Performance Marketing in 2025: Adapt to a new landscape or find yourself lost
Not one, but four disruptive forces are reshaping how advertising is bought, optimised and measured this year, making 2025 a pivotal year for performance marketing.
Performance Marketers are already struggling with a lack of transparency around the search queries coupled with the age-old challenge of managing multiple markets, campaigns and geographies.
These forces will add another layer of complexity and opacity to an already murky world. Yet, failure to take proactive steps will only deepen reliance on opaque systems, further eroding marketers' ability to steer their own success.
Taking control starts with understanding and responding to these forces, so what’s really happening in Search this year?
The Four Forces Rapidly Reshaping the Industry
1. The Seismic Shift in Search
After being a fairly static channel for 20 years, the Search landscape is being transformed - and at pace. New competitors have emerged and AI-led techniques are changing Search.
Search engine results pages are now very different with a lot of real estate being given to Gemini.
Perplexity and OpenAI are getting into search with OpenAI now making it possible to use its ChatGPT Search without an Open AI account and will likely have paid offerings in 2025. Microsoft Bing/Copilot powered by Open AI is resurgent.
We will likely see search results in new places in 2025 integrated into AI produced results.
Search is no longer just about keywords—it’s about intent, context, and multimodal interaction.
AI assisted Search: Search giants are increasingly surfacing answers from AI assistants rather than directing people to a webpage for the answer. This reliance on AI to interpret user intent, reduces the effectiveness of traditional keyword-based strategies as solutions like AI Google’s Gemini AI prioritise semantic meaning over exact-match queries.
Multimodal Search: Voice and visual searches are gaining ground. By 2025, it’s estimated that half of all searches will be voice-activated, while image-based search via tools like Google Lens will require brands to adopt new content strategies.
2. The Rise of Platform Automation
Platforms are taking greater control, shifting from human / marketer-led optimisation to AI-driven automation. These systems increase the automation and can be very powerful, but without vigilance, that power shifts to the giants. If we don’t monitor this carefully, rather than being geared to driving real advertiser value, such automation becomes another way for the giants to get more money out of their customers. The creative elements also mean that there is a greater risk of a poor or jarring customer experience without close control.
Google Performance Max and Meta Advantage+ are reducing manual control over bidding, targeting, and creative decisions.
Google Ads API updates are retiring manual bidding strategies, reinforcing automated decision-making.
Gemini 2.0 AI now optimises as much as 40% of Google Search Ads (by some estimates), using multimodal inputs to predict intent with far greater precision than human teams.
3. The Data and Privacy Lockdown
With third-party cookies phasing out, first-party data is becoming the foundation of targeted marketing.This makes independent measurement and validation harder than ever. While it’s still possible, it needs additional work. There is some speculation that this may be a deliberate tactic from the giants to push spends higher from time-starved and revenue-hungry advertisers.
Customer Match targeting restrictions are limiting advertiser reach due to evolving privacy regulations.
First-party data becomes critical as third-party cookies phase out, forcing marketers to rebuild consent-based data pipelines
4. Growing Dominance of the giants
As Sir Martin Sorrell frequently points out, we need to look at the numbers.
Meta, Amazon and Alphabet now control over half of adspend outside China
These companies are expected to take 70% of the incremental spend between 2024 and 2026.
What this means for advertisers
The result is an unrivalled consolidation of power with the entire ad industry beholden to just a handful of players.
Automation will compound the existing opacity with these platforms setting the rules and grading their own performance: The danger in this world is that platform algorithms increasingly prioritise their own revenue goals over advertiser KPIs.
Increased reliance on platform-driven measurement makes it harder to validate results independently. The giants have the conversion APIs that the independent sector lacks at scale, fuelling reliance on the giants’ own (increasingly opaque) measurement systems.
Risk of wastage (both in production and adspend) and brand harm as businesses struggle to service multimodal opportunities and lean too heavily on automation.
What this means for internal teams
Organisationally these external challenges herald further complexity and competition as teams, regions and their agencies compete for budget allocation. The murkiness of platform-controlled measurement models makes attribution harder to pin down, leading to fragmented decision-making.
Winning in 2025: How Businesses can take Control
While some businesses scramble to keep up, the real winners will be those who rewrite the rules to their advantage. To regain control and create clarity, organisations must:
Define success on their own terms by setting clear, independent performance benchmarks, validating performance against their own data.
Take advantage of new multimodal opportunities to connect with users while avoiding wastage:
By developing new workflows for video/content production they can improve production efficiency while retaining brand authenticity and resonance.
Then, by using AI-powered analysis to identify top-performing ad variants (correlating creative elements (e.g., CTAs, visuals) with their own conversion data), they can streamline resource allocation.
Protect and build their relationships with consumers to own their own data pipelines.
Unify cross-channel insights to eliminate silos and establish a single source of truth for ROI measurement and reduce internal tensions. By doing so, they’ll gain better insights by fostering better partnerships with engaged and motivated teams
Upgrade measurement and management tools to account for the shifting search landscape and evolving best practices and maintain a competitive edge. Marketers will need to build in flexibility in their measurement and management tools as the share of the Search market shifts (Open AI for example is currently around 4x Perplexity in Search, but this could change fast), but also to account for new formats.
The 2025 Playbook: Take Control, Unify, Validate and Leverage AI to your own advantage
The roadmap is clear: Own your data, unify insights, challenge opaque metrics, and use AI as a strategic advantage. Brands that do this will lead the next era of performance marketing—while those who don’t will be left playing by someone else’s rules.