Lisa Raehsler has run Big Click Co. for fourteen years doing paid search — mostly Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, with social layered on depending on the client. She came onto The Unscripted SEO Interview to trade notes across the aisle, and the conversation turned into the most useful kind: two specialists comparing what each one can and can’t see.
Because right now, the blind spots are the story. SEOs can’t tell from Search Console which queries fired an AI Overview or what it cost them. It turns out paid can’t either.
Nobody is reporting on AI Overviews — including Google, to advertisers
“They don’t give us reporting on the AI Overviews. And when the ads are showing up there in relation to any other search results, they don’t blend that information for us.” — Lisa Raehsler
Her workaround is unglamorous and honest: go manually check where you’re actually showing up. What she can say from pattern is that the Overviews skew informational. If your keyword themes are product-focused or further down the funnel, you’re more likely to get an ad slot than an AI Overview sitting on top of you.
The more interesting development is on the Microsoft side, where ads are being tested inside Copilot itself — not Bing. And the targeting logic there is a genuine break from twenty-five years of paid search:
“Rather than the concept of them being keyword focused, that they are, the ads are being served based on the context of the entire conversation.” — Lisa Raehsler
Keyword-triggered becomes conversation-triggered. Which, as Jeremy pointed out, hands even more control to a system whose main instruction to advertisers is already “trust us.”
Pure keyword campaigns are quietly losing air
Asked whether advertisers are paying more for the same result, Lisa’s answer was more precise than a budget number:
“Purely keyword campaigns are having a little bit of trouble maybe, like being shown a little bit less. There’s less activity, whereas if you’re pairing the keyword searches with audiences and blending more targeting types, they’re getting more exposure, they’re getting more impressions.” — Lisa Raehsler
Two things are happening simultaneously and muddying every diagnosis: broad match is being pushed harder, which widens the room for irrelevant triggers, and Performance Max is being pushed alongside it, which spreads spend across Gmail, display partners and the rest of the Google surface area. Attributing a click-through-rate change to any single cause right now, she said, is genuinely hard.
The click is no longer the only thing worth buying
On platforms built to keep people in-feed — Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube — the interaction before the click is the asset:
“Those views and those interactions where it seems that they might be less valuable than a click through the website, they’re valuable, very valuable in their own way because we can create all of these remarketing lists from it.” — Lisa Raehsler
Watch a video, visit a channel, download a brochure on LinkedIn — all of it flows into Google Ads as audience signal, layerable with in-market and interest lists. Add first-party customer list uploads, which nearly every platform now supports, and the platform will build lookalikes off your actual buyer profile.
The practical consequence for content people: getting someone into your email system can be worth more than getting them to convert on the spot, because that list is the seed for every audience you’ll build afterward. Especially in long-cycle categories — commercial real estate, cars — where you have months of runway to nurture.
It also reframes the familiar 3% statistic. Only a sliver of any search population is transaction-ready at that moment. Lisa designs around it rather than fighting it: keyword themes and audience lists get bucketed by searcher intent, and the campaign is built around the customer journey, with AI Overviews absorbing the most general top-of-funnel questions and specific product, brand and price queries further down staying winnable.
Launching a brand nobody has searched for yet
Jeremy brought a live problem: brands that don’t rank for their own name. Save Fry Oil doesn’t surface for its brand query. A founder messaged him because his new company, Lead Truffle, was outranked by the podcast interview he’d done about it. Google’s branded-versus-unbranded feedback loop is useless if Google won’t show you for your own brand.
Lisa’s answer for a brand-new company is to stop chasing the name:
“We’ll do keyword research, but there’s nothing. There’s nothing because it doesn’t exist yet. So now you have to figure out a way to say, I have this kitchen equipment. No one knows about me. How do I say, hey, we’re here, we’re new, we’re awesome. Check us out. Because they’re not going to be searching on the brand — they don’t know your brand yet.” — Lisa Raehsler
She’ll still buy the brand name as insurance and watch it grow, but the value that early is in generic product terms, competitor names, and in-market audience targeting aimed at the specific buyer — owners, managers, chefs, whoever actually signs for the equipment. Then the ad copy does the introducing.
Competitor bidding, and what the rules actually are
The unglamorous-industry question — how do you get creative for stump grinding, land clearing, slurry pumps — has a clean answer: run competitive campaigns. Someone searching a competitor’s name has already self-qualified. All you’re doing is offering a second option.
On the legal line, which trips up a lot of small advertisers:
“You can’t use the competitor’s name in your ad — in the ad copy, but you can use it as a keyword to trigger the ad.” — Lisa Raehsler
Big brands can file trademark paperwork with Google that blocks the keyword too, but most markets never reach that level of enforcement. Her framing of the ethics:
“If you go to the grocery store, you’re not going to see just one type of potato chip. We have the right to see all of the potato chips available.” — Lisa Raehsler
The strategic bonus is intelligence: bid across five or ten competitors and the impression and click data tells you which rivals are actually pulling the market — and, frequently, that the competitor everyone in the client’s office fears isn’t as significant as they thought.
Where SEO and PPC actually compound
Both agreed the pairing is underused. Ads fill the gaps organic can’t reach fast enough, and they carry messages organic can’t — this month’s promotion, a limited offer, a supply-chain reassurance — while sitting next to your organic result on the same page. Query data from paid is also the cheapest market research an SEO can get.
Jeremy’s cautionary tale runs the other way: a brand ran an influencer campaign that went semi-viral on a specific product, sold out in a day, and got bumped from the SERPs because there was no organic presence holding the ground the ads had generated. Demand generation without organic underneath it evaporates the moment the spend stops.
Her one action item: re-audit for the economy you’re in
Asked for a single thing to do today, Lisa didn’t pick a tactic. She picked a review:
“Do a special audit of your campaigns and your digital marketing program to see what the impact has been from the economy, the slowing economy, and if there’s any ways that you can minimize risk moving forward.” — Lisa Raehsler
Concretely: make sure the messaging matches the conditions people are actually buying in. If international trade is going to create an inventory problem, stop advertising that product. And the upside version —
“If you’re in an industry where somehow your product is made in America, that might be messaging that you want to add. Maybe it was not a big deal last year, but it is this year.” — Lisa Raehsler
The same discipline belongs in organic content. Most SEO calendars are built on evergreen intent and never get re-read against the economic mood of the quarter they’re publishing into.
Connect with Lisa
Lisa Raehsler is the founder of Big Click Co., where she’s been running paid search and paid social programs for fourteen years across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Listen to the full episode on Castos. For more conversations like this one, explore the Unscripted SEO archive, or try the keyword clustering tools at SEO Arcade.
