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How to Audit Your Conversion Actions Now Ads Run in AI Overviews

Ads are now eligible to appear above, below and in some cases inside AI Overviews, drawn from Search, Shopping and Performance Max campaigns depending on market and format. Two facts about this matter more than the feature itself: you cannot target the placement on its own, and you cannot specifically opt out of it. That means this is not a campaign decision. It is a measurement problem that arrived in your account without being switched on. This audit establishes what your numbers looked like before it reached you, so that you can tell the difference between a change in performance and a change in where your ads appear.

1. 1

   Accept the two constraints first

   You cannot target AI Overview placements alone, and there is no specific opt-out. Any plan that begins with isolating or excluding this traffic is a plan for something that is not available. The work is to understand the effect, not to control the placement.

2. 2

   Establish a baseline before you investigate anything

   Export the last ninety days of campaign performance at the level you normally report on, and save it outside the Google Ads interface. Once a surface starts contributing, you cannot reconstruct what the mix looked like before it. This is the step people skip and regret.

3. 3

   Read every conversion action you have declared

   Open your conversion actions and record, for each one: what it counts, whether it is primary or secondary, its attribution model, its counting setting, and its conversion window. Most accounts accumulate conversion actions over years and nobody has read the list in full since it was created.

4. 4

   Identify anything being counted twice

   Look for the same user action captured by more than one route — a thank-you page and a form-submit event, a call asset and a call conversion, a Google Analytics import alongside a native tag. Duplication is tolerable when volumes are stable and badly misleading when the traffic mix shifts underneath it.

5. 5

   Check which conversions feed bidding

   Confirm which actions are set as primary, because those are the ones automated bidding optimises towards. A secondary conversion you added for visibility is not steering spend. A primary conversion you forgot about is.

6. 6

   Separate branded from non-branded before comparing

   AI Overview placements change how a query is answered, which affects non-branded discovery queries far more than branded ones. Segment your reporting accordingly, or a shift in one will look like a shift in the other.

7. 7

   Focus on ad copy and landing pages, since those are the levers you have

   Google positions useful ad copy, clear landing pages, and, for retailers, feed quality as what influences eligibility here. Those are the only controls available, so they are where any effort should go.

8. 8

   Write down what you could not determine

   Finish by recording what this audit cannot establish — chiefly, how much of your performance came from this surface, because the reporting does not separate it. A measurement note that states its own limits is more useful to the next person than a confident number that cannot be supported.