The Super Consumer Is Here: What Google’s Rethinking ROI Says About the Future of Marketing

Google’s latest take on ROI starts with a pretty fundamental shift: the consumer has changed.

At its Rethinking ROI keynote, Google unpacked what that means across AI, Search, video, and the rise of what it calls the “super consumer.”One thing stood out immediately:

Today’s consumer is no longer the keyword-search consumer.

They’re not just typing “best Thai restaurant near me,” clicking a result, and making a decision. They’re moving between social media, AI tools, Google Search, video, reviews, and other sources to validate and triangulate their decisions.

Google framed this new consumer as a “System 3” thinker, building on Daniel Kahneman’s System 1 vs. System 2 framework. That was especially cool for me because I had the opportunity to work with Kahneman while I was at AIG.

• System 1 = thinking fast.
• System 2 = thinking slow.
• Google’s “System 3” framing = combining depth with speed.

And we can already see that behavior showing up in Search.

AI Mode queries are now roughly 3x longer than traditional search queries. People aren’t entering a phrase and leaving. They’re asking longer, more nuanced questions, following up, comparing, refining, and researching.

For marketers, I think that points to two big changes.

1. Your ads need to become answers.

I’ve always loved the premise of They Ask, You Answer: If your customer is thinking it, your marketing should be answering it. That matters even more in an AI-driven search environment.

Interestingly, Google’s guidance around SEO hasn’t fundamentally changed with the rise of GEO. Helpful, relevant, people-first content is still the foundation. In other words: good GEO starts with good SEO.

2. Static, manually produced advertising can’t keep pace with the number of questions consumers can now ask.

Imagine someone has an incredibly specific question about your product right at the point of purchase. You can’t manually create an ad for every possible question.

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But AI gives marketers the ability to generate, adapt, and serve creative at a scale that simply wasn’t possible before. That, to me, is where this gets really interesting. The other part of the keynote that really resonated with me was something I’ve seen firsthand:

Don’t stop investing in your brand.

The temptation is always measurable, direct ROI. But taken too far, that can turn into squeezing more and more value out of conversion channels while doing nothing to create tomorrow’s customers. Think of it as picking fruit from a tree without watering it.

Performance captures demand.
Brand helps create it.

Google actually put a number behind the cost of getting this wrong: for every near-term brand dollar cut, companies may need to reinvest $1.92 to win back the market share they lost.

And I’ve seen versions of this play out firsthand. A company cuts brand spend. CAC looks fine for the first few months, maybe even the first year. The conclusion becomes: See? We didn't need that spend.

But over time, the pool of people you can efficiently convert starts shrinking.

There’s a behavioral-science reason for that too.

The mere-exposure effect tells us that repeated exposure can increase familiarity and liking. Brands don’t become familiar, trusted defaults because someone saw one conversion ad at exactly the right moment.

They get there through repeated exposure over time.

So, going into 2027, three things I’m thinking about:

• Building AI-powered Q&A and creative systems that can keep up with a faster, more informed consumer
• Building SEO/GEO strategies around the questions people are actually asking
• Treating brand-awareness investment as part of the long-term growth engine — not optional spend to cut when short-term ROI looks good

The consumer journey is getting more complex and our marketing systems need to get smarter with it.