Liam Walsh
Liam is a Co-Director at Intelligency and heads up the agency's Digital Intelligence & Paid Social activity. Over the last decade, he has worked with brands from the world of sports such as Premier League clubs to entertainment such as Channel 4 and Disney.
Google has been making a consistent and increasingly well-argued case for what it calls demand-led budgeting: the idea that well-performing campaigns should never be held back by a daily budget limit. The argument is not new, and it is worth being clear that Google makes more money when advertisers spend more. But the reasoning Google has put behind this push is more substantive than it has been in previous years, and it is worth understanding on its own merits before deciding how much weight to give it.
Why Search Demand Is Harder to Predict Than It Used to Be
Google’s core argument rests on how search behaviour is changing. Queries are getting significantly longer, with 38% of retail searches now exceeding eight words, and AI Mode queries running more than three times the length of standard searches. At the same time, brand loyalty is weakening: two out of three shoppers end up buying from a completely different brand than the one they initially discovered. The implication is that if your ads are not showing when demand spikes, whether from a viral moment, a trending product, or a seasonal spike, a competitor will capture that customer instead. Google’s analogy is a simple one: a shop with the lights off loses the sale to the one next door.
The New Features Designed to Make This Feel Less Risky
For many advertisers, the reluctance to remove budget caps comes down to a lack of trust that spend will stay efficient at scale. Google has addressed this directly with two new features. AI Briefs give advertisers guardrails for AI Max campaigns, letting you set messaging rules, restrict certain search terms, and define audience parameters without losing the flexibility AI needs to operate. Product Value Optimisation, meanwhile, lets you adjust bids at the SKU level so you can prioritise or deprioritise individual products without restructuring your campaigns or managing multiple product feeds. Together they represent a meaningful step toward giving advertisers more control without forcing them back into manual management.
How to Think About This for Your Own Campaigns
The honest reality is that most businesses operate within annual budget constraints that Google’s vision does not account for. Demand-led budgeting works best when performance targets are clearly defined and the bidding system is trusted to hold to them. Google’s recent update to Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns, which tightens delivery to stated targets rather than beating them, is a step in that direction. If your campaigns are consistently hitting their return targets and running up against budget limits, that is the clearest signal that the conversation about scaling is worth having. If they are not, removing the cap is unlikely to help.
