Google Is Moving Local Services Ads Into Performance Max: What Local Businesses Need to Know

Do you advertise your business using local Google advertising features? Location-specific advertising is important for businesses that provide services in a specific geography. Doctors, dentists, veterinarians, lawyers, dry cleaners, retailers, restaurants, coffee shops and more all rely upon customers finding their business online but visiting them in person. Targeting ads to customers based on geography is vital. Otherwise, businesses waste time and money, and customers get frustrated because that great bagel place in Brooklyn Park is actually IN Brooklyn, New York—not Minnesota!

Google just announced that they are migrating Local Services Ads (LSAs) into a specialized form of Performance Max called Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals. The advertising experience is moving into Google Ads, while many of the things advertisers value about LSAs, such as local Search/Maps placements and paying for valid leads rather than clicks, will remain. 

Google began the U.S. migration in August 2026 for selected home and storefront services, with broader groups, including professional services and service-area businesses, expected to transition later in 2026. Remaining categories and non-U.S. accounts are scheduled for 2027. 

There’s a lot to take in with this topic. First, let’s take a big-picture look at the terms. Then, we’ll go into what each means. 

Key Takeaways

• Google is moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads. Eligible LSA campaigns are transitioning to Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals.
• The way local advertising is managed is changing, but you can still pay for leads rather than clicks, with ads continuing to appear on Google Search and Maps.
• Your Google Business Profile matters more than ever. Accurate business information, services, categories and service areas help Google understand your business and connect you with potential customers.
• Google is taking on more of the day-to-day advertising decisions. Businesses need to focus increasingly on providing accurate information, clear goals and reliable conversion data.
• Save your historical LSA reports before your account migrates. Past lead information will transfer, but historical campaign performance data will not.
• Local search is becoming more automated—and more complex. Having an experienced partner who understands both local SEO and paid search can help you adapt as Google’s advertising system continues to change.

Table of Contents

• Key Takeaways
• Understanding the Terms
• What’s Actually Changing?
  • Before: A Separate Local Services Ads Experience
  • After: Your Local Campaigns Move into Google Ads
  • The Bigger Strategic Change
• What’s NOT Changing?
• Why Is Google Doing This?
• What Does This Mean for Local Businesses?
• We Take the Confusion Out of Local Search Advertising

Understanding the Terms

Google’s terminology can be confusing, so before we go into what all this means for business owners, let’s go through the alphabet soup of acronyms. Google has a lot of advertising products that share similar names, which can also be confusing to many people. 

• Local Services Ads (LSAs)—the familiar pay-per-lead local advertising product. 
• Local Ads—ads that can use location information and appear through Search and other Google inventory. 
• Performance Max—Google’s goal-based campaign type that can potentially serve across Search, Maps, YouTube, Display, Discover, and Gmail. 
• Performance Max with pay-per-lead goals—the specialized campaign type Google is using for the LSA migration. 

This distinction is particularly important because the new pay-per-lead Performance Max campaigns aren’t simply ordinary Performance Max campaigns. Google says these campaigns remain focused exclusively on Google Search and Google Maps, unlike standard Performance Max campaigns, which can use Google’s broader advertising inventory. 

What’s Actually Changing?

If you’ve used Local Services Ads before, one of the biggest changes you’ll notice is where you manage them. If you don’t manage your Local Services Ads but we do, you can skim this section or skip ahead. 

Before: A Separate Local Services Ads Experience

Local Services Ads have traditionally lived in their own environment, separate from the main Google Ads platform. You managed your local advertising, budget, targeting and customer leads through the Local Services Ads dashboard.

After: Your Local Campaigns Move into Google Ads

As Google migrates Local Services Ads, your campaign will move into Google Ads, where it will become a specialized Performance Max campaign with pay-per-lead goals. 

Google says the migration is designed to happen automatically. Your existing campaign setup—including your targeted locations, service types, business categories, budget limits, ad schedule, and business photos—will transfer to the new campaign. If your business has already completed the required verification, your verification status and Google Verified badge will transfer as well. 

Once your account has migrated, the old Local Services Ads dashboard will no longer be available. If you try to access it, Google will redirect you to your campaign in Google Ads. 

There is one important exception: your historical LSA performance reports will not transfer. Google recommends saving your historical performance information before your migration if you want to retain it for future comparison. Your previous customer lead history, however, will transfer to Google Ads. 

The Bigger Strategic Change

The change is about more than moving a dashboard from one Google product to another. Google is bringing local lead generation into the same advertising environment where businesses manage other Google campaigns. 

That creates a more unified way to manage local advertising, with campaign settings, budgets, targeting and customer leads accessible through Google Ads. Google also says the new system gives advertisers greater control over certain campaign settings, such as service areas, ad schedules, and the phone number used to receive leads. 

For local businesses, however, the move doesn’t mean everything about Local Services Ads is changing. You still pay for valid leads rather than clicks, and your ads continue to appear on Google Search and Google Maps. The new pay-per-lead Performance Max campaigns also remain keyword-less, using information about your services and service areas rather than traditional keyword lists. 

In other words, Google is changing the management platform and the technology behind the campaigns, while preserving many of the things that made Local Service Ads different from traditional Google Search advertising. 

What’s NOT Changing? 

Thankfully, not everything is changing! For eligible businesses, Google says:

You still pay for leads, not clicks. 

That’s great news, because it helps control your budget to a measurable and desirable outcome. Sure, you want clicks, but clicks can be automated (hello, bots). A lead is a tangible result of a click, and one that cannot be faked by bots randomly clicking to drain account balances.

Standard Performance Max campaigns generally operate around clicks/conversions and broader Google inventory. The specialized pay-per-lead version charges for qualifying customer contacts such as calls and messages.

Other features that will stay the same include:

• Ads continue appearing on Google Search and Google Maps.
• The campaigns remain keyword-less.
• Local targeting remains central.
• Google Business Profile information continues to play an important role.
• The emphasis remains on generating customer connections rather than simply generating website traffic.

Like Performance Max, campaigns are set up by providing Google with contextual clues about your business rather than cut-and-dried keyword lists. In years past, for example, we may have given Google a list of keywords like “plumber in Minneapolis” or “plumbers to install hot water heaters in Plymouth.” Now, however, when we set up the campaign, we provide Google with many pieces of information, including a list of services and goals for the campaign. It sets up the rest—and does a great job of it, as our case study attests.

Why Is Google Doing This?

We can’t say for sure (nobody but Google can), but we do know that Google’s goal is, like any company, to make money. And they do so when they fulfill their mission: to help people find what they need online (search discovery). So, it is logical to assume that this advertising change is intended to help customers find advertisers, and vice versa, more easily. 

Google describes the move as creating a more integrated, self-service experience in Google Ads. It allows advertisers to manage budgets, targeting and leads alongside their other Google advertising activity. 

The bigger trend: Google is increasingly putting AI and automated campaign management between advertisers and individual searchers. 

Performance Max is built around Google’s AI determining where and when ads should appear based on the advertiser’s goals, available assets, and conversion data. 

What Does This Mean for Local Businesses? 

For local businesses, the move from Local Services Ads to Performance Max has several practical implications. One of the most important is that your Google Business Profile becomes even more important to your advertising strategy. 

Google says information from your Business Profile is used to populate your campaign. Your business name, address and standard business hours are synced from the profile, while your business categories, service areas and service types help inform targeting. 

That makes this a good time to review your Google Business Profile carefully. Does it have the correct business category? Are your service areas accurate? Have you listed the services you actually want customers to find you for? Is your phone number current? Are your hours, addresses, and other business information correct?

These details have always mattered for local search, but the closer connection between your Business Profile and advertising makes keeping them accurate even more important. Local SEO and local advertising are becoming increasingly interconnected. The information Google uses to understand your business can influence both how people find you organically and how your paid local advertising reaches potential customers. 

There’s another important change in the background: you’re giving Google more control over how your advertising is delivered. 

Performance Max is an automation-driven advertising system. Instead of manually controlling every search term, bid and placement, advertisers provide Google with information about their business, their goals, geographic targeting, and advertising assets. Google’s systems then determine how to allocate advertising opportunities based on those inputs. 

For local businesses, that means the questions you ask when managing your advertising may start to change. Rather than focusing primarily on “Which keyword should I bid on?”, you’ll need to think about whether you’re giving Google the right information about your business, whether you’ve defined your services accurately, whether you’re measuring the conversions that actually matter, and whether your advertising budget makes sense for the value of a qualified lead. 

In other words, as Google takes over more of the tactical decision-making, the information and goals you give it become increasingly important. 

We Take the Confusion Out of Local Search Advertising

Google’s entire advertising ecosystem is moving toward greater automation. Increasingly, businesses provide Google with the building blocks: accurate business information, advertising goals, geographic parameters, creative assets and conversion data. Google’s systems then make more of the decisions about who sees an ad, where it appears, when it appears, and how much to bid. That changes what effective local advertising management looks like. 

You don’t necessarily need to spend your time trying to control every individual keyword or search. Instead, you need to make sure Google has the right information and the right signals to work with. Your business category needs to be accurate. Your services and service areas need to be clearly defined. Your Google Business Profile needs to be up to date. Your advertising needs compelling creative, and your conversion tracking needs to tell you whether the leads you’re paying for are actually valuable to your business. In other words, as Google takes on more of the tactical work, strategic oversight becomes more important. 

For local businesses, the lesson isn’t that Performance Max is simply “taking over.” It’s that Google is taking more responsibility for deciding when and where your advertising appears. Your job is increasingly about giving Google’s system accurate information, clear goals, and strong signals to work with—and then paying attention to what happens as a result. 

That can be a lot to manage, particularly if you’re busy running the business itself. If you’re unsure how the changes to Local Services Ads and Performance Max affect your business, Dashboard Interactive Marketing can help. From local search strategy and Google Business Profile optimization to paid local advertising, campaign management and ongoing support, the Dashboard team helps businesses navigate Google’s constantly changing local search landscape. Whether you need advice on what to do next or want an experienced partner to manage your local search efforts for you, Dashboard Interactive Marketing is ready to help. Call us at 763-242-2454 or our new office number, 845-540-5619. 

You’re scrolling LinkedIn, and a post catches your eye. You read it, continue on, and wonder, “Didn’t I just read this?” Then, you click a link, scan an article, and realize it sounds very similar to what you just read a few minutes before. Polished, professional—and feeling completely devoid of anything original. 

Welcome to the current situation, which some pundits have dubbed “content cannibalism.” It’s rampant on social media, as well as in blogs, and newsletters. It’s rampant among companies that switched to AI-enabled writing. Here’s what’s happening, its impact on businesses, and how you can stand out among a sea of sameness. 

AI Slop, or Eating Its Own Tail

Tom’s Guide dubbed it “eating its own tail,” and that’s a good metaphor for what’s happening now: AI is cannibalizing its own material, resulting in lackluster, repetitive content.

AI models learn by ingesting enormous amounts of text and images from online sources. When large language models (LLMs) first appeared, they produced fresh text based on this large repository of human-created text. Now, however, as companies rush to produce content at scale using AI, more and more AI-generated content fills the internet. Social media, newsletters, blogs, and websites are filled with AI text, which—you guessed it—AI ingests and spins once more. Like a parrot that can only stutter back what it’s been taught, AI is now feeding back what it once wrote, resulting in a degradation of content across the web. That’s why so much of what you read, especially on business social media and blogging platforms, sounds the same. It is the same. The ideas behind it are the same. It’s just spun with new words.

We’ve Been Here Before: AI Is the New Article Spinners

About 20 years ago, a technology called article spinners entered the organic SEO scene. These platforms promised fast, cheap, and easy content to fill blogs with keyword-rich articles. Feed it a single human-written article, tell it which keywords you wanted, and it ‘spun’ or scrambled the words to make the new article feel different. Sometimes, it just inserted the keyword into a slot, generating a slew of articles with similar titles. 

The problem is that over time, mistakes began to appear in the AI output. Some are so minor you don’t even notice them. An incorrectly cited date, a fact that’s worded just a little bit off. However, as these articles proliferate online, AI ingests them again, and the mistakes compound. 

AI Content Needs Human Editing

Here’s a brief story illustrating what we mean. Our content strategist, Jeanne, was asked by one of her clients (not a Dashboard client) to edit an AI-created article. Jeanne began fact-checking the piece and discovered so many mistakes that she sent it back to the client with a note saying they were better off having a human writer write the first draft. Mistakes included: 

• Incorrect year when the company was founded (easily fact-checked online). 
• The wrong CEO was named in the article (the CEO had retired, and a new one began two years ago). 
• Glowing product reviews…from an article that didn’t exist (there was a link in the AI output, but the actual web page didn’t exist). 
• Percentages that should have added up to 100…and added up to 140 instead. 

Yikes. Can you imagine the reputational damage to the company if they had published this article verbatim without fact-checking it? If a staff member had written such a piece, they’d probably be invited in for a quiet chat to find out what’s wrong. 

Instead, people are publishing similar articles, posts, and images without fact-checking them, feeding the AI beast more misinformation that’s spun even further from fact into fiction. 

AI Content Doesn’t Perform Well in Search

Another consideration for those tempted to use AI-generated content in their blogs and social posts: AI-created content doesn’t perform well in organic search.

We shared the findings from a 16-month study of 100 fresh websites in a previous article. Search Engine Land’s conclusion is that AI-created content ranks quickly, but within a few months, the rankings collapse. Without fresh insights, Google and other serach engines view the content as disposable, and it drops like a stone in the rankings.

The Solution: Fresh, Insightful, Human-Created Content

The solution is simple: publish fresh, insightful, human-created content. If you used AI to generate content, make sure a good editor steps in and updates it so that it has a personal touch. 

Human-written content shares several hallmarks that make it indispensable for digital marketing, including social media and content marketing. 

First, it’s unique. No two people write in exactly the same way. Stylistic and linguistic differences are as unique as a fingerprint. This original voice and tone, when it embraces a company’s brand voice and tone, creates a fresh, memorable read that both humans and search engines love. 

Next, it offers original insights. Just as no two people write the same way, no two people experience the world the same way. I’d bet that even conjoined twins, if asked about an event they shared, would describe it differently!

A lifetime of experience in your industry and business means an enormous amount of original ideas are just waiting to be explored and shared. This is what brings life to posts and articles. AI writing may be grammatically perfect, but it’s linguistically bland. 

Get Help with Your Social Media and Content Marketing

Here’s the best part: you don’t have to write everything yourself.

At Dashboard Interactive Marketing, we have a team that includes a senior content strategist and a senior social media expert. We love working with clients directly and gathering ideas like bees gather nectar from flowers. The “busy bees” on the team turn that nectar into honey; we take your ideas and craft original posts, articles, case studies, and other materials. And like honey, it’s attractive, gathering search engine results in the form of website traffic, clicks, and leads.

If you’d like help fixing AI content (editing it to make it unique, original, and on-brand) or you’d like support for your social media, content marketing, or digital marketing, give Dashboard Interactive a call at 763-242-2454. Real-live humans are ready to help you avoid the bland and the boring.

Best Practices In Branding Lead to More Leads: A Case Study

As digital marketers, we’re always analyzing the metrics associated with our customers’ Google Ads campaigns. We recently tested a new approach to one of our customers’ digital advertising initiatives and achieved strong results. It’s a good case study on the importance of observing, analyzing, and using data to drive marketing decisions—the hallmark of Dashboard Interactive Marketing’s services. 

A Case Study: Focusing on Campaign Goals

We’re going to keep the client information anonymous, but the facts of this case study remain the same. 

The client runs multiple travel and tourism websites, each focused on specialized tour packages. Each tour package focuses on a unique destination, such as touring historic sites in a specific country or city. 

The group travel sector has seen a volatile decline in international attendance, primarily driven by higher travel costs, stricter border policies, and lingering geopolitical tensions. While domestic group and corporate meetings reamin resilient, international inbound volume has notably softened. This led to a decline in website traffic and leads. They asked us to help improve website traffic, leads, and sales of tour packages. 

For a long time, the client’s ads focused on specific destinations. Keyword phrases such as “London historic tours” and “German wine-tasting tours” were thought to drive traffic to specific tour packages. The client ran multiple campaigns around their biggest tour destinations, focusing the digital advertising and search campaigns heavily on location-type tours. 

Enter The Shift to Brand Building

We’re constantly on the lookout for new tools and platforms that will drive more efficient lead generation for our customers. As a result of our long-standing relationship with Google, we have access to new tools and data that can help drive leads and conversions.

Performance Max is an AI-enabled platform that automates much of the manual ad and keyword testing previously handled by humans. Instead of managing multiple keyword-based campaigns across different channels, Performance Max manages it all through a single outcome- or goal-based campaign.

We set up a goal-based campaign to test this fresh approach against the client’s longstanding, highly specific location-based approach. The data gathered from this test continually informed our approach, ensuring we focused on what was working to increase traffic and retiring techniques that didn’t support the campaign goals.

The Results: New Approach and Campaigns Outperforming Legacy Ads

We are data-based marketers, and the data showed us something extraordinary: branding campaigns, in this instance, far outperformed location-based campaigns!

Taking a branding-first approach and leveraging AI-enabled tools such as Performance Max, we discovered that campaigns focused on their brand outperformed highly specific location-based ad campaigns, and this was a brand that had been around for a significant amount of time. 

This was an important discovery, as it’s changing how the client thinks about their digital advertising and, indeed, how they understand the way in which customers search for and find them online. 

They had assumed that customers searched for tours and travel arrangements for very specific destinations, and some still do. We’ve found that more search on broad categories—”river cruise companies” or “wine-tasting tours of Europe,” for example—rather than destinations or specific activities. 

We could track web searcher activitiy on the client’s site after they clicked through the ads and discovered that the general ads drove more traffic and generated more traffic and conversations. Once people visited the site, they stayed longer, explored the company’s many unique tour offerings, and returned. 

Data-Driven Marketing Improves Sales

The data supported a major change in how the comapny markets its services via Google. Now, instead of focusing primarily on very specific offerings, they’re working on building a digital brand for broader search terms. The Performance Max and Search campaign data support this approach, and the data-driven marketing success is like compound interest, building more and more search traffic and improving leads and sales. 

It’s a great example of how a data-driven approach to advertising can radically improve clicks, leads, and sales. 

Digital Ad Campaign Setup, Support, and Management

Dashboard Interactive Marketing drives leads and sales to businesses through focused digital marketing. This includes digital ad campaign setup, support, and management. Please call us at 763-242-2454 for more information. 

SEO and AEO: How to Get Leads in this New Search Environment

Two Dashboard team members recently attended a webinar hosted by Search Engine Journal. One of the presenters described ChatGPT as “Google in a raincoat,” and it’s been the phrase of the day around here. 

Why? Because it does describe ChatGPT to a T. ChatGPT is Google search, hidden in what appears to be a conversational, ‘answer this for me’ platform. 

And Google has recently introduced “AI Mode” search powered by its Gemini AI model. It’s a conversation-based search model that enables you to deeply explore a topic. You can switch to traditional search or explore links to the source information, which are displayed in the right-hand margin of a desktop browser. 

With all of these new tools and platforms emerging as potential competition for search engine traffic, should businesses give up their traditional SEO marketing tactics? What about AEO, AI engine optimization? Should your business now include AEO as part of its marketing strategy? 

The Dashboard Team continues to monitor this new and emerging field. Here’s what we currently recommend to clients. Now, please be aware that these recommendations may change—as we said, this is a new and rapidly developing field. Given the current marketing environment and tools available, this is what we believe is the smartest course of action. 

Focus on Evergreen SEO Best Practices

Google reiterated after its major core update in May 2026, that the basics of SEO have not changed. Businesses should consistently focus on: 

• Building, maintaining, and updating websites so that they meet Google’s technical requirements. This means sites should be easily read by search engines, render quickly (within seconds on mobile devices), and have a logical, clearly delineated pathway of links to the main pages and the most important content. 
• Writing high-quality content—blog posts, articles, web pages, and useful downloads—for customers first, search engines second. When you focus on your customers’ wants and needs, and write in a way that’s easily understandable to them, you’ll naturally write well for search engines, too. 
• Avoiding spammy actions and policy violations that can get you in trouble with Google. What NOT to do is a long list, but the ones that small business owners may inadvertently do include participating in paid link programs or link exchanges, publishing thin and low-quality content, or publishing keyword-stuffed articles to try to manipulate search engine visibility. All of these continue to be no-nos with Google and are considered bad SEO practices. 

AEO Is SEO with a Twist

AI engine optimization is very similar to search engine optimization, and in fact, the major search engines do not provide specific changes to make in your SEO to help your site become a citation or mention in AI-based responses. Instead, they recommend focusing on the evergreen SEO best practices mentioned above and adding a few simple steps. 

First, interact with communities outside of your website. This means participating in social media discussions on platforms your customers visit, such as LinkedIn or Facebook. 

If you can naturally (and not in a spammy way) engage in discussions on Reddit or Quora and mention your brand name, that’s valuable, too. Discussion groups continue to be a source that AI platforms cite, likely because they offer a large volume of natural, human-generated responses for AI tools to draw on. One important thing to note, however, is that Reddit requires a delicate touch. This is not the place to be spammy or self-promoting; Redditors (people who frequent Reddit) have a very low tolerance for self-promotion and will blast you publicly if you get too heavy-handed with brand mentions. Answering questions on both Reddit and Quora is generally a safe way to get your knowledge out there without others perceiving you as self-serving. 

Brand Discovery: Pinball Instead of a Funnel

Another point mentioned in the Search Engine Journal webinar and by a growing body of marketers online is how AI is reshaping brand discoverability. 

Marketers used to describe lead generation as a funnel: lots of customers go into the top of the funnel, and as time goes by, a few end up as leads or sales at the bottom of the funnel. 

However, the changing nature of search and the increasing use of AI platforms is making brand discoverability feel more like a pinball machine than a funnel. If you have ever played pinball, you know how the game goes: the ball shoots out from the bottom, hits the top, then bounces around wildly, hitting various objects and bumpers until it finally returns to the bottom. 

Customers are increasingly going to multiple places to discover brands. Instead of a straight line from their favorite search tool to click through to your website to explore products and services, they’re bouncing to social media, asking communities on Reddit or other forums, diving into their favorite AI tools, reading a bunch of comparison articles, listening to podcasts and videos, and then landing on a website. 

Multi-Channel Marketing

What does this mean for business owners? It means that it’s important now more than ever to build brand visibility in the age of SEO and AEO. Instead of focusing extensively on one lead development channel, companies must maintain active presences on multiple platforms to enhance discoverability. This includes continuing SEO and content marketing on their own websites, maintaining at least one active social media channel, running paid ads, and many other tactics, as suggested during a competitive, data analysis, and strategy-building session. 

It’s complicated. It’s changing. But with the right partner by your side and a focused approach, you can continue to gain leads and sales in this ever-evolving world of digital marketing. 

Contact Dashboard Interactive Marketing at 763-242-2454, and let’s evaluate what you need to generate more leads. 

Is Social Media Still Worth the Marketing Effort?

The early 2000s were the time of social media firsts. Although rudimentary social media platforms existed in the 1990s, they lacked the interactive features that are characteristic of the platforms we know and love today. However, with the advent of LinkedIn (2003) and Facebook (2004), the modern era of selfies and lunch photos was born. And with it came a whole new marketing channel just waiting for businesses to explore. 

The major social media sites we know and use today have evolved over time, and businesses that had grown accustomed to using them as a means to drive traffic to their websites are noticing several big changes. Organic traffic has declined as the platforms work to keep users on-platform. The ability to reach those who follow your business is more difficult organically, as the algorithms have switched from a connection-based graph to an interest- and intent-based graph. Now, with the increase in bots and an explosion of AI content and privacy concerns, however, you may be wondering if—and why—social media still matters. 

As business owners and marketers, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on this important question and the role that social media continues to play in the modern marketing mix. 

Why Social Media Still Matters

Social media still matters because our customers still use it—and they spend a significant amount of time using it. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of adults included in their survey check Facebook several times a day, 33% look at YouTube several times a day, and 19% of adults log into TikTok a few times a day for their dopamine hit. It’s astonishing how videos have captured the attention of people, especially short-form videos. 

Many people turn to social media for entertainment—and that’s where videos reign. Short-form videos, longer videos, and all sorts of videos attract people of every age. Now, businesses must compete against AI-generated video and video created solely for entertainment and engagement. 

Given that so many people log into social media every day, it makes sense that businesses continue to show up there, too. Companies aren’t just expected to show up, however. For organic visibility to people who are interested in your industry, businesses must participate in the daily dialogue, respond to questions, share stories, and build relationships. Each platform attracts a unique, nuanced audience and offers different ways to share information. Businesses should view social media as another way to provide customer service, interact with customers, and increase brand visibility. 

Organic vs. Paid Social Media Marketing: What’s the Difference?

When marketers talk about social media, they often append the terms “paid” or “organic” to it. But what does each mean?

Paid social media sounds just like what it is—you “pay to play.” It takes the form of ads, paid placements, and payments to the social media platform to share your content or promote your page, brand, or products to a targeted audience. The platforms have gathered data on each person’s level of interest and shown it to them based on this information. 

Organic social media is home-grown social posts. It’s something that you create and share with your users or followers. It may take the form of social media posts, interactions, or comments. Organic posts enable you to share your own voice and engage with people on a genuine, one-to-one basis. 

Two significant evolutions of many major social platforms impacting the way businesses use social media are:

1. Efforts to keep each user on its platform and reduce the visibility of posts that include links going away from the platform, like a business website. 
2. The algorithm on some of the platforms has changed to be primarily interest-based, showing each user content they know the user has an interest in based on searches, clicks, engagement, time spent on a post, and includes that user’s activity off of the platform. Long ago, you could “follow” a business that you support and like and expect to see posts from that company. Not anymore. If the platform algorithm doesn’t have signals that you have a current interest or will interact on a regular basis with that business’s posts, you aren’t likely to see their content going forward. 

Because social media platforms are businesses like any other, they encourage businesses to pay for reach, frequency, and leads, whether through paid advertising, promoting a business page, or other advertising methods. 

The Pros and Cons of Paid versus Organic Social Media

As a business owner, you’re guarding every penny. You want to know that money invested in marketing pays back in leads. It’s tempting to view social media through this lens and only consider organic social marketing—after all, it’s free! But is it? Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of paid versus organic social media. 

Paid Social Media

Pros

• You can reach many, many more people through paid posts than organic posts, and you can measure it more accurately.
• Advertisements receive priority placement and promotion. 
• Ads can be targeted to specific demographics, making them even more cost-effective for reaching specific audiences by age, gender, geographic location, interests, and more. 
• Testing is possible, enabling you to improve ROI over time based on test results. 

Cons

• Ad costs can fluctuate greatly. Costs are calculated using an auction-based system. Predicting ad budgets can be challenging. 
• People often instinctively distrust ads. Some social platforms make it hard to distinguish ads from organic posts, which adds to the mistrust. 
• Advertisers must rely on the platform’s algorithms to show their ads appropriately. The algorithms may change over time or may make mistakes, wasting ad dollars. 
• Paid ads require a solid strategy and more skill to create, and companies must be prepared to spend money on the creative output (images, videos, and landing pages) as well as the advertising costs for a truly effective campaign. 
• Ads are rarely “one and done.” They must be tweaked and updated to continue producing viable leads, which means additional creative output, a larger advertising budget, and so on, all of which lead to higher expenses. 

Organic Social Media

Pros

• On its face, organic social media is less expensive than paid advertising. It requires basic creative skills (for example, editing and generating original images and texts), which can be greatly enhanced with low-cost, third-party platforms and tools. 
• It builds trust over time. While not a rapid way to build followers, it may be argued that the followers who do choose to interact with companies on social media through organic promotion are truly interested (not just attracted by an advertisement). 
• It supports customer interaction in a natural, conversational way and adds another way in which customers can find and interact with your brand.
• Effective organic social marketing requires a thoughtful strategy, consistenty and time spent on posting and engagement. It’s not just posting. It requires active participation in not just your own account, but in accounts and groups that are relevant to you, with engagement and comments. Time is a cost to consider. 

Cons

• It can have extremely limited reach. Facebook and LinkedIn, the top two social media platforms used by most businesses, show approximately 2% or less of your organic posts to followers. That limits their reach. 
• Most of the algorithms prioritize “pay to play” or ads over organic content. 
• It’s more difficult to test with any accuracy or assurance of test results. 

Paid or Organic Social—How About Both?

We often think about decisions as either/or—paid social media marketing or organic. Why not both? Both types of social media marketing offer unique benefits and have their drawbacks, but when used together, they form a sound marketing strategy to build brand awareness, cultivate customer loyalty, and offer a unique way to reach specific customers who may be delighted to learn about your products and services. 

It’s really not an either/or question, but a both/and approach. When deployed as part of an integrated digital marketing approach, social media marketing can be a valuable addition to your marketing plan. Speak with a social media marketing expert at Dashboard Interactive about your social presence and how it can be improved. Call 763-242-2454. 

AI in Content Marketing: Examining the Data, Exploring the Findings, Charting the Future (Part 2)

A two-part series from Dashboard Interactive Marketing

Welcome back to our two-part series on AI in content marketing. In Part 1, we shared the results of a study published in Search Engine Land that tested Google’s ranking of AI-generated content across multiple industries. In Part 2, we’ll explore what makes a good content-driven SEO strategy, and the place that AI content can have in that strategy for success.

Does Google Rank AI Content? The Study

We won’t recap the whole study. Be sure to read Part 1 of this series. You can read the original article on Search Engine Land, too. 

The Findings

The key findings:

• Google did index the AI-generated content
• Most of the content was indexed quickly
• 80% of the articles ranked well for one month
• Rankings dropped significantly over time
• SERP ranking did not recover with time but plateaued

Why Didn’t the AI-Generated Content Continue to Rank Well?

The study’s authors pointed out that many, many factors affect web page rankings. Google states that E-E-A-T—experience, expertise, authority, trustworthiness—are important to SEO. The fresh websites created for the study had none of these factors, nor did they include internal links, external links, or promotional activities that, together, can help web pages rank better.

We also believe the content produced for the study lacked the essential ingredient of good content marketing: strategy.

A content strategy is vital for the success of a content marketing program as part of SEO. Strategy takes into account the four P’s of marketing (product, price, place, promotion) with competitive intelligence, brand elements, and customer demographics to match content creation and promotion with audience needs.

Without a solid content strategy to guide content creation, you’re throwing the verbal equivalent of darts at a dartboard and hoping to hit the bullseye.

A good content strategy helps you hit the bullseye, aligning content such as articles, blog posts, ebooks, videos, and more, with audience interests and needs. It focuses not just on what you’ll say, but why and to whom.

The content generated for the study lacked strategy. It also lacked many elements of a solid SEO plan. As a result, while it was indexed by Google and ranked fairly quickly, it did not maintain its rankings.

AI Content Generation: Speed Without Strategy Is Just Speed

AI content generation without a strategy is like hitting the gas without knowing where you’re going. You’re moving fast, but there’s no map, no route, and no guarantee you’ll end up anywhere that matters. 

With strategy, you can generate content more quickly using AI. It will be better aligned with the audience, but will it be meaningful? Will it be new, fresh, and original? 

It’s the latter that AI cannot produce. AI can only say what’s been said before—albeit in fresh ways. But the thinking behind the content is missing because machines can’t think. 

AI writing tends to be mediocre. Yes, it reads well. However, there is nothing inherently interesting about it. The simplest explanation is that while it has been trained on some of the best writing in the world, it has been taught to aim for the middle of the road. In other words, it cannot come up with metaphors, similes, and real-life experiences to add color, flavor, and unique branding to a piece. The writing remains pleasant, factual, and ultimately, forgettable. 

Let’s aim for something memorable. Let’s infuse your brand, your voice, and your thought leadership into your content marketing. Search engine optimization is more than producing well-written, keyword-rich articles and publishing them as quickly as possible. It’s about leveraging your unique experience and customer knowledge, along with our digital marketing expertise, to encourage Google to rank your web pages well on search engines results pages. 

While AI platforms can speed up content creation, they only accelerate the production of mediocre content. AI content lands squarely in the middle, neither good nor bad. And it’s the outliers that we remember, not the mediocre ones. The blog posts that spoke about a significant day in our lives, an event that changed us. The web page that speaks from the heart about our service or a true customer story. This is what drives clicks and reactions, not plain-vanilla, mass-produced content. 

AI has its place in digital marketing. It can help with research, come up with a headline when we’re stuck trying to be clever, or provide feedback. 

However, it’s not going to replace a strategy and experience when it comes to building traffic for a website or writing the content that drives clicks, leads, and sales. 

We’d be happy to review your content strategy and provide honest feedback. And, if you don’t have one, we’re happy to help. Call Dashboard Interactive Marketing at 763-242-2454 for a consultation.

AI in Content Marketing: Examining the Data, Exploring the Findings, Charting the Future

A two-part series from Dashboard Interactive Marketing

For over 20 years, Dashboard Interactive Marketing has focused on effective, data-driven marketing for small and mid-sized businesses. We have tracked the latest search engine optimization platforms, tools, and techniques to provide you with the best services we know how to deliver. We focus on lead generation, marketing return on investment, and quantifiable, measurable results.

With every marketing trend that has come and gone during the past 20 years, we have researched and tested before sharing the latest best practices with you. When it makes sense, we incorporate new approaches. In everything we do, we monitor and measure the results, always striving to do more of what works to drive leads and sales for your business.

That’s why we have been a bit cautious about jumping on the “AI everything” bandwagon. We’ve been following the research to see if—and when—it made sense to incorporate more AI tools and platforms into our workflow.

You’ve probably been AI-curious yourself, testing everything from Microsoft Copilot to ChatGPT, Claude, and the many other tools out there. Some of them have merit; all of them have flaws; none is the magic marketing approach that will cut costs while increasing leads.

One study recently caught our attention. It was published in March 2026 in Search Engine Land. Entitled, “How AI-Generated Content Performs in Google Search: a 16-Month Study,” it examined the results of using solely AI-crafted content online to generate organic website traffic. We’d like to share the study with you in this article. We’ll share with you our perspective on the results—why they are what they are. Then, in Part 2, we’ll talk about how the content marketing field is evolving and where we believe AI has its place.

Ready? Let’s take a look at the study.

Part 1: Examining the Data from a 16-Month AI Content Study

Title: How AI-Generated Content Performs in Google Search: a 16-Month Study
Author: Bogdan Babiak
Published: March 2026, Search Engine Land

Many companies wonder whether AI-generated content can enhance their marketing efforts. They’ve used Copilot or ChatGPT and marvel at the clean, grammatically correct output. 

However, as we shall see from the following study, just because an article is grammatically correct doesn’t mean it will generate traffic for a website. Good content relies not just on smooth writing, but on the creative spin that people add to a topic. Great content explores beyond the limits of what has already been said, adding value to the conversation, whether that conversation is about the right filters for a car or the high-stakes world of cybersecurity. 

A Carefully Crafted Study of AI-Generated Content

The study started with a “blank slate.” Twenty new domains were chosen that spanned 20 unique industry categories. None of the sites had published any content before. They did not have a social media presence. No advertising was used. Any traffic generated by the test content was generated purely from organic search. Google was the main search engine tested. 

The study team conducted keyword research and selected 100 long-tail “how-to” topics for each industry. They chose phrases with low competition. 

Each keyword phrase was run through an AI platform to generate an article and was published to the website. They then submitted the sites to Google Search Console and waited. Nothing further was done to promote the websites. The test had begun. 

Month 1: Early Results Show Promise
Early results were promising. In month 1, approximately 71% of AI-generated pages were indexed by Google. Approximately 80% of the sites ranked for at least 100 keywords. This includes both the chosen phrases used to generate the content and synonyms. 

Month 3: Measuring Cumulative Growth
At the three-month mark, the team measured the overall growth of the sites. They measured 526,000 impressions and 782 clicks. No internal links were added to the websites; Google’s crawlers had to find and index the sites solely through Search Console. 

Months 3 to 6: Ranking Collapse
Inexplicably, around the third month mark, the AI-generated content began losing its search engine ranking quickly. Approximately 28% of the AI content ranked in the top spots in search engine results page in month one, but by the fourth month, less than 3% maintained this coveted spot. 

The decline continued over the next several months. Some of this may be attributed to the websites’ newness. We know that Google uses many signals to rank content, including experience, expertise, trustworthiness, and authoritativeness. Because all 20 websites were brand-new, they lacked these elements, which may have effected Google’s perception of the content to some degree. 

However, the slide in rankings turned into an avalanche, leaving very little of the AI-generated content among the top citations on search engine results pages. They remained indexed but lost considerable visibility. 

Month 16: The Experiment Ends
Although the test sites’ numbers showed some improvement after various Google updates, they remained low, especially in Health and Finance. We’ll talk about why we think that happened in our analysis article to follow. 

The final numbers showed that the AI-generated content ended its 16-month test with poor numbers. The cumulative number of impressions across 20 sites totaled 1,092,079, with 1,381 clicks.

The Dashboard Take: Content Alone Isn’t Enough to Rank—You Need Quality Content

There are many insights to gain from this study. The study’s authors suggest that stand-alone content, published without the scaffolding of SEO strategy elements such as internal links, domain authority, and trust signals, may have suppressed some search traffic. In other words, if other SEO techniques had been added to the website, it may have helped the content rank better.

We agree, but have a slightly different take. What’s missing from the study’s approach, and from many other individual attempts at using AI to generate content at scale and with speed, is the strategy.

Content alone isn’t enough to get better search engine rankings from Google. Twenty years ago, website owners rushed to fill their sites with articles. Some paid people to write these articles, while others used software to “spin” the content, replacing words with synonyms. Article spinners were all the rage for a while, churning out poor-quality content that, because it was worded differently from other articles, thanks to the synonyms, still counted as a new article. It helped sites rank quickly. However, like many other ‘get rich quick schemes,’ it collapsed around 2011 with successive Google updates. Google got wise to poorly written, meaningless content created to game the system. They deindexed it or dropped it in their index.

We are seeing something similar now with AI-generated content. It reads well, to be sure. Words flow smoothly. It makes sense. However, it lacks originality. It says nothing new. It regurgitates what has already been said. Like the article spinners of 20 years ago, it uses different words and word patterns but adds nothing to the topic. Google considers this low-value content and de-ranks it.

We believe in the power of data-driven marketing. While the data from one study isn’t conclusive, it does point to the need for a comprehensive content and SEO strategy that relies on human-centered content creation. AI platforms can help speed the creation process, but they shouldn’t replace it.

In Part 2 of our series, we’ll explore what a good content marketing strategy looks like, and the place AI tools have within it. See you there.