Google is bringing Gemini much deeper into Google Ads and Google Analytics, with a new generation of AI features designed to help marketers understand performance without digging through reports manually.

At the centre is Ask Advisor, Google’s Gemini-powered conversational assistant. It can answer questions about campaign and website performance, investigate changes, generate visualisations and point users towards relevant reports. Google is now extending that further with AI-generated summaries, personalised insight cards and natural-language reporting across Ads and Analytics.

For marketing and communications teams, the immediate appeal is obvious.

GA4 remains a powerful product, but it has never been especially forgiving. The move from Universal Analytics required many teams to relearn familiar reporting habits, adjust to a different data model and get comfortable with a more complicated interface. Several years on, plenty of organisations still use only a fraction of what GA4 can do.

Gemini could make that capability much easier to access.

GA4 Is Becoming More Conversational

Rather than starting with a report, users can increasingly start with a business question.

Someone might ask why organic traffic dropped last week, which channels contributed most to revenue growth or how a particular audience behaved over a given period. Ask Advisor can then analyse the relevant property, generate an explanation and direct the user towards the underlying data.

Google is also adding AI-generated summaries to the Analytics homepage, highlighting notable changes since the user’s previous visit. Those changes can then be explored further through Ask Advisor.

Natural-language reporting pushes the same idea further again. Users describe what they want to understand and Google builds the visualisation.

For people who already know GA4 inside out, these features may simply make routine analysis faster.

The greater opportunity is probably among everyone else.

Marketing managers, communications teams and channel specialists often know exactly what they want to understand but do not necessarily know which combination of dimensions, metrics, filters and explorations will produce the answer.

A conversational layer starts to separate the business question from the mechanics of operating GA4.

That could make Analytics considerably more useful to teams that have struggled to get comfortable with it since the Universal Analytics migration.

Google Ads Is Moving The Same Way

Google Ads is following a similar path.

Ask Advisor can answer questions about campaigns, diagnose performance changes, troubleshoot policy issues and suggest possible improvements. The latest update also introduces personalised insight cards designed to surface relevant changes and opportunities without requiring marketers to go searching for them.

The progression makes sense.

Google Ads has already automated large parts of campaign execution, including bidding, targeting, placements and creative combinations. Gemini is now moving further into interpretation.

Instead of simply allowing Google to optimise campaigns, marketers can increasingly ask Google to explain what happened and recommend what they should do next.

Reporting and optimisation start to merge into a single conversational workflow.

AI Is Moving Across Marketing Platforms

Google’s move also fits a broader change taking place across marketing technology.

Generative AI tools are increasingly connecting directly with the platforms marketers already use rather than operating as separate applications.

ChatGPT and Claude, for example, are becoming more capable of working across external systems and data sources. Meta’s Ads MCP server provides a good illustration. Compatible AI agents can interact directly with Meta advertising accounts to access campaign reporting, create and edit campaigns, work with catalogues and set up experiments.

The early generative AI workflow often involved opening an AI tool in one tab, copying data into it and asking for help.

That model is starting to look dated.

AI is increasingly becoming an interface across marketing systems, able to interrogate data and eventually take actions inside the platforms themselves.

Google has an obvious advantage in that environment. Gemini can sit directly inside Google Ads and GA4, with access to the underlying data and product context rather than relying on manual exports or copied screenshots.

Ask Advisor is therefore less about adding another chatbot to Google Analytics and more about changing how people interact with the product.

Easier Analytics Does Not Fix Bad Analytics

Making GA4 easier to interrogate does not make the underlying measurement automatically better.

Weak tagging remains weak tagging. Poorly defined conversions remain poorly defined conversions. Attribution problems do not disappear because Gemini can explain the numbers more fluently.

Teams still need enough analytical capability to know whether the question being asked makes sense and whether the answer can be trusted.

The same caution applies even more strongly inside Google Ads.

Google can analyse campaign performance and recommend actions against the objectives it has been given. That is useful, but it is not independent advice.

Google is both the advertising platform and the adviser.

An AI assistant may recommend ways to improve a Google campaign. It is much less likely to decide that Google should receive less budget in favour of another channel.

Platform recommendations have always carried that tension. Generative AI could make them more persuasive because they arrive as explanations rather than scores, alerts or automated suggestions.

An articulate answer still needs judgement behind it.

GA4 May Finally Become Easier To Use

The most valuable part of Google’s announcement may be relatively simple.

GA4 could become easier for more people to use properly.

Teams that have relied heavily on dashboards, analysts or a small number of internal specialists may be able to interrogate their own data more confidently. Analysts can spend less time answering routine reporting questions and more time on deeper investigation.

The skill requirement does not disappear. It shifts.

Knowing where every GA4 report lives becomes less valuable when Gemini can find the answer.

Knowing which questions are worth asking, whether the data is reliable and when an AI-generated explanation does not fit the commercial reality becomes more important.

For organisations that never quite made peace with the move from Universal Analytics to GA4, that is a meaningful improvement.

Google has spent years making Analytics more capable.

Gemini may finally help make more of that capability usable.