How Data and AI Are Shaping PPC and SEO

yeah that's that's a good one so uh paid search what's interesting so digital marketing what i really like about digital marketing and i briefly before i've done a million different things but briefly before uh starting smart sites i worked at publicis which is one of the biggest advertising agencies i think now they are the biggest um i think back then they were one of the biggest um and they did all kinds of media right they did digital was always the at the bottom of the totem pole um i i was in charge of digital for walmart for for a little bit samsung before that and um this this wasn't the 90s this was 15 years ago uh but digital is always a the lowest on total and the biggest media was always print tv radio right out of home those kind of things and as powerful as those are the they are really not data-based and what i really liked about digital and when we started smart sites the reason we focused on digital separate from my background digital is that it's very database and very measurable in a very good way if you think about the other mediums i don't know tv tv tv advertising right which is still very nothing to say about tv there's still value to it it's still a huge huge channel if you think about tv advertising As much as it tries to be data driven, it really isn't.

The data for it is, I don't know, Nielsen estimates viewership by a couple of people having boxes, and then they project that out.

And whether they actually saw the ad, didn't see the ad, didn't perform an action after the ad, it's really not trackable at all.

So paid search is the opposite.

I think it's one of the most powerful advertising channels because of the data angle.

and what's interesting is as as we are in 2026 now the data component i think could be split in almost two different ways so one side of it is the data that is natively feeding into a platform and the platform uses it all so this is the machine learning that google ads microsoft ads does so that's hundred percent very data driven still needs to be set up correctly and still needs to be running correctly and it still needs someone overseeing it but this is the data the campaign itself collects this is the data from your website feeding into the campaign this is setting up actually values on your conversions it's some of these things seem simple but it's really the only way the data will actually do something useful so That's, I think, half of the data equation in 2026 and moving forward, the data that's natively feeding into the machine learning engines, right? It's your data, but you're feeding it to Google, you're giving it to Google, you're giving it to Microsoft, and you're supervising it and making tweaks, but you're giving it to make a lot of on-the-fly decisions.

Google calls it auction time bidding.

For those who are not familiar with it, when you search something on Google, in the fractions of a second after you press submit and before the ad learns, the ad loads, Google uses the data to determine what ad to show you, what's relevant to you.

There's so many things that happen.

I think that's one piece of the data equation for paid search and probably the most common one that people think about.

The second one is actually more interesting to me.

So what's been happening now is there's this whole second data component of the data that you have not only of yourself, but data you could have from others.

And that becomes very relevant for us as an agency.

And I'll give you guys an example.

So we've been very AI-forward.

We have AI enabled for everyone.

We're cloud-centric.

So we use cloud a lot, and cloud is hooked up to all of our data sources.

So for us as an agency, let's use dentists as an example.

We don't just manage one dentist, we manage thousands of dentists.

And we're hooked up to the data sources for all of this.

Google Analytics, Google Search Console, all these data sources.

And what's funny is, I mention some of these things at conferences in Europe sometimes, and people freak out.

They're like, you have all this data? You're allowed that? I USA we are, and we have even clients who canceled whenever on LinkedIn.

So we have this huge, huge data set.