I'll become a direct referral going straight to that website probably in a couple of weeks time when I'm finally at the stage of being ready to book my holiday. So they may not even know that I've originally come from Chbt, but this is what that condensed search journey looks like. And for a low ticket item, a lot of people would make that purchase straight away in under 15 minutes. We're not going to quibble over spending £10 on something. We're going to quibble on spending two grand on a holiday instead. It's a little bit different. But now, because we're having those conversations, we're having all of that top offunnel conversation very, very quickly. It can be done so much faster and more efficiently compared to me then having to write 10 different search queries into Google first to understand where beginners even might surf, where there are surf camps, what the sea temperatures are in all these different destinations, what the weather is in a certain month of the year. That would have taken over an hour if I'd done it the manual Google way. There is now no need for any searcher to be doing that. And more and more searchers are going to start to move to these AI chatbot apps. Whether that's chatbt, whether it's Gemini, whether whether it's one of the others is is almost neither here nor there. The search journey is being condensed. Google's AI mode is aiming to do exactly the same thing. And I suppose the future looks like this where the next time you come to book a holiday, Google Gemini Power Google is going to say, "Well, I know you've been here before because I helped you book that trip." Um, I I'm going to say at the very top, would you like you may want to go back to this destination. You spent the time there and judging from your photos, you had a great time. Would you like to go there again or would you like any of these few other places? And it recommends places that are either similar or whatever. But it's just going to recommend based off what it knows about you. And then for might actually mean that 15 other destinations are just not going to come up in the recommendations whatsoever because either you shop, you know, you shopped there before or because it just knows enough about you to not recommend those kind of things. So you've got like a really hard marketing job if you're in 15 other destinations that you've you've not been to or aren't similar to the ones you've done before. Just seems to complicate matters if I'm in charge of that marketing uh strategy. Absolutely. And for anyone who's in charge of a cross channel marketing strategy similar to the type that I've just described there, all of the clever companies of course are now remarketing to me. I receive retargeting ads for all of the surf camps that I've looked at and for other surf schools in similar destinations as well, which is speaking to the importance of having a really really joined up marketing strategy. and someone who's ignoring this very first top of the funnel part which is more and more increasingly happening in chat GBT Gemini AI chat bots they're then missing out on the middle of the funnel you can't retarget to someone who's never heard of you never been to your website has no idea who you are you can put ads out there and hope to get to the right demographic but if you've ignored the top of the funnel you've got less coming down into the middle of the funnel And if you don't have anything coming into the middle of the funnel, nothing's coming to the bottom and ultimately you're not making revenue off the back of it. So for businesses who are still burying their head in the sand about AI search, now is very much the time to realize that your competitors are thinking about it and many of them are already acting on it. I was talking just before last year and you and I were having a conversation and I was talking to you about I really want to write this thing up about dark search about how there's all this search activity that's happening in AI platforms. Um, and this is this is kind of what's happening is that people are doing purchasing decisions that aren't getting visibility and you need to track everything around it as best as you can in order to make sure that you are aware of you how people are coming through to your website because if you don't understand that, you won't know where how like where to dedicate your marketing budget. For example, I had this conversation with a client yesterday or um we're talking about self-referrals. You have to ask people how they heard about you because if you just rely upon analytics alone, you wouldn't know the full story. Like the marketing channels that our analytic software tells us is where we get our leads from does not match up with where the self-referral uh tells us where people come from. There's a complete mismatch. You need to know both. And you may not see chatb come up as a source in analytics. People might just come direct or you don't know anything at all. as you said earlier, but the self-referral is saying, "Oh, I found you in Gemini or I found you in chat GBT." So, you've got to again step back and diagnose what your current situation is and then adapt your strategy to include all this other stuff. Well, and this is the perfect example, right? The surf camp that I'm looking at, I originally, if you ask me how, if they ask me how did you hear about us, the answer is chat GPT. But when I make a purchase from them, I will come through as direct traffic because it's likely to be so significantly after and I haven't clicked a link through and made a purchase directly from chatbt. So being pretty much that's that's last attribute, right? Last last click attribution. I'm going to be the analytics tool can't attribute me to a specific source. So it's going to say, okay, she's direct traffic. And that is essentially dark traffic. They don't really know where you originally came from. So, they can't attribute it at all. So, you come under direct traffic. And we're going to see this more and more exactly as you say, Dale, because we can't see so much of what was happening now at the beginning of the search journey. And I think marketers are probably losing their minds a little bit over this, which I totally understand. But the the way I like to think about this is, as with life, you can't control everything. So, what are the variables that you can control? And how do you get enough context to understand what the majority of people might likely be doing at the beginning of the search journey? And your own search habits, if you pay attention to them, will probably tell you a lot about this to start with. And the other thing to do is just listen to stories from your friends and family about how they search for products and services because it comes up, it comes up around the family dinner table. Someone's searching for something, they'll tell you about it. And all you need to say is where did you where did you learn about that brand from? Or where did you first uh start thinking about this service? Why have you decided that you want to get your teeth whitened? How's that happened? And go from there. You'll learn a lot about user behavior, about search behavior just by understanding what people, you know, actually do when they search. I'll end on this because I've got one more question to ask uh of you. I think there was a McKenzie report that came out in August of September of last year that said something like 50% there's two numbers in my head either 50% or 67% we'll go with 50% because that's a safer more conservative number 50% of buyers start their journey their buying journey within an AI platform of some description and that includes AI overviews in Google that includes AI mode but also includes like Gemini and Chad GBT the buyer journey not just product based But service purchases too are happening in AI. So like if you haven't yet figured it out, [laughter] it's time to tackle it and we've got plenty of content to help you there. So just head over to exposurinja.com. We've got blogs, podcasts, videos. We've got you covered. So just head on over to the website. But my final question to you Charlie is if I am in the seuite or V level like I'm a VP of marketing or a marketing director, what do I do about all of these new releases that Google has dropped on us in the first month of a new year? This is a great question. The first thing to do is actually read up on what they mean and think about what that's going to mean for how people find your business. If you're in the seauite, the next thing to do is have a conversation with your marketing team. Get an assessment of how well they understand AI search. And that can be a nice conversation. That doesn't need to be a what are you doing about it? What are we getting kind of conversation? You can just get a read on how confident they feel with AI search and then have a look at some of the metrics. How much traffic is coming from AI search? How many conversions are coming from AI search? Is that growing over time? If you don't have that in place, that's the first step. Get some tracking in place. Very simply, you can just separate it out in your Google Analytics so that you have something to work from. And as you said earlier, Dale, there's going to be a lot of dark traffic. There's going to be a lot that isn't attributed directly to AI search, but you can at least get a read on a portion of what is able to be attributed to AI search so that you can see what's happening. Then the next stage is to understand what are the marketing team's plans around ensuring that you show in AI answers. Have they thought about what kind of prompts, what kind of queries that people are searching in AI that they want to show for? That's incredibly important because you want to be showing up similar to how you want to show up on Google for certain keywords. You want AI to surface you for certain types of topics around your products, your services, but also around questions that people might ask earlier in the funnel before they definitely know that they need your product or your service. So first understanding what's happening with that understanding what kind of content and context and answers you want to be showing up in then making sure that there's a tactical plan and seuite shouldn't have to be involved in what are the specific tasks that we're actually doing to make headway on this seuite only need top level overview so you just need to be confident that your marketing team have got this that they're working on it they're working towards something and if they are struggling if this is very very new particularly If you have a small marketing team or you don't have people dedicated to search, then working with an agency to do audits to understand where to start and look at the strategy or getting some consultancy so that your team can actually learn what to do is a great place to make headway. That's exceptional. And I think uh yeah, if you really aren't sure about some of this stuff and it's understandable because it's constantly changing, Google and Chat GBT and everybody else is dropping updates all the time as well as classic broadcore updates to the underlying Google algorithm as well. You're unsure about any of that stuff, come on over to us. We'll happily help you out. So just go to exposioninja.com review, give us your information. and we'll be able to actually have a look at your marketing, your website and see what opportunities there are to kind of support you with your strategy, hopefully hit you um hit your goals for this year and maybe turn the tide for some of you who have been unfortunate where you have seen those drops uh from Google over the last year or so. Well, thanks so much. I would also like to plug that on 12th of March, I'm going to be speaking at e-commerce Scotland. If AI search and AI ads are also of interest to you, I highly recommend checking out the agenda. And if you happen to be in Scotland, then lucky you. There are some amazing speakers, not just me. I'll be speaking about AI search in the organic sense, how we actually show up in AI answers, but Shopify are going to be there speaking about how Agentic is changing e-commerce. And there's lots of amazing speakers in this sector talking specifically about how AI is changing search journeys. Superb. I imagine you're promoting that on your LinkedIn. So, I'll make sure the LinkedIn link in the podcast notes later on so people can go direct there and find out more. Again, thank you so much for your time, Charlie, and thanks for all of you for joining us. Uh hopefully see you again soon. Take care. Bye bye.