If you run Google Ads, this one's worth knowing about.

Google is rolling out something called AI Brief, in beta, across Performance Max, Shopping and AI Max for Search.

It's a space inside Google Ads where you write instructions to its AI in plain English. Who your brand is. How you sound. Which products to push this season. What you'd never say. Which customers you actually want. Gemini reads it and uses it to shape your ad copy, your Shopping highlights and the searches you show up for.

Google first announced AI Brief on April 30 for AI Max in Search campaigns, as a way to give natural-language instructions on how its AI writes ads and targets searches. Now it's reaching the campaign types most ecommerce brands put the bulk of their budget into.

Why does it matter? For years, managing Google Ads meant pulling levers. Bids, keyword lists, negatives, settings. Google keeps taking those levers away and handing the decisions to its AI. AI Brief is how you get a say back. Your words become the main control you have.

That's the part I'd pay attention to. The brands writing good briefs now will spend the next year teaching the machine who their customer is. If you're still running Google Ads the old way, you'll be starting that learning from scratch while they're already a year ahead.

Today's lesson: log into Google Ads and check whether AI Brief has appeared in your account yet. If it has, don't fill it in today. Just ask yourself honestly whether you could.

Ian
Founder of EcommerceGrowth.com