As the leader of a 250-person SaaS business serving customers globally, I’ve been seeing waves of market volatility since the start of the year. As such, it doesn’t surprise me that Google chose 2025 to issue an ad quality update that changes the game—both for our business and for the digital marketers and agencies we serve.
Why Google is making this change now
Google’s update doesn’t feel terribly new, but it does feel more serious. For years, they’ve been consistent in their message: advertisers must provide a quality paid search experience. The difference now? They’ve developed the tech to draw a hard line—turning that expectation into a requirement.
It’s evident that Google is facing intense competition in its search business from–you guessed it–AI. Perplexity, Andi, ChatGPT and others are already viable alternatives in the growing AI search marketplace. It makes sense that Google is taking an even more aggressive stance to protect the search experience.
How Google’s new ad quality model works
It’s been common knowledge for a while now that Google determines whether you’ve provided a good experience by evaluating where you send your traffic and tracking user actions. They use this data to confirm the journey from ad to destination page is seamless and predictable.
With the recently-issued update, Google is going one step further with their AI-powered ad quality prediction model. The AI model predicts the effectiveness of your ad funnel by anticipating the user experience, and Google will simply not serve your ad if the score isn’t up to par. That’s right—big budgets no longer increase the chance of your ads getting served if you’re sending them to poor quality destination pages.
The possibility of turning money away? Well, as someone who regularly reports to a board, I can tell you that’s a bold move.
On the positive side, Google has made it abundantly clear what their model is looking for. They specifically point to the fact that a successful ad experience includes using a dedicated paid search landing page that’s aligned with the ad content, easy to navigate, and informative.
It’s officially time to stop sending ad traffic to your home page
Here’s what I can guarantee won’t work: Sending ad traffic to your home page. While your home page is likely filled with a ton of content about your organization, it is not optimized for search. Think of it as providing a four-course meal when all your visitor really asked for was a snack.
Strikingly, about 52% of B2B PPC ad traffic still goes to home pages. Yes, that’s as of today—2025. Statistics like these explain why Google feels the need to double down on this mandate.
Four ways you can adapt (plus AI tools you can use)
The full update issued by Google isn’t terribly long or complex, but it is prescriptive. The good news is, there are plenty of AI tools you can use to create landing pages that Google’s prediction model will deem hyper-relevant to your ads. Here are four ways that my internal marketing team is adapting and how we’re advising customers:
- Create specific, dedicated landing pages: Creating a landing page per ad campaign (or per ad, to get even more granular) is what Google demands. Home pages aren’t just bad for your quality score, they’re incredibly difficult to scale. Landing page builders were created specifically for paid media marketers because they allow you to quickly and easily create multiple variants to personalize ads at scale. They typically have drag-and-drop functionality and AI features that make page creation fast and easy for marketers.
- Customize your page content: Once you’ve dragged the right content blocks into place, you’ll need hyper-specific content per ad. Using AI writing tools like ChatGPT or Smart Copy to draft your landing page and ad copy is a great shortcut to align the content of your ad with the content of the page. Simply tell your AI writing tool what the ad says and what you’re attempting to achieve on the landing page. Best case scenario? You end up with the perfect text and paste it right in. Worst case? You’ll at least be presented with a draft to get you started.
- Add navigation: One wrinkle that Google threw into this ad quality update was about the “quality of your navigation experience” on landing pages. You can use an AI content tool to help suggest the hierarchy of information on your landing page, and then place anchors on the page allowing for visitors to move among various parts of the page with ease. If you think users will need to navigate beyond your landing page, you can use AI to identify common page paths from similar content on your website, then replicate that experience by linking to relevant pages within your landing page ecosystem.
- Automate personalization: Just need to change a word or two to keep your page relevant to the search terms? Dynamic Text Replacement is a great way to automate personalization across multiple ads, without creating multiple landing pages. You can also deliver personalized content based on location or device by using AI optimization (Smart Traffic) to automatically route visitors to the landing page that’s proven to convert customers with similar attributes.
You know the old adage: You wouldn’t bring a spoon to a sword fight. The 2025 version of this is: Don’t battle AI without AI. If Google is using AI to determine what ads it is going to serve, your marketing teams need to be using AI to build and optimize your destination pages.
I’ve been at the helm of multiple martech SaaS companies in my career and we’ve been using AI in various forms for many years now. While some marketers may be panicking, I see Google’s new AI-powered prediction model as another iteration of ways that AI can make both marketers and marketing better. We’re embracing it here at Unbounce and we’re fortunate to be able to empower marketers to use AI to elevate their campaigns and deliver better experiences from click to conversion.
