What every Marketer needs to know about the future of search - Google’s Sophie Neary

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0:38All right, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. This episode is an advertisement feature brought to you by Google. Today, I'm joined by a returning guest, none other than the fabulous Sophie Neary from Google. Now, as many of you know, search has changed more dramatically in the past year than it has in the past 20, with AI search taking over how many people are discovering new products. So today I'm joined by Sophie to talk about what that means for marketing, what Google are doing about it, and how you can take advantage of all those changes.

1:11Sophie is, as always, absolutely fabulous and full of great insight. You'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, let's get into it.

1:25Sophie, it's great to have you back on the show. What a pleasure it is to be here. Two and a half years later, I think. Yes, I know. Time's flown, I have to say. But in honour of you, anyone listening won't realise, anyone watching, I've changed my T-shirt just for you. There we go. We love that. So anyone who knows Sophie will know you love pink. I do. So for one day only, the black T-shirt's become pink. And I've almost let my side down, but you can't see about actually down the side of my jeans I have a pink stripe. You do. You do. There we go. So very on brand. So when you spoke to me last time, I think you just joined Google.

1:57I'd love to know what's happened in the last couple of years and particularly maybe what have you learned on your journey in the last couple of years? Oh, blimey. It's almost like what hasn't happened in the last two and a half years, isn't it? It's been the most incredible, incredible learning journey. There's that great phase, change has never happened so fast, we'll never be this slow again. I don't think that's ever been more true than now. And when I joined, all of the headlines were AI is going to be the Google search killer. there was this Gartner report that came out that said large language models will mean that Google Search will decline by 25 % in 2026.

2:38And what I really love was that at the end of 2026, Sundar, our CEO, came out and said, we've just had the biggest quarter ever of people using Google Search. So it didn't decline, it got bigger and better, and people use it even more. Because guess what? As our friend Mark Ritson would say, the most important piece of product, when you make the product, Google search, when you make things easier to find and buy and discover and answer questions, people use it more. And it's just been the most incredible journey from when I joined, search was very much words in a box. And now, well, I think you heard me when I came in today, I don't even type into the Google box anymore.

3:20I just speak and Google answers my searches for me. This is true. So for the listeners, Sophie walked into the studio literally dictating some quite detailed instructions about a rental as well, weren't you, as you're walking in and it produced an email for you, sent it to the right people and off you go. Yeah. Very impressive. A great time saver. Yes. I need to learn from this, by the way. This sounds amazing. Given what you know now, right, if you put your hat back on, so you used to be, for example, running marketing at Boots, didn't you, before? Yeah, boots.com. What have you learned now? You've been at Google, you've got the inside track on an amazing technology and amazing company doing great things.

3:55What do you know now that you wish you knew then in terms of you put your marketing hats back on and where you were? I would definitely think quite differently about how we used our search budget. So when I was at Boots, I ran all of Boots.com, I owned the P &L and I did all of performance marketing. I didn't do the brand side. And we had a fixed budget for Google search. And that meant that at some point in every day, we sort of ran out of money. And today's equivalent of that would be, let's say you have a shop on Oxford Street, and at four o 'clock, you close the door because you've spent your fixed budget for that day or that week.

4:36And it's even more pronounced in retail because online, pretty much every retailer's busiest day as a Sunday. So of course, people stop working on a Friday, they put their budget in the Google system, they go away, have a nice weekend, they come back to work on Monday. And unintentionally, they could have run out of money at seven o 'clock on a Sunday morning, which was actually the biggest trading day of the week. What this means is instead of inadvertently closing your shop, because that click never goes unsold, just someone else moves into your premises on Oxford Street, opens their doors and starts taking all those customers who are queuing up to buy from you.

5:11So by having what we call flexible budgets and setting your target, you have to trust the algorithm, but there's loads of tests that you can do and we do know what we're doing in this space. So the conversation with the boards that I tend to have isn't about can you have more budget for marketing, it's can you afford to miss category market share at your target ROI? And I've yet to meet a CEO who says, yeah, I'm really happy to do that. That's a very good way to put it. Yeah. Who doesn't want to grow their market share. Now, in your job now, you advise lots of marketers. So I guess you're a marketer turned, I don't know, seller of two marketers, aren't you?

5:48Yes, coach turned gay keifer or the other way around. So what would be, if you had to challenge one assumption that you think marketers hold in the conversations you have, what would it be? I think there's an interesting conversation around the fixed budgets. And if I was to be a critical friend rather than a friendly critic, I think a lot of us for a long time, and I did it myself when I was working in retail, is you add a lot of value to the size of the budget that you manage and where you then decide to put and place that budget. But if we go back to the conversation we just had about flexible budgets and search, actually, you have to hand that control back over to the CFO because it really then becomes a cost of goods line in your cogs, right?

6:35It's just a variable cost. and so sort of getting over that and navigating through the ego side of actually to do the best thing for my brand and for my shop and for our market share I'm actually going to have to relinquish relinquish some of that control and people are people and we all have egos and that's sometimes quite a difficult conversation to have and I think the other thing which having grown up in a world where you always look to the most senior person thinking they had to have all the answers. I actually think a CMO's job now is the hardest one in the world because you have to be a master of all trades.

7:15You just cannot be a jack of all trades and a master of one. You just can't. But it's impossible. And so you cannot, you have to surround yourself with deep, deep experts in all of these different areas, whether it's measurement, whether it's creators, whether it's brand building, whether it's performance, because no one person can possibly be an expert in all those different areas because it requires so many different skills, right? Being creative and deeply, deeply analytical tend not to exist in the same human being. So we've got to move away from the hippo, you know, the highest paid person's opinion into really making sure that you have a diversity of strength and strengthen the diversity of the people in your team.

7:57And you've got to have a bench like it's a team game now and it can't just be a top of the tree person saying I just don't like the color in that advert I love your hippo example so I suppose the it's a bit like it's not about who's got the best answers who's going to ask the best questions yes it's probably the other way I think about and I see that by a lot of really good CMOs is that their skills is in enabling others to share their expertise yeah rather than as you say be the sort of one that supposedly knows all the answers. Yeah. Yeah. Love that. Very good. Well, obviously, I say obviously, but I regularly consult Google, obviously, when I'm preparing for this podcast.

8:35And of course, I had to ask what questions I should put to you. Oh my God, now I'm nervous. It's fun, isn't it? I know. There's a few of these in here, so we'll have fun with this. But the first question actually was lovely because it reminded me of something I asked you last time. So the question that came back was, Google sits on a goldmine of data. What's the one consumer behavior pattern that AI has surfaced that may surprise you? I think the changes in search that we've seen, so last year when really we used AI to completely reinvent how we search, right? So no longer words in a box, but we have one in six searches are now either voice or image.

9:13There are 25 billion Google lens, so image searches every single month and one in five of those has commercial intent. So that's someone looking to buy something. as you said I speak to search now I don't even type in the box anymore and those longer queries they're much more like natural language so you start to have a conversation with Google search in a way that you just couldn't when you were typing words in a box and when you start to have those conversational queries with search and you sort of play backwards and forwards with it and you don't have to go back and start a new search again when you want to build on a query it it's the whole scope of what you can help find and information or products or whatever you might be looking for.

9:56I'll give you a really good example. With the family, we went to Thought Park the other weekend. I haven't been to Thought Park. I've got two steps into a 12 and 10. One did not want to go upside down. One wanted to go upside down in every single ride. It's also not a cheap day out. And I was worried about queues because we were going over the weekend. And I said to search, help me understand what's going to be the best ride to do first. if someone wants to go upside down and someone wants to stay with their feet on the ground how do we like divide and conquer with me going on one ride and and their dad going on another and it was amazing and it actually came back with a whole plan like the whole day mapped out when you go into the when you go into the park everyone turns right don't turn right go left do these two rides first and then Archie who's the 10 year old he can decide how brave he wants to be and then I was asking it about well what about the queue jumping tickets which again aren't cheap and it gave me really good hacks around doing that and I had this whole like how to hack thought park all done in one day and I did it all by speaking without typing a single word and that's just incredible to me and it saved us money and it saved us time and we had a great day out yeah part of it I think is just people discovering what's possible yes just even having the thoughts to that i mean um last year producer night producer james and i did a stage of the tour de france he's a little humble brag here wow that's impressive but i remember um james and i kind of trained together you know we were at similar fitness levels at that point no longer now um anyway um we were we were we were both really suffering on the first climb i mean really suffering heart rate was going wild and anyway he's straight on going um literally asking like so uh this is my heart rate this is the what's we're doing we're on the attack we're doing this course what's going wrong and then we got the answer straight back well you're dehydrated you didn't sleep well last night it's a big it's a big yeah yeah the whole thing he just literally said this is what you should be expecting give it an hour report back in an hour and tell us whatever it's like wow we've got like a personal coach while we're actually on on a on a ride amazing yeah so sticking on this theme i think um the question that most people will have or most marketers are going to have is given AI is changing how we search, how do brand marketers ensure their brand turns up when people are doing the kind of searches that we're talking about?

12:18The most important thing to do is to understand that search is no longer about keywords. So we always used to think, back to the pink t-shirt example, that if you're selling pink t-shirts, You want to own every keyword about pink T-shirts. And that just isn't true anymore because as such has moved into its intelligence age, if you like, and it's only going to get cleverer. What you want to make sure that you're doing is now people are asking these longer questions, which isn't I want to buy a pink T-shirt. It's I'm going away for the weekend. I want to be able to do X, Y and Z. said, because AI has made such easier to ask questions, we've also used the same AI to make it easier for brands and advertisers and retailers to show up at the right time in the customer journey when they are asking those questions.

13:11So the slightly glib, but very, very straightforward and truthful answer is you have to adopt Google's AI powered solutions, because otherwise you will be missing out now on potentially billions, if not trillions of queries that in the old fashioned world of doing search, which is the world that I grew up in, by the way, just would mean that you're not even showing up for a huge amount of the opportunity that exists out there. And then to get really boring and really unsexy for two minutes, but bear with me, because it's really important that everyone listening to this understands it. You know, when I was at Boots, if someone from Google had come to me and talked to me about feed health or data strength, I'd have said probably in a bit of a hippo way.

13:56Oh, that's, you know, that's nothing to do with me. Just go and talk to my team about that. It really, really doesn't matter. But actually, it really, really does matter. So data strength is incredibly important. And the most simple way that I like to explain it is Google AI will work for everyone. Everyone gets to use Google search. everyone gets access to Google's advertising capabilities. There's no, you can't pay to get a special bit that no one else has, right? It's ubiquitous. And that's its strength. That's why it works brilliantly well for small companies and, you know, huge, huge multinationals, which is amazing.

14:29So what is your competitive differentiator? Your competitive differentiator is your data. So you have to have what we call good data strength. And we have a capability called Google Tag Gateway, which enables you in an obviously very secure and safe way to power the Google engine with your first party data. And that gives you a competitive advantage. And I would say in the UK, we're not good enough at doing that yet. So even though I have these conversations all the time, it's because it's not sexy and it's not exciting and it's not the new buzzwords like agentic or visual search or voice search.

15:05It gets sort of forgotten about, but you can't build for the future on sand. You've got to have really strong foundations. So data strength is really important. So anyone listening to this, go and ask your team, what is our Google data strength score? And for retailers, by October the 1st, you want it to be 80, right? Otherwise, everyone else who's 80 and above, they're going to be eating your lunch over the golden quarter, over Q4. So that's data strength. Doesn't sound sexy, but trust me, it's very sexy because nothing is sexier than selling more products during the golden quarter. And then the second thing that's really important is what we call feed health, which also sounds very like, what on earth is that?

15:47But basically, you feed Google with structured information about your products and it'll be pictures about the products. And everyone has done that forevermore. It's like it's the thing that powers all of Google Shopping. But what's really, really important is not only does it help you improve your conversion rate on your shopping ads today. So if you have a product that's on sale in your feed, if you have it saying the products on sale, then you get a little box on the top left of your Google shopping advert. Well, they get a 7 % conversion uplift compared to a product that may be on sale, but that doesn't have that little badge.

16:26And the same for what we call social proofing. So if you have at the bottom of the advert, you know, your four star or five star rating, that includes the click through rate of 5%. So there are ways now that are, again, just brilliant basics that if you're not doing those things, you're also putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. That also leads to more sexy sales, which is great. But then what's really exciting is it also powers this amazing sexy agentic future because the LLMs will also pull the data from your Google feed. And so if you want to be showing up in any LLM, not just Gemini, these are the foundations of making sure that you show up in a world where people are starting to discover in new and different ways.

17:16And my final point on that, which is actually very sexy, is YouTube. So it's really important to remember that large language models on YouTube, they can watch the videos, they read the descriptions of the videos, but they understand how many likes it's got. They understand the comments and they understand the sentimentality in the comments. So whether it's your own brand organic channel on YouTube or whether it's creator content that you've done in partnership with you or whether it's a creator that's just rocking up every day. And we were talking about James's love of watches and having his own channel on YouTube all about his love of bizarre, very nice looking watches.

17:59you know serendipitously your brand could be talked about in a really really positive way and that because it's on YouTube will be also picked up and will feed into these huge new recommendation engines so it's really really important to sound really boring obviously YouTube's really fun but but they all three of them have never been more important I met Andrew Warden who's the CMO at SEMrush yes and they did a big brand visibility study it was really iteming you need to know like where your brand is showing up which llms are kind of feeding it and what they're saying about you and it was fascinating because they ranked different categories which brands were you know standing out and which ones weren't and you realize i mean the one that stuck in my head was patagonia in fashion the number one recommended fashion brand by the llms and it was because they had such consistent brand stories content creative partnerships or whatever yeah over many many years that they had all this sort of like training data that the LLM could pick up on.

18:57So I think it's also, you need to understand that, don't you? You need to understand where the data is coming from and who's recommending you. Absolutely. And I would also say, solve for Google and you will solve for the other LLMs. You solve for YouTube, it feeds everything. So it's really helpful to know that those rules about being authentic, showing up consistently, rising tide floats or boats. And I think that's a really positive thing. We also touched on the importance of creative partnerships, doesn't it? Yes. Because what other people say about you is so important today, isn't it? It certainly is.

19:33And more creators you work with, you can magnify the number of conversations in a positive way happening about you. So how would you recommend advertisers collaborate effectively with creators to get that kind of endorsement going? So this is my passion point. I mean, I know I did sound excited about feed health and data strength. But my passion point is actually shopping on YouTube. So I think about it is if last year was the year that we used AI to reinvent how we search, then this is the year, 2026, that we would use YouTube to reinvent how we shop. And again, you know, the statistics on YouTube are phenomenal.

20:1147.9 million adults in the UK every single day watching YouTube on average for 78 minutes a day. I mean, it just blows my mind. And about 35 minutes of that on the big screen, on a connected TV in the living room, just blows my mind. But another fun fact that I really love, which is a global stat, is every year we watch 40 billion, that's billion with a B, hours of shopping related content on YouTube. and I have no idea what 40 billion hours looks like or even how to write it down but my good friend Gemini tells me that's 4.5 million years that people on YouTube are watching shopping content, hauls, unboxings, get ready with me, how to get the look, reviews etc which really blows my mind and all of that is now going to be shoppable which is just incredible and by that it's not just with adverts that sit around that, but with your product feed, which is sexy.

21:10Now, when you have creators talking and you do collabs with the creators and they're doing an unboxing, let's say it's from Boots, here's my summer holiday haul, then the Boots product feed can sit alongside that creator's content and it's become shoppable. And that to me is like, it's where the magic of the trust and the influence and the knowledge and the inspiration of the creator connects with what consumers are looking for with people that they trust then that's where the magic is really really going to happen and this year we are making every surface on YouTube shoppables we have the masthead which I like to say is like having Piccadilly Circus in your pocket right it's the thing that every time you log on to YouTube you can buy it it's like the ultimate home page takeover so it's the digital equivalent of Piccadilly Circus, but just with more reach and cheaper.

22:03Amazing. You can shop on connected TV, a billion conversions on connected TV in the last year, two billion shorts every single day, which is about the same as Instagram Reels. It's huge, shoppable. I mean, it's just so exciting. So you were showing off earlier your Google Fitbit Air, weren't you? Which is very impressive. So theoretically, then we make a short of this conversation correct could somebody shop that in this clip yes as long as we did a deal with the google shop to make this a creator collaborative advert wow that's pretty cool yeah i can see an opportunity yeah and i think they're 99 pounds you could google one and buy one today but it is amazing it tracks your sleep it's fantastic and this this was fitbit because you bought fitbit didn't you correct quite recently i well i think a while ago now but yeah yeah so what does the integration with the Google Health data allow you to do now?

22:54Well I'll tell you how I use it. I'm probably way more sophisticated users than me. So this connects with your Google Health app which you can download from the Play Store or the App Store and what it does is it gives you all of the data points which lots of other smart devices do for sure including heart rate variability which I again had to Google because I had no idea what it was and so it does all of the sort of sleep tracking and the fitness tracking and all of your health and your vitals. But because it's also powered by Google Health, which is powered by Gemini, you also get this amazing AI powered coach and assistant.

23:33So for my day after Thought Park, for example, it said, you know, well done, Sophie, you did the 18 ,000 steps. But you know, you seem a bit tired today. And it's like, well, because I spent most of the day in a state of sheer terror, worrying about where two children were, was one upside down, was one not. But also, you know quite frightened on quite a lot of the rides myself so it sort of helps you then prepare and plan for the day ahead and I don't travel that much with work but I know quite a few of the Google execs who do and they use it to help them sort of manage jet lag and they'll say okay I'm doing three continents in 10 days or whatever crazy schedule that might be but I want to stay on San Francisco time because you don't want your body clock to get out of sync and you know they have to be always on all the time and the google health coach tells them well this is when you need to sleep and these are the hours you need to work out and this is when you should eat and it might seem completely counterintuitive and utterly out of whack but it helps you know it sort of helps you guide through and navigate through some of those things that i mean was that even possible before i don't even know probably not but it also maps it to your vitals and when you like to sleep and your sleep patterns and stuff which is incredible that's very cool i like that i could seriously use that actually because travel a lot with the podcast that exact yeah that exact scenario you described i face all the time and also when you travel like you're away three or four days you don't want to get on the new time zone getting on the new time zone because then you double the jet lag because you just adjust and you come back and then you get it's crazy yeah it's nightmare last i talk with marketers all day many of them say the same thing traffic is down leads are down and they're not sure why until they realize what has changed most of their customers now trust AI to recommend the right brands to them and the first one that AI recommends they go with.

25:18Visibility in AI search comes down to whether AI trusts your content but most brands have no idea where they stand. So how do you show up when someone asks AI about the things that you sell with HubSpot AEO? HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search and makes clear recommendations on what to do to improve it without having to guess. So when someone asks AI what to buy, you're already the answer. Try it for free at hubspot.com forward slash AEO. Last time we spoke, we talked a lot about retail, the golden quarter as well. And we're coming up to that now. So I think when this goes out, we'll be entering the critical sales period.

25:59So what does Google data tell us about the big events that are coming up in terms of like retail. I know we talked about, you know, the Cyber Monday and Fake Friday. It seems like there's every year there's more and more kind of like retail things. But what was the data tell us about how to optimize through the golden quarter? Well, I tell you, going back to the very first question you asked me, like, what have I learned now after sort of two and a half years at Google? So when I came in and I originally did this podcast, and we talked about how Black Friday falls on a different day of the year because it's anchored on Thanksgiving.

26:35But here in the UK, we don't know when Thanksgiving is. So we usually assume it's just the third Friday in November, because for years and years and years, that's what it was. But two years ago, just the way that the days fell, Black Friday was at the end of November and Cyber Monday was actually in December, which meant that there were only three shopping weekends between Cyber Monday and Christmas Eve. and I explained breaking news on this podcast that we were going to see a phenomena which we call fake Friday which is the Friday before Black Friday because here in the UK we never know when Black Friday is there would be a massive surge of people going online looking for deals looking for the Black Friday offer I said it on this podcast I said it to every single retail partner that I work with and they all sort of smiled and nodded and said yeah yeah Sophie and then just went on and just did their fixed budgets over the Cyber 5 weekend.

27:26And they all missed out on this huge amount of customers in the market, searching, wanting a deal on that day, there and then. So three or four months later, sort of February, March time, after the Christmas of 2024, so early 2025, I went out to everyone and I said, look, look at all these sales that you missed out on. Without saying I told you so, because no one wants to sound like a clever clogs, but I did. and now everyone is totally lent into it which is really really exciting and fake friday is now i believe a well understood phenomena in amongst uk retailers and many of them do special offers for that weekend and then they double down and go big um the weekend after as well so things i think that are interesting for this year is black friday is still later in november but it's earlier than last year.

28:17What does that mean? It actually means we have one extra day between Cyber Monday and Christmas Eve when everyone stops shopping. Now, one extra day doesn't necessarily sound here nor there, but actually it's huge, right? Because retailers' biggest shopping days are always in December. So one extra day of shopping could mean the difference between someone making or breaking their golden quarter. And so I think that's a very exciting thing. Fake Friday will continue to be huge but hopefully now everyone believes us and trusts us that it's it's a big deal and it's it's here to stay and it's going to happen especially because the likes of amazon they go live with their black friday deals they call it cyber week and it's actually 11 days i mean they're so smart they bend time which is amazing and they're formidable retailers and that's who you're competing against so uh one extra day this year i think is really exciting there's still only three weekends sometimes you know when it's earlier in november there's four weekends between between Cyber Monday and Christmas Eve.

29:16So you've got to make every single day count. So go all in on Fate Friday, smash it out of the park over Cyber Weekend. Definitely have your flexible budgets, have real confidence in that. Make sure that your YouTube strategy, your shopping strategy is always on. We're doing so much testing over the summer with retailers on all of those fronts, which is really, really exciting. So put your safety prediction hat on then. what do you predict for the future of retail? What's going to be important? I mean, everyone at the moment, if I pick a buzzword to throw at you, everyone's talking about agentic, aren't they, in terms of commerce, which I didn't even know that word until about 15 months ago.

29:55So let's just take a quick step back because I think all of these new words, certainly when I started at Google, the word agentic didn't exist. It was just a word that engineers maybe used. Let's take a step back and just break down what they mean because I think it's helpful so we all are speaking the same buzzword language. So AI, artificial intelligence. So that's still very relevant in its own right. And it's really just the latest word for machine learning. And here at Google, we've been an AI first company since 2016. We've been an AI first company since 2016. And we've used AI to power so many Google products that you and I use every day.