Google Is Not Your Friend! But It Is as Powerful as Ever
Let’s get this out of the way first: Google is not your friend. It’s a multi-billion dollar advertising platform built to maximise revenue, not protect your margins. That said, it remains one of the most powerful lead-generation options of marketing ever created. The tension between those two truths has never been more obvious then it was across 2025 as the year Google Ads average CPC increased more than ever before.
Across nearly every competitive industry, cost-per-click surged. Brands weren’t just paying more for premium keywords; they were paying more everywhere. And why's that you might ask? Google’s ad ecosystem has fundamentally changed after being forced out of position by Google’s own AI Overview. Manual control has been replaced with AI-driven automation, broad match expansion, Performance Max dominance, and opaque bidding strategies that aggressively chase volume and aren’t always efficient.
Long story short: advertisers are being asked to trust the machine. But the thing is, Google’s AI is optimised for Google’s goals, not yours.
The Real Driver Behind 2025’s CPC Spike
The sharp rise in CPC wasn’t just inflation or competition. It was structural. Forced automation pushed advertisers into broader auctions, reduced keyword precision, and removed visibility from critical decision-makers.
For anyone that is “having a stab at it themselves” this created a perfect storm of less control, higher costs, and fewer insights to understand why performance was changing. Meanwhile, businesses that relied solely on “letting Google handle it” quietly watched acquisition costs climb while ROAS slipped.
Why PPC Management Is More Vital Than Ever
Moving into 2026, running Google Ads well isn’t about fighting automation; it’s about balancing it.
That balance requires deep experience: knowing when to let AI scale, when to constrain it, how to structure accounts to guide machine learning, and how to layer human insight over automated systems by utilising the negative lists that are so often forgotten about. This is exactly where we earn our keep.
FUZE Agency’s tak on this is that we don’t blindly trust Google, instead we challenge it. We analyse where CPC inflation is justified and where it’s a waste. We align AI optimisation with real business outcomes, not vanity conversions. And most importantly, we bring human oversight back into a system that increasingly tries to remove it.
Google Ads is still incredibly powerful. But in 2026, running it without expert guidance isn’t just risky and it’s expensive.
Lets talk all things Google Ads!
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