Google and YouTube published "The Rise of the Super-Empowered Consumer" in February 2026, and I just now went through all 34 pages of it, which is time you can now spend on something else. The argument is that the funnel is finished because people search, scroll, stream, and shop within the same session rather than moving through stages in order.
The first half gave me 3 numbers worth keeping. AI Mode had over 75 million daily active users at the end of 2025; Google Lens handles more than 25 billion visual searches every month; and queries in AI Mode run 3x longer than a normal search, with roughly 1 in 6 arriving via voice or images rather than typed text. Put those together, and the thing you used to call a keyword is now closer to a paragraph, sometimes a photo.
Then I got to the second half and started checking footnotes. Google says paid search returns $6 in incremental revenue for every dollar spent, that shoppers are 2.3x more likely to use Google than ChatGPT when deciding what to buy, and that 40% of AI Mode shoppers now use ChatGPT less. The source list on page 33 shows almost all of it is Google internal data or an Ipsos survey that Google paid for, and people agreeing in a survey that they feel more confident is not a measurement of what they did. The case studies read the same way, with Rare Beauty at 7X ROAS, Aritzia at a 42% lift in Q4 ecommerce revenue, and Toast at 20% more new customers, none of them showing spend, baseline, or control.
The one page I would actually open is 19, where the checklist is boring and correct: clean product data in Merchant Center, first party data connected through Data Manager, Conversion with Cart Data, and the Merchant API for live inventory. That work pays off whether or not agentic checkout ships on Google's schedule, which is roughly why we set it up for clients at SmartMetrics before anyone called it agentic.
You can download the guide here: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/ai-marketing-strategy-2026-guide.pdf
