I was sitting in a meeting with one of our clients recently when our team were asked: “With all this impact AI is having on organic channels, losing positioning to AI Overviews, people just asking ChatGPT, what does it mean for our paid channels?”
This is something we’ve talked about it in the office, but it struck me that we’ve been so caught up in the changes to organic that the impact on paid has been a bit neglected.
There’s a similar movement happening in paid, and far fewer people are talking about it. This blog is about the AI shift on paid and what you should be thinking about to make sure you’re managing its impact. On the organic side, you will hear a lot about “zero-click” searches: users finding answers without ever visiting a website.
A 2026 analysis found that the paid click-through rate dropped to 9.87% when an AI Overview was present, compared with 21.27% when one wasn’t. Meaning an AI Overview on the page roughly halves the clicks your ad earns. Meanwhile the average cost-per-click on Google Search has climbed to around £2.30 ($2.96), up about 12% year-on-year. Therefore, you are paying more, holding your impressions, and getting fewer clicks for it.
How can you start reacting to the changes?
Insurance and B2B finance already carry some of the most expensive keywords Google has to offer, so a healthy return on ad spend was always going to be hard-won. With CPCs now rising across the board, our verticals will feel that squeeze more than most.
In this section, we’ll go deeper into these shifts and explain what’s happening and what you can do to get ahead of the game.
AI is already hurting your CPC
Open your reports, and you might find that nothing actually looks broken. Impressions are steady, CPCs are creeping up the way they always seem to. The real problem is what’s happening underneath the surface of the account.
When an AI Overview appears, it sits at the very top of the page and pulls its answer from organic sources, listing those citations inside the answer card. Your paid ads get pushed further down, so you hold the impression but lose the click.
With AI Overviews now showing up on roughly 48% of tracked queries by early 2026, you might be surprised by how many of your paid targeted keywords are affected by this shifting landscape.
Next steps
Manual checking: Stop averaging your account into one number. Split your reporting by whether an AI Overview is present, because the damage hides inside a healthy-looking total.
You don’t need a fancy tool to start search your priority keywords yourself, note which ones trigger an AI Overview, then track how that group performs against the keywords that don’t. Once you can find the gap, you can decide where to defend and where to pull back.
Organic and paid are getting closer
Here’s where organic and paid stop being separate conversations. Data has found that when a brand was cited inside an AI Overview, its paid click-through rate averaged 16%, against 11% when it was not.
If you only take one message from this article, take this: your visibility in the AI answer makes your ads work harder.
The old setup, where the SEO team worried about links and the PPC team worried about the auction, falls apart when one feeds the other. If your brand isn’t being mentioned in the AI layer, the cost shows up twice, in lost organic ground and a higher price for every paid click.
Next steps
Sync up: Get your SEO and PPC people in the same room, looking at the same keywords and topic clusters.
Take the AI Overview list you built in the last step and check which of those answers cite your brand. Make sure those keywords are on their radar. The ones that don’t are your priority: that’s where paid is paying a premium to make up for missing organic presence.
Closing that citation gap is a paid-efficiency job, not just an SEO one.
When you lose keyword control
The harder adjustment is control. Google’s AI Max has stripped away much of the granular, exact-match targeting finance marketers typically leaned on to stay compliant and on-message. In its place comes a different toolkit.
You now need to be thinking about tighter negative keyword lists, first-party audience seeds, and enhanced conversions to feed the algorithm cleaner signals.
This is where finance can pull ahead. Companies that use first-party data well generate up to 2.9 times the revenue improvement of those that do not, and regulated brands tend to hold rich, consented customer data already. Treat that data as a competitive asset rather than a compliance headache, and you give the machines better instructions than your rivals can.
Next steps
Housekeeping: Audit your negative keyword lists, because with less control over what triggers your ads, they’re now your main guardrail against wasted and off-message spend.
Then look at how your consented first-party data is feeding your campaigns. If your CRM data isn’t connected to your bidding through enhanced conversions, you’re handing the algorithm worse instructions than you could be, and in a regulated sector that clean data is an advantage your rivals may not have.
New paid real estate, new rules
On the flip side to all of this is that the AI companies are opening brand-new places to advertise. ChatGPT began testing ads in February 2026, and Google is weaving shopping results and its AI Max system directly into AI Mode, we spoke about this more when we covered Google’s O/I announcement.
For finance brands sitting on expensive keywords, fresh inventory is tempting. Two notes of caution before you move any budget:
- Attribution is more of a headache than ever. Someone can click an AI-surfaced ad today and convert a fortnight later, and the credit for that is murky at best.
- The revenue itself isn’t a sure thing either. Perplexity already pulled its ads in early 2026 over fears they’d undermine trust in its answers, a telling signal for a sector built on exactly that. Test these placements early but go in with your eyes open.
Next steps
Reaction: Treat AI ad placements as a test budget. Ring-fence a small, genuinely expendable amount, set a clear question you want answered and measure it against your blended cost per acquisition rather than the platform’s own numbers, which flatter themselves.
Keep your core spend where attribution still holds up until the measurement catches up. It will work differently for different brands in these early stages, but if you have the budget, small tests will keep you up to date with the impact it could have on your business.
When the AI gets your numbers wrong
There’s a risk here that barely exists in other sectors. When an AI tool summarises a regulated product and gets it wrong, say an out-of-date APR or a “best savings rate” that no longer leads the market, the marketing miss is the least of your problems. For an FCA-regulated brand, an inaccurate AI citation is a compliance exposure, which makes monitoring your accuracy across AI surfaces a standing job rather than a nice-to-have.
The regulatory ground is moving under this too. The FCA has confirmed it won’t write a separate AI rulebook, applying existing frameworks like Consumer Duty instead, and its March 2026 perimeter report singled out AI-driven financial guidance as an emerging risk.
Losing granular keyword control to AI Max makes compliance-safe targeting harder at the very moment the stakes are rising. The shift in habit is a simple one: watch what the machines say about you, not only what you say about yourself.
The brands that win will not necessarily have the biggest budgets
You’ve probably read this before:, the thread running through all of this is that search has stopped being three separate jobs. Organic, paid and AI visibility now feed each other directly: your citations move your CPCs, your first-party data sharpens your bidding, and your accuracy in an AI answer protects both your performance and your compliance standing. The finance brands that come out ahead won’t be those with the deepest pockets, but those that stopped planning these channels in separate rooms.
A good place to start is one question for your own team: who owns the full picture across organic, paid and AI? In most finance marketing functions right now, nobody does, and that gap is the first thing worth closing. Our approach to digital has already made this shift. If you need support getting things aligned quickly, drop us a message.
