Choose by the size of the brief and the channel. GSD&M is built for national advertisers that need campaign creative and media at scale; McGarrah Jessee suits brands that want independent creative with a Texas point of view; (un)Common Logic is the pick for paid search, SEO and analytics; Optimal fits brands that want media buying tied to their own audience data; and Practice Cafe serves dental practices exclusively. The questions below cover ads inside Google’s AI answers, Google’s AI Max for Search and what Texas’s new AI law means for marketing.
Can an agency buy ads inside Google’s AI Overviews?
Yes, though not as a separate placement. Google began showing Search and Shopping ads in AI Overviews in the US in October 2024 and expanded them to desktop and more countries in 2025, it has been testing ads in AI Mode in the US, and on October 28, 2026 it expanded AI Mode ads to ten more markets, including Canada, Australia and India, and launched multi-turn ads in the US. Existing Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns qualify automatically; broad match and AI Max can match the context of an AI answer, while exact and phrase match serve only on direct commercial queries, and advertisers can neither target nor exclude these placements on their own, since results are folded into standard Search reporting.
What is AI Max for Search, and should we switch it on?
AI Max is a set of features Google announced on May 6, 2025 that layers three things onto standard Search campaigns: matching to queries beyond your keywords, AI-written variations of your ad text and sending clicks to whichever landing page Google judges most relevant. Google said in 2026 that AI Max was leaving beta and that it would start upgrading campaigns that use automatically created assets or campaign-level broad match in September 2026, with Dynamic Search Ads following in February 2027. It can surface demand your keyword list misses, so ask your agency to set the brand, location-of-interest and URL controls, read the search-terms report weekly and test AI Max against a control campaign before converting everything.
Does Texas’s new AI law limit AI-generated marketing?
Very little for most private companies. The Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, signed on June 22, 2025 and in force since January 1, 2026, bans developing or deploying AI with the intent to incite self-harm, harm to others or crime, to discriminate unlawfully or to produce child sexual abuse material or sexual deepfakes of minors, and it requires government agencies to tell people when they are dealing with AI. Only the Texas Attorney General can enforce it, after a 60-day period to cure, with penalties of up to $200,000 for a violation that cannot be cured; ordinary AI-assisted ad copy, images and chatbots are not its target, though federal advertising law and the ad platforms’ own AI disclosure rules still apply.
