Test finds one in five AI answers on PPC is flat wrong

A 45-question test of five major AI tools on pay-per-click advertising found one in five responses was simply wrong, a cautionary result as sellers increasingly ask chatbots for campaign advice.

Gemini proved most accurate with only three incorrect answers, encouraging given its integration into Google's advertising products. Google's AI Overviews performed worst, with 12 wrong out of 45, notable because those answers now appear in over half of searches. Meta's assistant was best on Meta platform data but shaky on Google Ads, and several tools recommended phased-out ad types. ChatGPT showed a people-pleasing streak, delivering soft reassurance when shown campaigns that were clearly bleeding money.

Keyword suggestions were the weakest category across the board: mostly broad, high-competition fluff. The takeaways: match the tool to the platform, write detailed prompts, and never act on a single AI answer without cross-checking.

Elsewhere in the briefing: coordinated fake negative review attacks are rising, with waves of one-star ratings arriving over three to seven days using similar language. Successful removal requests cite precise policy violations, document identical phrasing patterns across reviews, and state explicitly what Amazon should do. Meanwhile the FTC is tightening enforcement on incentivized reviews: any free product or discount turns a review into a testimonial requiring clear, prominent disclosure, and sellers should keep incentive records for at least four years.

Two ad-account warnings: a new Sponsored Products setting defaults to maximize reach, pushing spend into off-Amazon placements that often do not convert; switching it to minimize spend plugs the leak. And a beta feature reallocating unspent budget within portfolios can amplify waste if a weak campaign starts absorbing leftovers, so a strict portfolio cap is advised.

On attention economics, the average person now spends over 40 percent of waking hours on connected screens: streaming leads at nearly four hours daily, social media takes two hours 21 minutes, and paid media is where the return now sits. Trivia answer: just 3.5 percent of websites attempt to block AI crawlers in robots.txt.