No strategy overhaul. No budget reallocation. Just actionable items you can complete in the next 5 days.
Check If AI Overviews Appear for Your Top Keywords
Search your top 10 non-branded keywords in an incognito window. Count how many trigger AI Overviews.
If it's more than half, your CTR on those keywords is likely down 30-40%. You now know why.
Time: 15 minutes
See If You're Being Cited
For queries where AI Overviews appear, check if your brand is cited. Look at the sources listed in the AI response.
Cited = 91% higher paid CTR for your ads on that query. Not cited = you're invisible in the AI layer.
Time: 20 minutes
Add Enhanced Conversions
If you haven't set up Enhanced Conversions, do it now. It sends hashed first-party data (email, phone) with conversion events, improving attribution accuracy as cookies die.
Google Tag Manager makes this straightforward. Documentation is clear.
Time: 1-2 hours
Pull Your Search Term Report
Filter by the last 30 days. Sort by cost descending. Find 10 queries that are obviously irrelevant and add them as negative keywords.
Do this weekly. It takes 20 minutes and prevents ongoing waste.
Time: 30 minutes
Upload a Customer Match List
Export your customer email list from your CRM. Clean it (remove invalid addresses, standardize formatting). Upload to Google Ads as a Customer Match audience.
Use it for: remarketing to customers, building lookalikes, excluding customers from acquisition campaigns. Match rates are typically 30-60%.
Time: 1 hour
Check Your Ad Extensions
Open any campaign. Click "Ads & assets" → "Assets." Are you using sitelinks (at least 4), callouts, structured snippets, image extensions?
In a zero-click world, more ad real estate = better visibility. Fill in what's missing.
Time: 30 minutes
Audit One Landing Page for Message Match
Pick your highest-spend ad group. Click through to the landing page. Does the headline match the ad? Is the promise delivered above the fold?
If there's a disconnect, you're losing conversions. Fix it or flag it for your team.
Time: 20 minutes
Set Up One Incrementality Test
Google Ads → Tools → Measurement → Experiments → Conversion Lift.
Pick a campaign. Set up a geographic holdout test. Run for 2-4 weeks. You'll learn whether the campaign is actually incremental or just claiming credit for organic conversions.
Time: 45 minutes to set up
Block AI Crawlers (Or Don't — Decide Intentionally)
Check your robots.txt. Are you blocking GPTBot, Anthropic-AI, or other AI crawlers?
If yes, you're preventing your content from training AI models — but also potentially reducing your visibility in AI responses. Make this an intentional decision, not an accident.
Time: 10 minutes to check
Add Schema Markup to One Key Page
Pick your most important landing page. Add Product schema (for products), Organization schema (for your homepage), or LocalBusiness schema (for local services).
Use Google's Structured Data Testing Tool to validate. Schema-marked pages are more likely to be cited in AI responses.
Time: 1-2 hours (or 15 minutes with a plugin)
The Point
You don't need a complete strategy overhaul to start adapting to AI search. You need momentum.
Each of these items takes less than 2 hours. Most take less than 30 minutes. Do one per day this week, and you'll be meaningfully better positioned than you were on Monday.
Next week, do 10 more. The advertisers winning in AI search aren't waiting for perfect plans. They're executing small improvements consistently. Start today.
