Retail marketing has always moved fast.
This year, it’s moving even faster.
At Google’s recent retail event in New York, one phrase from Courtney Rose, VP of Retail at Google, captured the shift perfectly:
This will be the first truly AI-powered holiday season.
But the important story isn’t that AI is becoming part of shopping. We already knew that was happening.
The important question for retailers is:
What does AI change about how customers discover your products, decide what to buy, and ultimately convert?
Across conversations about Search, YouTube, creators, AI-powered advertising, SEO, product feeds, brand, and measurement, one thing became clear: the traditional path to purchase is becoming much less linear.
For retailers preparing for Q4, that requires a different playbook.
1. Product Discovery Is Changing
For years, Search was heavily associated with intent. A shopper needed a pair of running shoes. They searched for running shoes. They needed a holiday gift. They searched for a specific gift. That behavior still exists, but AI is expanding what happens before the shopper knows exactly what they want.
One of the most interesting statistics shared during the event was that approximately 70% of shopping searches on Google are now related to discovery.
Consumers are using Search and AI to brainstorm, compare possibilities, expand their options, and find brands and products they may not have previously considered.
Instead of: “Buy black leather handbag.” The journey can begin more like: “What should I give my wife for our anniversary?” Or: “Help me find an elegant handbag that works for both the office and dinner.”
That’s a fundamentally different search experience. AI doesn’t just help consumers find something they’ve already decided to buy. It can help them decide what they want in the first place. For retailers, that creates both an opportunity and a challenge. If AI is increasingly participating in product discovery, your brand needs to give these systems enough information to understand what you sell, who it’s for, why it’s different, and when it should be recommended.
2. Your Product Feed Is Becoming More Important, Not Less
One of Google’s clearest recommendations for Q4 was deceptively simple: Enrich your product feeds.
Structured product data is fuel for AI-powered discovery and advertising. Titles, descriptions, categories, attributes, images, pricing, availability, and other product information shouldn’t be treated as routine e-commerce housekeeping. They’re signals.
The richer and more accurate those signals are, the better Google’s systems can understand your inventory and match products to relevant consumer intent. That means feed optimization should be part of your Q4 marketing strategy—not something you set up once and forget. Before holiday demand accelerates, retailers should review their feeds and ask: Are our titles descriptive enough? Are important attributes missing? Do descriptions actually explain what makes the product different? Are images strong and current? Is pricing and availability accurate?
In an AI-powered shopping environment, better inputs give the system more to work with.
3. Stop Optimizing Every Product the Same Way
This may be one of the most important conversations retailers should have before increasing Q4 budgets. More revenue doesn’t automatically mean more profit.
Two products can generate the same $100 sale and have dramatically different economics. That means your advertising strategy shouldn’t necessarily value them equally. Google emphasized product value optimization and the importance of establishing margin thresholds with finance.
Marketing and finance need to be having the same conversation.
- Which products have the strongest margins?
- Which products drive repeat purchases?
- Which products attract valuable new customers?
- Which products can tolerate a higher acquisition cost?
- And at what ROAS or contribution margin are we actually comfortable scaling?
Once you understand those economics, AI can optimize toward business value instead of simply chasing the easiest conversion. That’s an important distinction.
Don’t just teach the algorithm what sells. Teach it what is valuable to your business.
4. Capture Demand. Don’t Cap It.
One phrase from the event deserves to make it into every retailer’s Q4 planning meeting:
Capture demand. Don’t cap it.
Holiday demand doesn’t arrive in perfectly predictable increments. A product can suddenly gain momentum. A creator can introduce your brand to a new audience. Search demand can spike. A campaign can find a profitable pocket of new customers. Rigid budgets and targets can unintentionally prevent retailers from taking advantage of those moments. The answer isn’t unlimited spending. It’s knowing your economics well enough to recognize when additional demand is profitable.
If marketing and finance have already established the appropriate margin and profitability thresholds, the conversation changes from:
“Did we spend the budget?” to: “Can we profitably capture more demand?” That’s a much more useful question.
5. YouTube Is Becoming a Decision Engine
Another major theme throughout the event was YouTube. Retailers have traditionally thought about YouTube primarily as a brand-awareness platform. Reach people. Tell the brand story. Generate awareness. Then move elsewhere to capture the conversion. That distinction is becoming increasingly outdated.
Kharoon Weiss, VP of Commerce at Google, described YouTube as a place where people come to decide. That makes sense when you think about actual consumer behavior. Someone discovers a product on social media.
What happens next?
They may not immediately click “Buy.”
They verify.
They Google the brand.
They search for reviews.
They watch a product demonstration.
They compare alternatives.
They find a creator who has actually used it.
And YouTube sits directly in the middle of that behavior.
Google shared that 94% of holiday shoppers who watched relevant content on YouTube took an action that moved them closer to purchase. That’s why retailers should stop asking whether YouTube belongs at the top or bottom of the funnel.
The more useful question is: How can YouTube influence the entire buying decision?
6. Creators Should Be Part of Your Performance Strategy
That brings us to creators. Creator marketing is often treated as a separate initiative:
Find an influencer. Send a product. Get some exposure. Measure engagement.
That’s too narrow. Creators can provide something increasingly valuable in an AI-saturated marketplace: Trust.
Consumers know what brands say about themselves.
Creators add third-party context through reviews, comparisons, demonstrations, styling ideas, tutorials, gift guides, and personal recommendations. The goal shouldn’t simply be finding the creator with the largest audience. Retailers should identify creators whose audiences overlap with their actual customers and whose content can help someone make a buying decision.
Then don’t let great creator content disappear after one organic post. Identify what resonates and amplify strong content through paid media. With products such as Demand Gen, the distinction between brand-building content and performance media is becoming increasingly blurred.
Creators can build trust. Paid media can scale that trust.
That’s a very different way to think about influencer marketing.
7. Brand and Performance Aren’t Opposites
This idea came up again during a discussion involving Gap’s CMO: Brand is performance.
For years, marketing organizations have separated the two.
- Brand marketing creates awareness.
- Performance marketing generates measurable revenue.
But consumers don’t experience your company through your org chart. They experience one brand.
A stronger brand can increase recognition, trust, consideration, branded search, conversion rates, and ultimately the efficiency of performance marketing. That doesn’t mean every brand investment automatically generates positive ROAS. It means marketers need to stop assuming that brand and performance are competing objectives. The question should be how the two reinforce each other. YouTube is a particularly interesting example because creators, video, intent, AI-powered targeting, and performance advertising are increasingly coming together within the same ecosystem.
For retailers, the opportunity is to build demand and capture demand instead of choosing between the two.
8. AI Doesn’t Kill SEO. It Raises the Bar for Content.
There has been plenty of speculation that AI will make SEO irrelevant. The message at the event was very different.
- The fundamentals still matter.
- Your website needs to be crawlable.
- Your pages need to be indexed.
- Your content needs to rank and be understandable.
- You still need a strong technical and content foundation.
But there’s another layer now.
AI systems also need information from which to learn. And that’s where generic content becomes a liability.
If your website says essentially the same thing as every competitor in your category, what unique information are you providing? Retailers should increasingly invest in content based on:
First-hand experience. Expertise. Original perspectives. Detailed product knowledge. Real customer questions. Useful answers.
One phrase from the sessions summarized it particularly well: “The best ads are answers.”
That has implications beyond SEO. Your website, product information, organic content, and other first-party assets can influence what AI-powered marketing systems have available to work with. Which leads to a simple principle: Generic content in. Generic marketing out.
AI doesn’t eliminate the need for good marketing inputs. It makes them more important.
9. Speed Doesn’t Mean Moving Blindly
AI allows marketers to move faster. But speed itself isn’t the competitive advantage. Learning speed is.
One of the strongest management ideas discussed at the event was the importance of understanding what’s working and what’s not working quickly enough to respond. A failed test isn’t necessarily wasted money if it gives the organization useful information quickly.
Or, as the discussion put it: “Failure is success.” Not because failure should be celebrated for its own sake, but because understanding why something didn’t work can improve the next decision. That requires timely data.
- Retail teams need visibility into more than clicks and impressions.
- They need to understand business outcomes.
- Revenue.
- Margin.
- Customer acquisition.
- New versus returning customers.
- Product-level profitability.
- Conversion behavior.
- And how those metrics are changing.
The companies that can launch → measure → learn → adjust faster have a very different advantage from companies simply launching more campaigns.
What Retailers Should Do Before Q4
If we condensed the conversations from Google into an actionable Q4 checklist, it would look something like this:
Strengthen your product data. Audit and enrich your product feeds so AI systems have accurate, detailed information about what you sell.
Know your margins. Align marketing and finance around product-level profitability and clear thresholds for scaling.
Prepare your AI-powered campaigns. Evaluate Performance Max, AI Max, Shopping capabilities, and Demand Gen based on your business and campaign objectives.
Take YouTube more seriously. Think beyond awareness and consider how video influences discovery, validation, consideration, and conversion.
Invest in the right creators. Prioritize audience relevance and trust over follower count, and amplify creator content that proves it can influence customers.
Improve your first-party content. Continue investing in SEO while creating genuinely useful, original content based on real expertise and customer needs.
Measure business outcomes faster. Build reporting that tells you not only what happened in the ad account, but what happened to the business.
And perhaps most importantly:
Don’t use AI simply to do more marketing. Use it to make better marketing decisions faster.
The Bottom Line
The first truly AI-powered holiday season isn’t simply about adding AI tools to an existing Q4 strategy. The customer journey itself is changing. Consumers are using AI to discover. Search is becoming more exploratory. YouTube and creators are influencing decisions. Advertising platforms are using increasingly sophisticated signals to determine who should see what. And retailers have an opportunity to connect all of it.
But sophisticated AI doesn’t compensate for weak fundamentals. It still needs:
- Strong product data.
- Clear business economics.
- Original content.
- Compelling creative.
- Trusted voices.
- Accurate measurement.
The technology may be changing quickly. The ultimate objective hasn’t changed at all:
Get the right customer to discover your brand, trust your product, choose you—and do it profitably.
