On 28 October 2026, Google announced it was expanding ads in AI Mode to ten more countries, India among them (Google, Oct 2026). The ads appear within or beside AI Mode's answers and carry a "Sponsored" label. In the same post, Google said queries in AI Mode are on average three times longer than traditional searches, a figure it sourced to its own US data from May 2026.
That second detail matters more for a young marketer than the ad format. Longer queries mean people are describing their situation, not typing two keywords. "Best laptop under 60000" becomes something closer to "laptop for a first-year engineering student in Chennai who codes and travels by bus, budget ₹60,000". The search engine reads the whole thing. Ads and content that answer the situation, not the keyword, will do better.
What changes in the job
For the last decade, a lot of entry-level digital marketing in India was keyword work. Build a list, group it into ad groups, write ads that repeat the keyword, send traffic to a landing page, and optimise cost per click. Content teams did a parallel version: one blog post per keyword.
AI search does not remove that work, but it moves the value to three places:
- Understanding intent. What does the person actually need, and what would a good answer look like? This is the old idea of search intent, now with much more context in each query.
- Landing pages that answer. If the AI answer already summarised the basics, the person who clicks wants specifics: price, delivery time to their pincode, EMI options, a comparison table, proof. Thin pages lose that visitor fast.
- Measurement you can defend. Automated campaigns decide more of the targeting and bidding. The marketer's job is to feed them good conversion data and to test whether spend is actually adding sales, not just claiming them.
A realistic example
Say you are a marketing executive at a Jaipur company that sells handmade cotton bedsheets online. Your search campaigns were built on terms like "cotton bedsheet double" and "jaipuri bedsheet".
A more useful week of work now looks like this. You open the search terms report and read the longest queries that led to sales; they tell you what people actually ask about (thread count, colour fastness, whether it fits a king-size mattress, delivery before a wedding date). You rewrite the product page so those answers sit near the top, with a size chart and real wash-test photos. You fix your conversion tracking so a sale through cash on delivery is counted when it is delivered, not when it is ordered, because Indian COD return rates can make "orders" a misleading number. Then you set up a simple holdout test in one region to see whether a campaign is adding sales or just catching people who would have bought anyway.
None of those steps need a big budget. They need judgement and care with data.
Skills that are rising
- Search intent and query reading. Seeing patterns in what people really ask.
- Writing pages that answer a question completely. Structure, specifics, trust signals.
- Conversion tracking and UTM discipline. If the data going into automated bidding is wrong, the automation optimises for the wrong thing.
- Landing page and checkout fixes. Clarity, trust and friction, including Indian checkout realities such as COD, UPI and pincode checks.
- Incrementality thinking. Asking whether spend caused a result, not just whether it sat near one.
How to start
- Read Google's announcement and note what it says, and what it does not say, about reporting. Measurement details for new ad surfaces usually arrive later and change.
- Pick a product category you know. Write ten long, realistic queries a real Indian buyer might type or speak, with city, budget and use case.
- For each query, find the page that currently ranks or answers it. Note what it is missing.
- Write one page that answers three of those queries properly, then check it against an on-page checklist: title, description, headings, images, internal links.
- Tag every link you share with UTM parameters for a week and look at the results in Google Analytics.
Our marketing courses cover these steps.
SEO & Content Strategy (free) starts with how search engines find and rank pages and a mini technical audit. Week 2 is search intent, finding keywords and building topic clusters. Week 3 is the most relevant here: writing a page that answers the query, on-page SEO for titles, descriptions, URLs, images and links, and refreshing old content using Search Console. The assignment has you write and optimise one page.
Performance Marketing Pro covers the paid side. Week 1 is how Google Ads works (keywords, auctions and quality) and building your first search campaign. Week 3 is conversion rate optimisation, including fixing a landing page for clarity, trust and friction and a lesson on funnel analysis and checkout in India. Week 4 covers smart bidding and targets, and scaling spend safely with incrementality and measurement.
Digital Marketing Masterclass is the broader starting point if you are new: funnels and channels, customer personas, content and email, and a week on Google Analytics, attribution and UTM tags.
Who this is for: students and early-career marketers in D2C brands, agencies and startups who run or support search, content or paid campaigns and want to stay useful as search changes.
Who this is not for: anyone hoping for a trick to rank in AI answers overnight. There is no reliable one. These courses teach the fundamentals that AI search still rewards: clear intent, good pages and honest measurement.
The honest takeaway
AI Mode ads arriving in India is another sign that search is shifting from keywords to situations. The marketers who do well will be the ones who understand what buyers are asking, build pages that answer it, and measure results carefully.
Begin with the free SEO & Content Strategy, then add Performance Marketing Pro for paid search and measurement. Getskilled membership (₹99 for 90 days) adds live webinars, recordings and the members' WhatsApp community.
