I received interesting news that Google will further penalize paid advertisers who provide poor landing page experiences via paid search. While page quality score has always been a key factor in Ad Rank since the early days of Google Ads, this update introduces a stricter focus on quality. However, this is a more stringent focus on quality that the industry expects to impact Paid Search CPC’s by more than 10% as us rolls out over the next month (in staggered, uneven fashion, of course). As a byproduct of this change, the Quality Score metric will apparently be sunset.
The reasons for this are clear. Google needs fresh content to power its generative search experience and maintain its dominance amid AI-driven shifts in search. This change will also boost revenue.
If your landing page isn’t designed for AI to interpret your advertised product or solution—lacking relevant images, use cases, and alignment with user intent—you’ll end up paying more per click.
What to do about this? Your next best dollar spent is on your site experience. Much of this is tedious, time-consuming, but not costly.
- Further align the site experience with the intent of the user and the specific application of the products.
- Create content that directly answers common user questions about products and services.
- Optimize digital assets for ingestion into AI systems.\
- Use schema markup to structure data effectively, ensuring content is optimized for multimodal search.
- Adhere to SEO Best Practices to optimize site content for traditional and emerging search platforms.
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