Automation commoditized everything except your feed

Google has spent the last five years making paid search dramatically easier to run. And that is precisely why it keeps getting more expensive to win.

It is a classic case of Jevons paradox.

When steam engines became more efficient, they used less coal per unit of work. But total coal consumption did not fall, it rose. Cheaper-to-use coal made coal economically viable in more places, so efficiency expanded demand instead of reducing it.

Paid search is following the same pattern.

• Smart Bidding removed much of the manual work behind bid management.
• Performance Max absorbed channel strategy soon after.
• Then AI-driven query interpretation started handling the work that once required tightly structured keyword systems and manual campaign architecture.

What Google promised was efficiency (and even delivered), but the result was standardization.

The sophisticated campaign you used to build by hand is now the default configuration anyone can activate in a few clicks.

As a result, the entire auction floor rises simultaneously. Every advertiser gains access to the same optimization systems, the same bidding logic, and increasingly the same execution layer. The performance gains from automation get competed away.

Brands experience this as rising media costs.

But in many cases, what they are actually experiencing is the collapse of operational asymmetry. The edge they once built internally is now being distributed across the market through a shared interface.

The one major input automation still cannot fully commoditize is the product feed, because no two brands share the same one. Everything else has converged, that has not.