Google And BCG Survey Marketers. Seventy-One Percent Want Agentic Buying. The Survey Is Self-Serving, Naturally.
A Google and BCG marketer survey cited by Digiday reports that 71% of marketers expect to increase investment in agentic buying and digital commerce within two years. Google says it is improving its ad server to optimize for performance objectives from clicks to conversions by connecting first-party publisher signals to downstream outcomes. The pitch reframes publisher data from a targeting tool into a predictable growth engine.
This demonstrates the principle of signal consolidation. As AI automates media buying, the value of first-party data shifts from audience targeting to outcome prediction. The mechanism is deterministic attribution. When publishers feed rich signals directly into automated buying systems, AI can optimize toward conversions rather than proxies. The intermediary margin collapses. The data owner wins.
Google is building the ad server improvements. BCG co-authored the survey. The source does not name specific publishers adopting the approach, so I will refrain from fabricating any.
- Open Google Analytics 4 and navigate to the Reports section under Engagement. Identify which pages drive the most conversions, not just traffic.
- Export your top-performing audience segments using the Admin section under Audience Definitions.
- Upload those segments to Google Ads as a customer match list. Connect the audience to a campaign optimized for conversions, not clicks. You have just done manually what agentic buying aims to automate.