Search campaigns now take a much smaller slice of the Google Ads click pie. Across 31 accounts managed by Brainlabs, Search fell from 62% of clicks in January 2024 to 41% by August 2026, while its share of spend slipped from 86% to 71%. The agency published the figures on October 7, 2026, in a post arguing that the old paid search premise — plan, bid and report around the click — is wearing thin.
Those are client portfolio numbers, not an industry average. They partly reflect Brainlabs’ own buying decisions across Performance Max and Demand Gen. Still, the direction matches the broader anxiety in performance marketing: the click is arriving later.
The decision happens before the ad
Brainlabs’ point is that buyers increasingly compare products inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT before they ever reach an ad. The agency uses a family shopping for ski travel insurance as an example. Instead of opening five or six comparison tabs, the family asks ChatGPT to compare three policies with specific medical cover. The reading and elimination happen inside the answer. As Brainlabs puts it, the click is now one of the last steps in the decision.
What the account data shows
The click shift matters because it changes what a click is worth. In a companion study of 54 clients, organic sessions fell 10.5%, from 140,132,402 to 125,439,245, and organic key events dropped 15%. AI referral traffic jumped — sessions rose 163.5% — but from a tiny base. Brainlabs calculates that AI visits replaced only about 5% of the lost organic sessions.
The silver lining is conversion quality. After Google’s AI Overviews became common, AI-referred visits converted at a 13.4% key event rate, against 10.4% for organic search. Before Overviews, the order was reversed. Still, the report’s claimed 1.5x conversion gap is hard to reproduce from its own monthly tables, which show AI referrals under-converting organic until early 2026.
ChatGPT ads are early, but moving fast
Brainlabs frames ChatGPT ads as a way to pay to appear inside the conversation, with early CPMs of £15 to £60 and an average around £20 to £25. The post describes buying as impression- and click-based, without conversion optimization. That product position has changed quickly: OpenAI began rolling out conversion-optimized campaigns in June 2026 and listed more than 20 measurement partners on October 5, two days before the Brainlabs post.
What to do now
Brainlabs calls measurement “the part nobody has solved,” because AI referrals often land as direct traffic. The practical fixes are simple:
- Give AI referrals their own GA4 channel so conversion rate is visible separately.
- Run holdout groups to prove incrementality before finance asks for a clean number.
- Pass first-party conversion values back into automated bidding so platforms chase high-value clicks.
- Test ChatGPT ads early, while CPMs are low and competition is thin.
The takeaway is not that Search is dead. It is that counting clicks without measuring what happens before them understates the value of the traffic that does convert.
Source: PPC Land
