Google turns Ads and Analytics into AI workspaces with new agentic tools

Google is expanding its AI assistant, Ask Advisor, with new agentic capabilities across Google Ads and Google Analytics to help marketers uncover insights faster and make decisions without leaving the platform, the company announced on 10 August.

The update reshapes how marketers interact with Google's ecosystem, adding AI-generated homepage summaries, natural-language dashboards, and competitive benchmarking directly inside the tools they already use daily.

What's changing, and when

Google Analytics is introducing AI Overviews on the homepage, providing a summary of key performance changes since a user last logged in, highlighting trends such as shifts in traffic or seasonal sales spikes, then recommending potential next steps. Users can click directly into Ask Advisor to investigate a specific insight further, and they can opt in to receive these AI-generated summaries via email or mobile notifications.

Google Ads is getting a redesigned homepage with personalized AI-powered insight cards, where advertisers can ask natural-language questions (such as how competitors are affecting impression share or what trends could influence campaign performance) and Ask Advisor will generate tailored insights.

Google is also introducing Dashboards in Google Ads, with support for Google Analytics coming soon, allowing marketers to generate visual reports from their data using simple text prompts, while AI automatically creates real-time summaries explaining the performance trends behind the charts.

The third feature is competitive context. Google announced a new benchmarking feature in Ask Advisor for Google Analytics that compares campaign performance against anonymized averages from similar businesses, helping marketers judge whether their campaign numbers are normal for their industry.

Why this matters for social media marketers

Most social media marketers run paid campaigns across multiple platforms. Google's shift to agentic AI matters because it changes the time required to diagnose issues, identify trends, and act on them.

The new dashboards enable advertisers to create visual performance reports using simple natural-language prompts from raw data, with each report automatically generating a real-time summary explaining the "why" behind the data. That means you can ask "which campaigns underperformed last week and what changed" and get an answer in seconds, not hours.

The benchmarking feature is equally significant. Without industry context, a 2% CTR could be exceptional or terrible depending on sector. Analytics builds your default peer group from the industry category set when the property was created, along with signals from your URLs and app attributes. You can change this peer group before the comparison arrives.

The competitive edge here is speed and accessibility. Marketers can use the tool to automate campaign setups, diagnose performance drops, generate creative assets, and build visuals of custom data using natural-language commands without the need to switch between platforms.

What Ask Advisor actually does

Ask Advisor is a Gemini-powered AI collaborator designed to work across Google Ads, Google Analytics, Merchant Center and Google Marketing Platform, acting as a unified agent that connects insights, workflows and recommendations across Google's marketing ecosystem to help marketers launch campaigns, analyze performance and surface optimization recommendations without needing to switch between products.

A marketer could ask Ask Advisor to "find new customers for my hair care products," and the system would automatically pull product details from Merchant Center and help build a campaign in Google Ads.

Ask Advisor is designed as a performance interpretation layer that connects campaign data from Google Ads with audience and behaviour data from Google Analytics to explain what happened and why, understanding original goals, explaining exactly what worked, and recommending what to do next.

Ask Advisor is currently available in beta for English-language accounts, with additional capabilities expected to roll out later this year.

How this compares to the industry

Google's rollout positions the company competitively against Amazon, which recently introduced its own Ads Agent and Creative Agent at its unBoxed event, with Amazon's tools designed to automate campaign planning and creative production using behavioral and contextual data to drive personalized targeting.

The shift is industry-wide. The timing illustrates how the industry's largest platforms are racing to make ad operations autonomous, with human oversight focused more on direction than execution.

What differentiates Google's approach is the cross-product layer. While most agentic AI tools live inside a single product, Ask Advisor connects Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and the Google Marketing Platform into a single conversational interface.

What marketers should do now

Check your Analytics peer group before benchmarking goes live. A benchmark is only useful if the businesses in it look like yours, with Analytics building your default peer group from the industry category set when the property was created, along with signals from your URLs and app attributes, and you can change the peer group in Analytics.

Set up AI Overview notifications. AI Overviews are designed to improve data discoverability by highlighting key developments such as completed Google Ads or Search Console integrations, significant traffic anomalies, and seasonality changes, helping you quickly prioritize urgent issues or opportunities without manually digging through your data.

Test the prompt-driven dashboards with specific questions. The quality of the output depends on how specific your input is. Vague prompts produce vague answers. Ask tight, clear questions tied to business outcomes.

Log in and explore the features today. The tools are already rolling out to English-language accounts, and the earlier you learn how they interpret your data, the more useful they become.

The wider shift this signals

Google is transitioning from a system of rigid knobs and dials to an agentic ecosystem driven by natural language, and while these updates drastically lower the barrier to entry for launching campaigns, they simultaneously increase the premium on human strategic oversight, with the brands that win being those that understand how to steer the underlying AI models.

The technical ability to build a campaign is becoming table stakes. What separates high performers from the rest is the quality of the question being asked and the strategic clarity behind it. AI makes execution faster; it does not make strategy obsolete. If anything, it makes weak strategy more visible, more quickly.

This update does not replace the need for analytical expertise. It redistributes where that expertise gets applied. Less time building dashboards manually, more time deciding what to ask and what to do with the answer.