Google Slipped Marketers an AI Copilot Called Ask Advisor

A couple of days ago, a friend of mine who does paid media was venting to me.

He said that every morning when he opens Google Analytics, it feels like opening the fridge. It's packed full of stuff, but you have no idea what to eat. Dozens of reports, hundreds of data points — just scrolling through them all takes half an hour. And by the time you're done, a new email has already broken your train of thought.

I laughed when I heard that.

Because Google just did something that's practically built to save people like him time. They rolled out an AI agent called Ask Advisor, baked right into Google Ads and Google Analytics.

So what is Ask Advisor?

Simply put, it's an AI assistant that lives inside the product. When you open the Ads or Analytics homepage, it has already chewed through your data for you. Which metrics spiked, which channels look off, what's different from last week — it pulls all of that out and puts it front and center.

Think about what that means.

You no longer need to open ten tabs just to piece together the answer to "what the heck has been happening lately." You land on the homepage, and the answer is right there waiting for you.

The Homepage Now Talks to You

This change is bigger than it looks.

What used to be on the homepage? An entry point. A bunch of cards — you click one, it expands. You had to decide what to look at yourself.

Now? Google Analytics has a new section at the top called AI Overviews. It does one simple thing: it tells you what happened since you last logged in. A seasonal spike in a certain product category's sales, a traffic drop on a particular channel — one small card, one clear sentence.

See something you want to dig into? Click it, and it carries the context straight into Ask Advisor, dropping you right into analysis.

You can even have insights pushed to you by email or phone, at whatever cadence you choose. Once a day, once a week — whatever works.

Google Ads got the same treatment. The homepage now features a set of insight cards, also AI-generated and tailored to your account. Maybe a competitor is eating into your impression share, or certain search terms are trending upward. You can also type a question in plain language right into the input box above those cards, and it will generate a custom insight just for you.

What's the real shift here?

It's not that it makes you faster — it's that it decides what you should be looking at. Before, you interrogated the data. Now, the data comes to you first.

Generate a Report with One Sentence

Reporting has always been the wall between marketers and their data.

You need to know how to write filters, how to build charts. A decent report takes an hour or two just to format.

This time, Google launched Dashboards inside Google Ads (Google Analytics is getting it soon). How does it work?

You type.

Type something like "conversion comparison across channels last month," and it generates a chart for you. And it's not just a chart — it also writes a real-time summary in plain language, explaining the "why" behind the numbers. Which channel went up, by how much, and what might be causing it.

Think about where the real value is here.

You want to pitch your boss for a new budget? No more burning half a day building a slide deck. One sentence, one chart, one explanation. Your boss takes one look and gets it.

Reporting went from "you adapt to its format" to "it adapts to your questions."

Compare Against Your Peers to Know Where You Stand

Looking only at your own data has a blind spot.

You get your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) up to 3, and you're feeling pretty proud of yourself. But what if your competitors are all sitting at 5?

Ask Advisor in Google Analytics now has a benchmarking feature. It takes your ad performance and compares it anonymously against a batch of companies "similar to your business." Where the average sits, how far you are from the mean — all laid out.

The data is anonymized. You can't see who the competitors are, and they can't see you either.

But you do get to know exactly where you rank in your industry.

That friend — the one complaining at the very beginning — his name is Kevin Marshall, and he's the Director of Paid Media at a company called Gardyn. After using Ask Advisor for a while, here's what he told me in his own words:

"Ask Advisor has become my go-to for directional sanity checks. The speed is genuinely valuable, because it gives me time to dig deeper and make adjustments that actually move the needle, earlier on."

Notice what he emphasized — not how smart the AI is, but the time it freed up for him to do the things that actually need a human.

You're Still in the Driver's Seat

Now, at this point, I imagine some of you are raising an eyebrow.

AI looks at my data, builds my reports, benchmarks me against competitors — is it going to just start running my ad campaigns for me next?

Not anytime soon.

The model under the hood is Gemini. But its role within the product is clearly defined: it's an Advisor — a consultant, a copilot. It explains the data for you and helps you crunch the numbers, but the steering wheel stays firmly in your hands.

It tells you which channel is dropping hard. Whether to cut the budget — that's your call. It tells you the gap between you and the average. Whether to close that gap — that's your call too.

I think that's a pretty smart design.

Because what marketers have always lacked isn't decision-making power. It's the hours that come before the decision. Hours you used to spend digging through data. Now you don't have to.

The AI didn't grab the steering wheel. It just overlaid the road conditions onto your dashboard. You drive, and you actually know what's ahead.

These features are currently running in beta on English-language accounts. The Google Ads experience is already live, and Google Analytics is rolling out gradually. If you want to try it, log in and take a look right now.

My friend told me later that the morning after, he got through Google Analytics in five minutes.

The twenty-five minutes he saved? He said he was going to spend them on a coffee.

Respect.