Every conversation about AI and search seems to start and end with organic visibility:

• Will ChatGPT cite your site?
• Will Google’s AI Overview mention your brand?
• Is your content structured for AEO?

That conversation matters. But it’s only half the story.

Paid search is being restructured just as fast, and most B2B manufacturing marketers haven’t touched their PPC strategy to account for it. If your ad budget is still built around the search results page you learned on five years ago, you’re optimizing for a page that’s disappearing underneath you.

When an AI Overview or AI Mode response appears, it now occupies the most valuable real estate before a user ever sees a traditional organic result or, in some cases, before they see your ad at all.

Industry reporting on this shift has shown click-through rates for standard paid listings dropping sharply on queries where an AI summary appears.

Search Influence’s 2026 analysis found Google Ads CTR dropping from roughly 20% down to about 6% on queries where an AI Overview appears, and put the current zero-click search rate above 80%.

Zero-click search, where a user gets their answer and never visits a website, is quickly becoming the default rather than the exception.

For a manufacturer selling capital equipment, industrial components, or specialized services, this matters more than it might for a consumer brand. Your buyers already do heavy research before they ever talk to sales. If that research phase is increasingly happening inside an AI summary instead of on a results page full of clickable links, the top of your funnel is quietly shrinking – and no amount of bid adjustment fixes that on its own.

This is the part that surprises most marketers: Google isn’t just letting AI summaries eat into ad visibility; it’s built ad placements directly into and around them. Depending on the query, your ad can now appear above the AI Overview, below it, or in some cases embedded inside the summary itself as a shopping unit or contextual sponsored link.

Which placement you get depends heavily on how Google reads intent:

• High-commercial, transactional queries tend to push your ad above the AI Overview, where competition for that single top slot has gotten more concentrated.
• Informational or exploratory queries – which describes a lot of early-stage B2B research – let the AI Overview run first, with paid results following underneath it, competing for attention that’s already been partially satisfied.
• Embedded placements show up as product cards or sponsored recommendations woven into the AI-generated answer itself, which changes the game from “ad rank” to “does Google’s system trust your feed and your site enough to cite you commercially.”

Google has also rolled these placements out under a banner called AI Max for Search, which leans on broad match and intent-based targeting rather than the exact-match keyword lists a lot of manufacturing accounts have run on for years. Independent testing has been mixed – some advertisers see real lift, but a meaningful share report that gains at the campaign level were partly cannibalized from their own existing traffic rather than representing net-new demand. That distinction matters when you’re reporting results up the chain: the top-line number can look good while the incremental value underneath it is thinner than it appears.

The practical fallout of all this: rigid, exact-match keyword campaigns are increasingly locked out of the highest-value new placements. AI Overviews and AI Mode trigger on longer, more conversational, more specific queries than a traditional keyword list was ever built to catch – which, if you’ve spent any time in your own site’s search console data, is exactly the kind of query B2B buyers are already using.

Google’s guidance points advertisers toward broad match and AI Max’s intent-based targeting specifically because it’s built to catch that variation. That’s a real shift in control: you’re handing more of the matching logic to the algorithm and leaning more on landing page quality, structured content, and conversion signal cleanliness to make sure it matches you to the right buyer. It also means your organic content strategy and your paid strategy can no longer live in separate silos – the same structured, well-sourced content that earns you a citation in an AI Overview is also a factor in whether your ads are eligible to appear near one.

Google isn’t the only place this is happening. OpenAI rolled out an ad program inside ChatGPT that went from a small, invite-only test to a self-serve auction model within a matter of months, and adoption has moved fast – ads are now showing up in a meaningful share of US ChatGPT replies. Early B2B-focused formats include sponsored educational content built for longer, more considered sales cycles, and an interactive format that lets a user ask follow-up questions directly to an advertiser inside the chat.

Microsoft Copilot has a large enterprise-integrated user base and existing ad infrastructure tied into it. Perplexity’s position has been less consistent – it built and tested sponsored placements for a couple of years, and reporting on its current stance is mixed, with some sources describing an active B2B-leaning ad product and others describing a pullback in favor of a subscription-first, ad-free positioning. That inconsistency itself is worth noting: this landscape is genuinely still being decided in real time, platform by platform, and a strategy built around any one of these channels today should be treated as a bet, not a certainty.

What’s consistent across the ones that are further along: pricing tends to run at a premium compared to traditional search (often several times a typical Google CPC), justified by higher-intent, pre-purchase traffic – which is exactly the profile of a B2B buyer doing vendor research before ever filling out a form.

If you think about your marketing funnel, the impact isn’t evenly spread:

• Awareness and Interest are where the damage is heaviest. Broad, informational research queries are exactly what AI Overviews and AI Mode absorb first, which means the top of your funnel needs both strong AEO content and a paid presence built to show up next to, not just above, an AI summary.
• Consideration is where the line between paid and organic content starts to blur. The same well-sourced, clearly structured content that earns trust signals for AI citation is now also a factor in paid ad eligibility — so a thin landing page hurts you twice.
• Intent and Purchase still look closer to familiar territory, since high-commercial, late-stage queries are the ones most likely to trigger your ad above the AI summary rather than beneath it. This is where your paid budget still buys something close to what it always has.

The practical takeaway: pulling budget out of paid because “AI is eating search” is the wrong move. The better move is redistributing it — protecting spend at the bottom of the funnel where paid still performs close to normal, and treating the top of the funnel as a joint content-and-paid problem rather than an SEO-only one.

A few concrete first steps if you haven’t touched this yet:

1. Pull your AI Overview and AI Mode placement reports inside Google Ads to see what share of your current spend and clicks are already happening in these environments – most accounts are further along here than they realize.
2. Audit your exact-match dependency. If your highest-performing campaigns are still running tight keyword lists, they’re likely shut out of the newest placements entirely.
3. Treat landing page quality as a paid media lever, not just a conversion-rate one. Structured, well-sourced content increasingly affects ad eligibility, not just Quality Score.
4. Pick one non-Google AI ad surface to test small. Even a modest budget on a platform like ChatGPT’s ad program gives you real data before the space matures and gets more expensive.
5. Stop reporting on impression share and clicks alone. Add zero-click and AI-referral visibility to your dashboards so you’re not flying blind on the part of the funnel that’s shrinking the fastest.

This space is moving quickly enough that any specific stat in this post will look dated within a few months. The underlying shift won’t: paid search is no longer a keyword auction sitting next to organic results. It’s becoming one more input into what an AI system decides to show a buyer – and manufacturers who treat AEO and paid as the same problem, instead of two separate departments, are the ones who’ll still be visible when the research phase moves further inside the chat window.