Team siliconindia

• Google launches new AI-powered ad tools in India to streamline consumer journeys across search, scroll, stream, and shop.
• Features like Shoppable CTV and AI-generated creatives aim to boost engagement, targeting, and performance across platforms.
• Swiggy and other brands report strong ROI, while Google now commands 40-45% of India’s Rs 70,000 crore digital ad market.

In a strategic move to dominate every phase of the digital consumer journey, Google has rolled out a powerful suite of AI-powered advertising tools in India. The aim is to position itself as the only platform present across all four major consumer behaviours searching, scrolling, streaming, and shopping. These new features, structured around four core pillarscreative, performance, discovery, and agentic tools are set to redefine how brands interact with consumers in an increasingly automated world.

Roma Datta Chobey, Managing Director of Digital Native Industries at Google India, stated that while many platforms offer reach, only Google and YouTube can enable brands to appear consistently across all key digital behaviours. With this rollout, Google now supports both brand discovery for buyers and campaign customisation and measurement for sellers.

Among the standout additions are ads in AI Overviews, Shoppable Connected TV (CTV), and a Shoppable YouTube Masthead. Shoppable CTV allows users to interact with products directly from their smart TVs, an important step considering YouTube has been the most-watched CTV platform in India for the past year.

Google’s agentic capabilities through Ads and Analytics now offer AI assistants that can help set up and optimise ad campaigns with minimal manual intervention. “We’re finally reaching that moment where we can serve the right user at the right time with the right creative,” said Dan Taylor, Vice-President of Global Ads at Google.

These innovations are supported by features like Product Studio’s 'Generated for You', which identifies content opportunities across a merchant’s catalogue and generates on-brand visuals and videos for instant publishing. This offers scalability to small businesses across India, helping local sellers produce creative content in multiple languages without depending on studios or designers. Ambika Sharma, Founder of Pulp Strategy, emphasised how this feature could disproportionately benefit India by democratising creative production at scale.

On the performance side, tools such as Performance Max Retention Only Mode, AI Max for Search Campaigns, and Smart Bidding Exploration offer more intelligent targeting, better search query matching, and more efficient return on ad spend (ROAS).

On Device Measurement for iOS uses first-party app data to boost campaign efficiency, while Meridian enables faster, scenario-based insights through Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM). Ramya Ramachandran, Founder and CEO of Whoppl, remarked that this rollout is fundamentally changing campaign planning, unifying targeting across Google Search, YouTube, and Display.

Brands are already seeing results. Swiggy, one of Google’s early adopters in India, reported a 10–20% increase in customer acquisition and a 40–50% faster return on investment using Google’s Performance Max. Its Retention Mode helped re-engage users at a fraction of previous costs.

With 84% of Indian users engaging with Google or YouTube daily and 87% of brand discovery journeys involving one of the two platforms, the tech giant is already deeply embedded in the Indian digital experience. Advertiser adoption of Google’s AI-generated creatives has surged by over 250% in just the last year.

Yet, as automation increases, concerns around creative erosion have surfaced. With AI now capable of generating copy, visuals, targeting logic, and performance scenarios, some marketers worry that ad campaigns may begin to feel too similar, risking brand dilution. Yasin Hamidani, Director at Media Care Brand Solutions, reassured that brand safety remains intact as AI-generated assets still go through human review and approval to maintain on-brand relevance. The question of whether agencies might be sidelined by AI is also being debated.

While Google’s AI can recommend bids and generate creative assets, it can’t replicate human instinct. Dan Taylor clarified this by stating, “AI is not a strategy. AI is the how. Your marketing strategy, your audience, your creative those remain human decisions”.

Ultimately, Google’s AI-led transformation of the advertising ecosystem in India represents not just a technological leap, but a broader shift in how marketing is conceived and executed. By combining data, automation, and creative intelligence, Google is not just reshaping the ad world it is helping brands and consumers connect with unprecedented precision and purpose.